4. Building Trust with Scientific Sales Pitches
- Nishith Rastogi Founder and CEO, Locus
We prepare our sales pitches like a binary tree. Sometimes, even for deals in the 200-250K range, we end up with a binary tree that ends in like 60 plus branches. But this helps us conclusively know which way this conversation will go.
Never ever compromise your reputation. One of the first things we do in the first 5 minutes, we make sure we tell what we don’t do. Never bullshit your client. Your client knows all your other target clients.
Some clients will care more about optimization. Some clients will care more for information security. In large enterprise deals, the buyer and the user can be different. Within the same customer company, different personas will care about different things.
For example, I run the Logistics for Optimization delivery app, right? My users are the driver and the warehouse manager, right? My buyer is the CXO. My buyer often does not know the number of users in the organization.
Your pitch would be very, very different during your sale and deployment. That’s why I say to branch your pitch. You can then ask, from the selection of things you do, what's most relevant for your target audience, right?
This one time, we sold to a team of many stakeholders and then their CEO wanted to have a presentation finally. We created a detailed map with the help of their team — first 7 minutes this, next 12 and a half minutes this, etc. On the day, the CEO comes and says, “Hey, I have no interest in understanding what you do. I want to understand who you are. Tell me about your child.”
This is assuming your CEO is not the one with the buying power. To your buyer, to your functional buyer, right, you have to sell his KPA.
Also, I cannot emphasize this more, but good buyers have been running an EBITDA-positive business for 10 years. They are not stupid and they know what they want.
Once you cross a certain sales volume, you can actually directly straight up ask your POCs what are the KPIs for their promotion. Directly.
You don’t want to tell the client that they are stupid and you are smarter than them. That’s not the point. We don’t want to win the battle, we want to win the war. So we want to be very helpful.
When starting out we used to tell our clients that we are tech guys, if you have your current technical architecture, we will tell you the plot hole that you already know. They already know it, but I will tell it to them to give them confidence that I can deliver what I am saying.
You should just have some humility. Everyone has 99 problems and at the end of the day, you’re only solving a few for them. You will need to identify the buyer and build up empathy for the buyer.
Good customer focus goes a long, long way. To the extent that when we were raising our series B, our valuation went 1.5x because of a single client reference call. One of our clients told our investors that if they didn’t do this deal, they would do it from their venture arm.
So best to never mislead your clients when you’re selling to enterprises.