The First Three Months

I was recently introduced to a founder who was looking for some help on developing his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. He had spent the last six months in development and talking to customers, and was ready to bring his product to the market. “So, how do I sell?", he asked.

Luckily, we had just spent the last few months at Skyflow going through a similar process, so this was top of mind. We spent the next few hours talking through how to develop a customer thesis, identify the right buyer and what the sales process should look like. As someone who has spent a lot of time in sales cycles, both in selling and in being sold to, I have a pretty good idea of what this should look like. The problem is that for a lot of technical founders, this doesn’t come naturally. And there’s a simple reason for it. Most technical founders don’t spend their time in sales cycles and haven’t had the chance to flex their GTM muscles.

Seeing how much it helped that founder, I wanted to share our thought process and the things that we focused on in the first three months of bringing our product to market. At the same time, I’m also going to try to make it tactically-useful. There’s a lot written on this topic that’s theoretical or so high-level that it’s hard to actually put into practice. Hopefully, you’ll be able to put some of this into practice.

One point before we get started, I think it’s important to make the distinction between Sales and GTM. Sales is a component of GTM. GTM also encompasses Marketing, Sales Ops, Product Mgmt, Strategy and other teams (Finance for pricing, Ops for Legal, etc.) The thing is that in most early-stage startups, resources are limited and there are usually one or two people who are wearing all of these hats. Which, in a way is nice because there’s a tighter feedback loop to iterate and optimize. At the same time though, it’s difficult to really give each GTM component the time it deserves, so you have to focus and prioritize. Lastly, GTM is fluid. It should change as your product matures, you find new use-cases, new competitors enter the market, you move up or down market and your company scales. You should be constantly evaluating your GTM and trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Okay, let’s get into it.

Refined our customer thesis

A customer thesis is a hypothesis on who your buyer is and why they would buy your product. At Skyflow, we approached this from a few different angles. To start, we had a good idea of the problem that we were trying to solve and why someone would buy our product. It was the notion that businesses historically had to choose between securing their data and using it for business growth. This leaves a lot on the table. If you’re securing the data, you’re not using it for product innovation, data analysis, and other purposes. If you’re using the data then you might not be securing it correctly and protecting your consumers’ data privacy. After 50+ customer conversations, we felt like we were on the right path.

The second thing that we looked at was who is our buyer persona? Is it developers? CTOs? CISOs? At Skyflow, we believe that CTOs are ultimately responsible for building the infrastructure that keeps customer data secure. Therefore, we need identify how CTOs buy and craft our marketing and messaging towards that buyer persona (more on this in the next section). Another angle to this problem is to view this from the company lifecycle perspective. At what stage in a company’s lifecycle will somebody buy our product? We broke this down into three stages:

• Early stage (seed, series A) - companies are building their core infrastructure and want to adopt a data security and privacy-first approach from the get-go.

• Mid-stage (series B, C, D) - companies have experienced some growth and have outgrown their initial infrastructure and need to re-architect for scalability. This is a natural point where they will re-evaluate their tech stack and adopt new tech.

• Late-stage (series E, F, …, Public) - infrastructure decision-making is decentralized by specific application teams. These teams almost act as mini-companies within the larger company and usually make their own decisions.

We decided that early-stage and mid-stage companies were the best fit for us. Late-stage companies could work but they are harder to work with and the sales cycles are long. At an early-stage company, we’re optimizing for speed and learning. Smaller companies buy faster and give more feedback (the early-stage wounds are still somewhat fresh and they understand the need for feedback). The trade-off is likely smaller ACVs but you can always move up market once you’ve worked out the kinks and chase those whales.

This approach helped us focus our messaging based on the lifecycle of the customer and narrow the search space of our ideal customer profile (ICP). With limited resources and time, focus is key.

Developed sales and marketing collateral

I spent a good amount of time developing sales decks, linkedin messages, competitive landscape overviews, product/marketing one-pagers, investor slides and other collateral. There are two purposes for this. The first is education. We use it to educate customers, investors, new-hires, contractors, partners, and the market on who we are and what we do. As we better understand our buyer persona, we create collateral that resonates with the things they care about. This in turn creates interest which hopefully drives sales. CTOs care about reliability, scalability and efficiency. So we created collateral that highlighted these things in the context of our product. Collateral is like software. Once you create it, you can re-use it as many times as you need to until you need to update it.

The second, and arguably more valuable purpose, is the process that you go through to develop it. When you develop content, what you’re really developing is a story. A story of your company, your product and how you solve a problem. It should have a beginning (how this problem came to be), a middle (who you are and how you can solve the problem) and an end (usually an ask - talk to sales, buy my product, sign-up, etc.). Like any good story, it needs to be concise and focused. If you’re building a deck, it shouldn’t have more than 8-10 slides including the title and intro slide. If you’re writing a marketing piece, it shouldn’t take someone more than 10 minutes to read it (seriously, it’s backed by science).

These time and length constraints help you focus and prioritize your thinking, your value prop and your key points. It also helps everyone else in the organization better understand the problem and how you’re solving it. This reduces confusion and strengthens alignment which builds stronger teams.

Focused on finding the RIGHT customers

In the “Refined our customer thesis” section, I talked a little bit about how we analyzed the company lifecycle to determine when our product would naturally fit in. I want to expand on that and explain why I think it’s so important to find the RIGHT customer.

As an early stage company, our goal is to make our first 3-5 customers insanely happy. Of course you want all of our customers to be happy, but in the early days, it can be life or death.

These initial customers will form the base of your customer network. They’ll be (reasonably) patient as you fix bugs and provide you with invaluable feedback on our technology, processes and teams. They’ll serve as reference customers and vouch on your behalf. In fact, they’re more of advisors than they are customers. The fact that they are paying you is just an added bonus. The problem though is that, as early stage companies, our resources are limited. There are a lot of things that we want to do but only so much that we can do well. The last thing you want to do is sign up a customer that you don’t have the resources to manage and end up having an unhappy customer who takes time and energy away from other potentially happy customers.

This is why finding the RIGHT customers is so important. We only have so many engineers and PMs to fix bugs and manage the customer. At Skyflow, we’ve had to have tough discussions on potential customers and whether or not we feel like we can make them as successful as we and they want to be. Just as personal relationships shouldn’t be one-way streets, neither should professional ones. Don’t let high ACVs blind you. Have an honest discussion with your team before signing a customer about whether or not you can really support them. It can mean the difference between success and failure for the both of you.

Experimented with our sales cycle

If you’ve never been in a selling position before, a sales cycle can be a confusing thing to go through. When do you demo your product? Should you do a proof-of-concept (POC)? Should it be paid or free? How long should the sales cycle last? These are all valid questions. The truth is that there is no right answer. It differs prospect to prospect. Some customers want a demo right away because they know what they need and want to see if your product will work. Others are in the beginning stages and aren’t sure what they need and want you to walk them through it. The only way to find out is to ask questions and experiment with your sales cycle.

Sales is fundamentally an experiment. Good sales people are like scientists that follow the scientific method. They first develop a hypothesis on how customers buy. Then they test it by prospecting and having as many conversations as possible. They collect data from those conversations and then refine their hypothesis. Then they start over again.

At Skyflow, I tried demo’ing on the first call (my old sales managers are rolling in their metaphorical graves) and sometimes it was successful. Other times, it wasn’t as successful. Sometimes I pushed hard for a POC, other times I waited until we had a few a conversations. Until you experiment with different iterations of your sales cycle, you won’t know what works. Once you have a prospect, generally you should go through qualification/discovery, demo, potentially a POC, proposal, contract/negotiations and post-sales success. But you should experiment to find out what works best for your product.

The last point I’ll make here is that you have to know which customers and prospects to spend your time on. Remember focus and prioritization. If a customer isn’t interested, there’s no point in pushing for a demo or POC. Your time is just as, if not more, valuable than your prospects or customers. You have an obligation to build your business, they don’t. Focus and prioritize ruthlessly.

Last few words

At Skyflow, we’re constantly having these conversations and trying to refine our GTM and how we think about the market, our products and our customers. Like I said, GTM is fluid, it’s always changing. To stay ahead of the curve, you have to be willing to respond to changing technology and customer expectations.

Early-stage startups are hard. Bringing a product to market from a company that most people have never heard of is hard. You have to take the small wins when you get them. This might look like a conversation with customers who agrees that your product and approach to solving the problem is the right one but maybe can’t buy right now. Or a customer who responds to a cold email and takes a meeting even if it doesn’t end up in a sale. These small wins are signs that you’re on the right path. Given everything else that you have to do to get a startup off the ground, these small wins can make the difference between feeling hopeful and hopeless.

Prioritize your time, effort and energy and focus on the things that move the needle. In the spirit of focus and prioritization, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite sayings, “No startup ever fails because they didn’t have enough to do.”

Cheers,

Evis