Many people want to start a side business, but don’t know how to do it.  It’s really easy to start a business nowadays, but it’s tough to keep it going. We’re going to tell you how to establish your own side business today. The points we made today: Side business owners are business owners Be proud of your business Know your skills How can you use your skills Using online platforms to advertise your skills How writing an e-book is a smart choice Why you need to take one step at a time (versus spending a lot of money) Keep realistic goals Don’t “cheat” your paying employer We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community. The post 269: Encore Episode – How to Start a Side Business appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today Steli and Hiten talk about how to get those first few customers when your business is just getting off the ground.  The key to that initial traction is to connect with potential customers as soon as possible. Hiten’s first course of action is to set up a landing page that allows you to collect email addresses.  There are a bunch of tools out there that allow you to do this well.  Pick the one that’s easiest for you to set up today and start getting those email addresses. If you don’t already have an audience or traffic to the site, start blogging about what you’re doing.  Driving traffic to the site this way is a great way to start getting interest in your project. Steli used a tactic that is actually one of Hiten’s favorite approaches:  doing consulting around the problem you’re trying to solve, then build tools to solve the problem that your consulting did initially.  In Elastic Sales Steli’s team they validated the concept of on demand sales teams, and within two weeks they had a pipeline 7 potential customers, and 2 that were actually paying.  Check out the script for Steli’s initial cold call. The reason this was successful is that Steli was able to leverage his unique advantage.  Whether it’s sales, content marketing, or some other specific consulting knowledge, use your Authentic Competitive Advantage as the way you can overcome objections in sales situations. Stop the recording right now:  Write down what your Authentic Competitive Advantage is and how it can help you get your first few customers.  If you need help figuring this out, send Steli and Hiten an email. When you get that Authentic Competitive Advantage down, start doing customer development to better understand what the problem really is.  Don’t lead people down a specific path with this and let them freely tell you what their problem is.  Then you’ll need to figure out how to best solve that problem. Next step is to get people to actually pay you money.  How much to charge?  Steli says charge 3x what your initial instinct tells you.  Get paid what you’re worth.  Offering lifetimes discounts for initial customers is a great way to get people on the line early.  What you charge can easily be changed later.  This is just an indication that the problem you’re solving is actually one that people are willing to pay for. Today’s Tips: Steli: In the next 24 hours, ask 10 people to be your customer.  Doing this will get you over the mental hurdle of asking people for their business. Hiten: Stop thinking about how to do this and go do it.  Take action today and start trying to get customers. Join our Facebook group to be able to talk with each other.  This is an exclusive group for our listeners and a place to build a community around. As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat. Let us know where you get your motivation. The post 268: Encore Episode – How to Get Your First 10 Customers appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the challenges of being an entrepreneur in today’s ultra-competitive business world. Although there are lots of positives to being an entrepreneur, like being your own boss, working when you want to and how you want to, choosing your staff and ideally making a significant profit, there are also some difficulties that may come your way on your entrepreneurship journey. From trying to establish a brand to working really long hours, dealing with the competition and staying profitable, being an entrepreneur can be very challenging and depressing sometimes, no matter how long you’ve been in business. In this episode, Steli and Hiten address some of these challenges and share some tips on how to deal with them so you can operate an efficient and successful business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 Steli and Hiten about today’s topic. 00:30 Why they chose to talk about this topic. 03:00 Hiten reads a text message they received from a struggling entrepreneur. 03:38 Hiten’s tip for dealing with challenging times in your business. 05:34 Steli talks about the difference between having challenges and suffering with them. 07:15 Steli’s philosophy when dealing with challenging times in life. 10:21 Hiten talks about why you should identify the cause of any challenge you might be going through. 12:38 Steli talks about Zen founder, a podcast by Rob and Sherry Walling. 3 Key Points: Problems are mandatory but suffering is optional. The reason I’m struggling with something is because I’m not doing it right. Emotions are what usually gets the best of us in the worst situations. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on the StartUp Chat, we want to talk about is entrepreneurship hard even after you’ve doing it for many, many years and should it be. And here’s the deal. Hiten, you and I we’re friends with the founder. And that founder sent both of us a text message last night. And this was a personal text message, so I’m not gonna share who it is, but I’m pretty sure that if you’re listening you know who you are. The founder just had, I think, a moment where things were overwhelming, and he reached to us to share that moment with us, which I-   [0:00:42] Hiten Shah: Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. I love that we’re doing this one. Just wanted to say that.   [0:00:47] Steli Efti: Okay. Very good. I didn’t tell Hiten that we’re doing this episode. This is one of the ones where I’m like, “Keaton, let’s record. I’ll tell you what I want to talk about, I’m sure. We’re gonna just rock and roll with it without talking about it first.”   [0:00:57] Hiten Shah: It was in my head. It was in head, and like I forgot, dude. So good. Let’s do this.   [0:01:02] Steli Efti: Awesome. So we get this text message. It felt like a vulnerable moment where this founder which is like exhausted and texted both of us saying, “Dudes, even after fucking,” whatever it was, “15 years of being an entrepreneur doing startups, why is this is so fucking hard? Man this sucks. This is so hard.” He sends us this. I receive the text, Hiten receives the text and I have multiple thoughts here, right? Once I received it. One is, I’m really grateful that he feels so connected to us and feels trust us so much that he feels that it’s okay to be vulnerable. That he feels like “okay, these are two founders that I experience that I can be honest with. I don’t have to fuck around. I don’t have to pretend I’m always strong and I know everything. I can just be myself and they’ll understand. They’ll be okay. They won’t judge me, they might be able to help me.” On the one hand, I love that. On the other hand I was very conflicted on how to respond to this, right? Because part of me wants to just have empathy and understanding, say, “Yeah, things are sometimes hard.” Part of me wants to kick him in the ass. I have all these different conflicting thoughts and emotions and I didn’t respond to his text message, and I noticed you didn’t respond either at least not until this morning.   [0:02:25] Hiten Shah: Nope.   [0:02:26] Steli Efti: I wanted to talk to you about this. I wanted to talk about it in general, like entrepreneurship and startups being really, really hard. Is this true? Should it be true? Especially if you’ve done it a long time. What are our thoughts about that?   [0:02:39] Hiten Shah: Okay, can I read what he texted?   [0:02:41] Steli Efti: Yes, it doesn’t identify him, so I think it’s totally cool.   [0:02:45] Hiten Shah: No it does not. It does not. Honestly, I don’t even think he’d care, but we’re going to respect it, because we’re like that. It was a group thread, it was a text message that said, “I don’t know why startups are so painful sometimes. Even after 15 years, I still find myself crying.”   [0:03:04] Steli Efti: Wow, yeah.   [0:03:06] Hiten Shah: He’s a sweet heart first of all. I’m not surprised he sent that to us, because I think we definitely have a connection to him because we both really like him and enjoy our time with him. One of the things I think that I’m going to start with on this is like, there was a bunch of tweets also that were about, “Oh it never gets easier, that’s kind of the dirty secret, so don’t tell anyone that when they start.” I got to say that like, one of the hardest things to do in a startup and I think you and I have like, this is a pattern that we’ve talked about a lot is controlling your emotions. It’s literally, I’ve got to say the word is control. I wish I had a more like generous word. It’s an aggressive word and for me I think it’s general, most of us, whether we’re running our own companies or not, the emotions are what usually get the best of us in the worst situations. This friend was definitely having a moment, he’s been at it for 15 years. It’s not like he just started a year ago and he’s like telling us, “Hey, does it get any easier?” He’s literally like, “Yo, I’m crying over some shit here and like, I felt like I was doing that 15 years ago, I’m still doing that.” For me, it’s your reaction to things, it’s controlling your emotions, but not like … It’s just awareness of them I think that’s most important, not that I’m trying that don’t feel it, but when you feel it, understand what it is. We’re all going through this and also realizing that you’re not alone. I think even him texting us, I think it was like 6:34AM Pacific when he texted us.   [0:05:02] Steli Efti: Yeah, I don’t remember what time it was. I saw the text, I felt like late at night, I don’t really know, it’s all a blur.   [0:05:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it was … Oh no, sorry. It was 6:34PM, my bad.   [0:05:17] Steli Efti: PM, there you go.   [0:05:18] Hiten Shah: I was like AM, whoa. Like I don’t know, I think this is the norm. It’s not going to get any better. That’s why not everyone starts their own business.   [0:05:30] Steli Efti: True, I want to say something. I don’t know why, but I want to say something a little opposing of this view to a certain degree. I’m of two minds and hearts here. Because on the one hand, it’s true man, things are hard. Life is hard. If life isn’t hard, you’re not doing it right, to a certain degree in my mind. The heart doesn’t need to be suffering. There’s a difference between having challenges and problems and between suffering with them, right? We’ve talked about this before I think.   [0:06:00] Hiten Shah: I like that.   [0:06:01] Steli Efti: I think suffering is a choice, I think having problems isn’t. You’re going to have problems, you’re going to have challenges, you’re going to have things that suck and that’s fine and that’s normal. I think you’re living a healthy human life if you have problems and challenges. I don’t think you need to … I think suffering is really optional. Problems are mandatory, but suffering is optional. When I read this, the one thing I wanted to say, “Yeah dude, shit’s hard and I get it and sometimes it sucks.” I’m not somebody that … One thing that I love about him is that he’s a sweetheart and he’s an emotional person, more so than even I am. It’s very hard for me to have super high highs, and super low lows, right? I don’t cry that often, but I’m not like overall out of my mind, excited or happy about things either, although this is surprising to people. I think this is something that we too have in common, right?   [0:06:54] Hiten Shah: Yeah, totally.   [0:06:55] Steli Efti: On the one hand I’m like, “Yeah dude. Shit’s hard sometimes. I get it. I get you. You’re not alone.” On the other hand I want to say, “I have this philosophy, that is if whatever I do that’s really hard, like anything that’s really, really hard means I’m not doing it right.” That’s kind of my personal philosophy, which means that if I’m struggling with something, struggling. Not if I’m inconvenienced, if I have to fix a problem, when I’m struggling and suffering through a problem through the starter world, I’m always catching myself and asking myself, is there a person out there that would not feel like this is so overwhelming? That would look at this problem that I have and would fell like it’s a small problem? The answer’s always yes. Just like some of the problems that I felt were overwhelmingly hard 10 years ago, today I think are nothing. Super simple. Easy. Because I have grown and I have mastered certain skillsets and I have accumulated certain experiences. The problems that are really hard to me today, are different from those that were really hard to me 10 years ago. Just like, when I was 12 and some girl broke up with me it was the end of the fucking world. It was literally the end of the world. Today, I would look at my 12 niece when she just broke up with her boyfriend and thinks it’s the end of the world, to a certain degree it’s cute. Then I remind myself that for her, this is a really, really tough thing and it’s totally legitimate to feel that way. We grow in skills, we grow in abilities, we grow in experiences. When you are most skilled, problems that seem to the less skilled very, very overwhelming and challenging, are not, are actually pretty simple to solve. Whenever something is incredibly hard for me to solve, I just think to myself, “Well shit. It means I’m not doing it right.” It means either I’m not the right person, this is not the right time, or I haven’t quite the right approach or skill to fix this problem.” The reason I’m struggling is that I’m just not doing it right. At least that’s my personal philosophy. On one hand I want to hug this founder and tell him, “Yeah dude. Shit’s always going to be hard.” On the other hand I want to kick his ass and go, “Mother fucker, just learn faster, learn more. You shouldn’t have the same problems you had 10 years ago, it should be new problems and things should get easier overtime at least for periods of time.” I’m like, is this really because you’re in a such more challenging position, or is it because there’s certain lessons that you’re not willing to learn so you’re holding onto certain problems and you’re suffering through the same thing again, and again, and again. I don’t know what it is. He didn’t tell us what the problem was or why it was hard, or why he had that moment. I don’t have the context to really judge. These are my two reactions when I hear people telling me they have something that they’re doing something that’s really, really hard and they seem to suffering during that time. It’s the same to myself. I’m not above this, I have moments where I’m overwhelmed or suffering, or overly worried, or like negative on something. “Why I have all this stuff? Why do I always have to deal with da-da-da.” I usually catch myself fairly soon and go, “Well mother fucker, you’re doing it wrong. You’re just doing it wrong. You know? If you knew how to do it better, it would be easier. Just fucking try to learn and change.” That’s my reaction when I hear that. I don’t know, what are your thoughts on this?   [0:10:24] Hiten Shah: I had to tweet it, problems are mandatory, but suffering is optional. You summed it up extremely well as to like how to speak to someone when they’re feeling that way. What I really also want to double down on is, if you feel like you’re having the same feeling over and over again, there are a set of patterns that are causing it. You kind of alluded to that. If you want to get over this feeling, you have to find what those set of patterns are. Right now, if we talk to this friend, I think both of us probably come at him and say, “hey”, after you told him to get over himself. Which I think is also accurate in some ways, just because like, he should. He should move on from this and get at a solution really fast. I think we’d probably talk to him about like, “What’s the pattern here? When you felt like this before, what was the cause of it? Where was your responsibility for that cause of this emotion that you’re feeling?” What’s the pattern inside of it of something that either you’re doing or not doing that you should stop or start doing?” In his case it’s probably just some kind of perspective he has on stations is what I would guess. The only reason I’m guessing that is, this person has a high level of emotion and empathy. He’s probably putting that on himself in a big way. That’s causing him to spiral in terms of his own thought process and emotions, and honestly getting negative. I think a lot of this has to do with also not letting yourself get so negative, that you get stuck in the pattern and can’t see above it or see underneath it and figure out where it’s coming from. For me, myself, the emotions come. It’s the patterns that I look for though. Because that’s when I know I’ve gotten past the emotion and found the reason. Once I find that reason and that pattern it’s my job to, for a lack of a better word, reframe. For lack of a better word, reprogram myself so that I can prevent it or at least catch it earlier and make sure that I’m being my best self. Because usually when you have these emotions and you consider them suffering, you’re not being your best self, you’re being your worst self.   [0:12:37] Steli Efti: I love that. We’ll wrap this episode up with this. I have a little shout out to give, to Sherry Walling and Rob Walling those are two friends of ours. They have a podcast called Zen Founder. Sherry has a background in psychology and psychiatry and she’s been married to an entrepreneur and she’s been an entrepreneur herself. They’re doing a podcast where they talk a lot about these emotional things. I know that they are just about in January to release an ebook on how to be founder without losing your shit. I think that there’s a lot of emotional stuff in there. I know that there’s parts of interviews Sherry did with you and me, in the ebook. For founders out there that want to have more control over their emotions, that maybe are going through the motions, maybe a nice little recommendation to check out the Zen Founder podcast and I’m pretty sure they’re going to publish the ebook somewhere there so you’re going to be able to find it.   [0:13:39] Hiten Shah: Yep, I have to double click on that.   [0:13:43] Steli Efti: Alright, that’s it from us for this episode. [0:13:44] The post 267: Crying About Your Startup? What We Tell Our Founder Friends in Dark Moments appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

This week’s episode of The Startup Chat is a special one. We feature Steli’s interview for the Inside Sales Summit, which was a virtual sales summit where we interviewed over 50 sales experts, leaders and founders, who teach their sales secrets during the summit. This episode is a follow-up to episode 256, where we published Hiten’s interview for the virtual sales summit. In this episode, Steli talks about how to diagnose your sales funnel and identify any problems that it might have, benchmarks for your sales funnel, how to do outbound and inbound sales the right way, how to improve your cold calling strategy and much more. Tune-in for tips and advice that can help you create a scalable and effective sales process for your startup. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:24 About today’s episode. 02:32 The introduction of the interview. 03:53 How to diagnose a sales funnel that is leaking leads and identify where things are going wrong. 10:05 Steli talks about whether there’s been a shift in how SAAS companies are approaching sales today and why that may be the case. 16:33 Steli reveals his best practices and principles for people that want to get started with outbound calling or are looking to revamp their process. 29:44 How to decide which is more effective for your startup – calling or emailing the prospect first. 32:56 Steli cites some interesting cold outreach campaigns he’s received in the past and shares some tips that can help you improve your messages. 37:59 Steli talks about vulnerability and why it can be important for salespeople. 45:55 The best investment Steli has made in the context of building his selling skills. 47:25 Where to learn more about about Steli and get in touch with him. Quotes Being vulnerable with confidence is the ultimate sign of strength The trick to sounding good on a sales call is feeling good first. The first step to fixing your sales funnel is to have a simple funnel, so that you can attribute the leakage to a certain step in the funnel. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hi everybody, this is Steli Efti and in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we have a special episode. This is actually my interview for the Inside Sales Summit, where I teach how to create a scalable sales process for your startup. So here’s the deal, we’ve done this a few episodes ago, I think it was episode 256, 256. Hiten Shah’s inside sales tips for startups, where we published on the Startup Chat Hiten’s interview for the Inside Sales Summit, which was a virtually summit where we interviewed over 50 experts, founders, sales leaders, teaching their inside sales secrets. And that episode got a ton of positive responses, and a bunch of people asked us “why don’t you publish Steli’s interview as well?” So this is what we do today people, you’re going to listen to my interview, it’s 46 minutes long, so it’s a much longer episode than the typical Startup Chat, but I got into a lot of details. I’ll talk about how to look at your sales funnel and how to identify problems there. I’ll talk about benchmarks for your sales funnel, how to do outbound sales, how to do inbound sales. I’ll talk about cold calling and cold emailing, so there’s going to be a ton of stuff around my sales philosophy and sales tactics that I’ve seen used successful at startups. So I hope that for people out there that are interested in that, this is going to be a super insightful episode. And for those of you that didn’t catch Hiten’s episode on the Inside Sales Summit, and want to listen to that after listening to mine, just go to episode 256 and take a listen. Hiten typically doesn’t talk a lot about sales, and he’s known as a marketing expert and product expert, but he’s very dangerous when it comes to sales. And that interview in particularly is very, very, good, so I highly recommend it. Alright, that’s enough from me, hope that you like the interview. And if you want to hear more interviews around inside sales, you can just go to insidesalessummit.com, put in your email address, and you’ll get instant access to all the recorded interviews, over 50 of them. I hope you’re going to like it, that’s it from me, now enjoy the interview. [0:02:14]   [0:00:06] Ryan: Welcome to the Inside Sales Summit. This is our interview with Steli Efti. Steli is the CEO of Close.io, the inside sales CRM of choice for startups and SMBs. Steli is a sales hustler in every sense of the word. He’s a Y Combinator alumni, advisor to several startups, is the author of “The Ultimate Startup Guide To Outbound Sales!” amongst many other sales related books. Steli co hosts The Startup Chat podcast with Hiten Shah, where they share twice weekly episodes featuring unfiltered insights and actionable advice for anyone in the world of startups. Somehow, somewhere, Steli also finds the time to speak about sales at events around the world, release daily videos and write for the Close.io blog. Steli, welcome to the summit.   [0:00:49] Steli Efti: Thank you so much. Don’t forget, I’m your partner in crime in putting together this summit.   [0:00:54] Ryan: Right you are.   [0:00:55] Steli Efti: There you go.   [0:00:56] Ryan: How could I?   [0:00:56] Steli Efti: There you go. All right. That was a high energy intro, my God. Ryan, I’m pumped, let’s do this.   [0:01:03] Ryan: We’re bringing it today, all right. So, Steli, one thing you’ve written and spoken a lot about over the past few years is curating and perfecting your sales process, with an inside sales team in particular. If you’ve got a product that you know your existing customers are getting value from, but your sales funnel is leaking leads for some reason now, how do you go about trying to diagnose where things are falling off the rails?   [0:01:28] Steli Efti: That’s a great question. I think that first step is to have a simple funnel so that you can attribute the leakage to a certain step in the funnel, right? Too often, we all like to be lazy with this, and if we’re not converting as many prospects into customers as we’d like to, we’ll just think maybe our pitch sucks, maybe our salespeople suck, maybe we need to train them, give them more material. We’ll come up with some kind of a story, usually zeroed in on the end of the funnel, right? The final piece of the funnel. But, often times, the most leakage that I’ve found in most startups that I talk to are more in the top or the middle of the funnel. So, my first thought would be make sure you have the right data, and you look at each step of the funnel. A framework that I offer is the AQC framework: activity, quality and conversion. I’ll give you an example really quickly. Let’s say we do a lot of calls and we say every rep has 100 sales calls every day, and we only close one deal a day, whatever, right? We want to close a lot more deals, how do we fix this? I always tell people, “I don’t fucking know,” right? This is not enough information for us to know where the problem is. Here’s what I would want you to do when you do calling. I would want you to track the number of dials, that’s the activity part, right? So, 100 dials a day. Then I want you to track the quality of that activity, and when we talk about calling I would want you to know what is your reach rate. If you dial 100 numbers, how many times do you actually reach the person you wanted to talk to, right? So, now that we know how many people we’ve reached, I want to know how many of these people that we’ve reached are truly qualified prospects, people that once we ask some question we learn a few things, we realize, yes, they should buy our solution. Then how many of those qualified leads and prospects ultimately close? That’s the funnel you need to have, right? We have the activity level that’s 100 dials, we know the quality of the activity, how many did we reach and how many of those that we reach did qualify, and then we know the conversion, how many of those that qualified closed. If I know this, the way of fixing your funnel could be very different, right? Let’s say we dial 100 numbers and we only reach two people. If we reach two people out of 100, there’s no fucking sales coaching that will get you to go from one close to two closes. You’re never going to close every person you talk to. Never, right? That’s not going to be like … The way to fix this is not to coach you on the closing side of things at the end of the funnel, the way to fix this is to realize our reach rate sucks, right? It’s terrible, and that’s the first thing we need to fix. This is actually, when it comes to calling, a lot of times the biggest problem is that people have way too low reach rates, and their campaigns are kind of dead in the water that way. Now, let’s say that we reach not two people, let’s say we reach out of 100, 50, right? We have a great reach rate, half the people that we dial we reach, but out of those 50 we only qualify two and then we close one. Again, closing is not the problem. The problem here is that we’re dialing numbers and trying to reach and get in touch with people we should have never called. People that after we talk, we discover they are not our target customer, they should not purchase our product. Then we know it’s a data and a lead quality problem. Then that’s the way to fix it, right? Let’s say we call 100 people, we reach 50, out of the 50, 40 people qualify. We’ve a really good quality of leads. Then out of the 40 that qualify, we only close one. Yes, bingo, boom. Now, we know we have a closing issue, right? We don’t know how to close. I would say, just to wrap this up, in a funnel like this, you want to … If we dialed 100 numbers, we would want to have a reach rate that’s at least in the 30% range, right? If you’re less than 15% you’re fucked, this is never going to work out. You want to be above 15%, ideally in the 30%. The higher, the better. Out of the people that we reach, we really want to qualify more than half of them, right? The higher the percentage again, the better, but if it’s less than 50% of the people that we reached ultimately qualify to purchase our product, we’re calling the wrong numbers, right? That’s the benchmark there. Then out of the people we qualify, you want to have a really high closing rate, right? You want to be way above 50%. 50 at the lowest level, 60/70% ideally because they’re the people that we’ve reached, we’ve talked to and we’ve qualified. Out of those, we should close a really high percentage if possible. So, that’s how you approach a leaking funnel, is you look at the basic numbers, you make it simple, you realize, you know, you look at the activity, at the quality of your activity and the conversion, and then you go top to bottom and try to fix these numbers if they look bad. You always start at the top because if you fix something at the top of a funnel, the jumps at the end are going to be significant. That’s the way to go. It’s not that complicated, but 9 out of 10 times a company will not go through this exercise. They will just go, “We’re calling 100 people, we’re only closing one. Let’s coach our salespeople so they double their closing numbers,” right? And then when they don’t accomplish that, they don’t know why, everybody’s frustrated and unhappy. The easy way to fix it is to look at the numbers in your funnel to identify where the problem is and fix that problem.   [0:07:02] Ryan: I love that. I mean, this is the most comprehensive answer I think I’ve gotten to this question, and I think it’s really simple. It sounds intuitive, right? Like it’s something that you make sound easy. So, you know, with that mind, moving onto the next question because you knocked that completely out of the park. You’ve been in SAS for nearly a decade, talking about sales the entire, entire time. I’m sure you’ve seen trends come and go as far as how SAS sales function. You know, the predictable model rather being one of them, for sure. Do you feel that there have been any other large shifts in how SAS leaders are approaching sales today?   [0:07:40] Steli Efti: Yeah, absolutely. 10 years ago, when I moved to Silicone Valley from Europe, sales was a dirty word in the valley. Like, tech companies were like, “We don’t want to have to do anything with sales. Here’s how every business is going to grow, it’s just going to be viral,” right? Virality was the big … Well, first it was user generated content, then it was virality, then it was mobile, then it was social, then it was, you know, whatever. There’s all these fads and fashionable things that are happening, but for the longest period of time, founders that were doing SAS companies, they didn’t want to really have to build a sales team or think about a sales process. They really were thinking how can we just do marketing and how can we just kind of find a way that our customers bring more customers on their own and we don’t have to work that hard on it. And I get it, it’s a very sexy idea. I’d love that too, right? Just set something up, lean back, and boom, your thing is exploding and just getting more and more customers. It’s just, you know, in the last five years really, people started going, “Huh. Maybe this whole viral, bottom up, user generated thing isn’t working in B2B, and maybe we do have to do some sales.” And, really, in the last three years, it’s switched the other way around. Now, every B2B, startup and founder is like, “Sales, sales is so important. Let’s hire salespeople, let’s read sales books, let’s go to sales events, let’s become really experts in sales.” It’s gotten from something that was really neglected to something that now is at the center of many B2B companies, it’s something that’s really kind of highly in demand and desire. I do claim, you know, Close.io and I personally, we’ve played a little part in that shift. We’ve championed sales as an important part in business, and we’ve written a lot of content, and hopefully influenced a lot of people to think differently about it. So, sales has gotten hot, right? It’s a hot topic, which is good and bad the way I see it, right? Good because a lot of founders have, I think, a higher chance for success because they have realistic expectations of what it will take to succeed, right? And I am always in the corner of the founders and entrepreneurs out there. But bad because now you have better competition, right? Now, when you’re in B2B and you compete with somebody, they also often think about building a sales team and they are not as naïve about it as they used to be. So, that kind of sucks at times. I think there’s really approaches that have gotten hot. There’s things that get like a rebranding, right? I’ll give you an example. It used to be that people that would do prospecting and lead gen, they would be called prospectors, right? That’s not a really sexy name. And then, boom, you know … Was a good friend and a good part of the summit, he came along and he called these people sales development representatives, SDRs. And like developing sales as a rep … Like just sounded better. And, boom, all of a sudden, all these people wanted to be SDRs, all these companies started hiring for it. It’s functionally a job that has existed forever, it just has a cooler name now, right? So, I think there’s some rebranding in sales that’s going on, that makes some certain functions better. I think there’s a lot of technology enablement going on in sales right now that’s very, I think, very exciting. You know, Close as well, we’ve tried to play a role in this and really empowering salespeople to do their job better by taking away all the manual data entry shit that they have to do and empower them to communicate better. One of my favorite things, maybe, that has changed and has gotten a lot better is just the basic philosophy of talking to customers and prospects. Again, we all in SAS wanted to build self serve funnels, right? So, companies would come, they’d sign up for a free trial, they’d play around with the product, they’d fall in love, they’d put in their credit card, they’d pay, they started using it more and more, they’d pay us more and more and more and more, and we all lived happily ever after forever. The idea was the less we need to talk to people, the better, because talking to people isn’t scalable, right, and everything needs to be scalable for it to be a great venture backed company and a great SAS company. I think that that trend, again, has shifted, and we claim some credit for that. Where, today, I think more and more B2B companies, more SAS companies than ever before are ready and willing and focused to talking to prospects and talking to their customers. I think still a tool that’s undervalued, but it will hopefully make a big difference in that regard, is talking to them like auditorily, so talking to them on the phone or via some kind of a voice app, and not just talking to them in chat or in email or in some forms that they fill out. ‘Cause when you talk to people in person and you hear their voice, you have so much more context, it’s a much more context rich environment. You can influence them better, but you can also understand them more. You can hear when they say yes, but they really mean no. You can hear when they say they understand what you told them, but their voice is giving away that they’re confused. It gives you all this rich data to dig deeper, to ask follow up questions and to ultimately get to a point of true understanding, and whoever understands their customer best will ultimately own them and their relationship with them. So, I think the phone is getting reintroduced, and at the center of the relationship, and talking to customers, talking to prospects, calling your trial signups, all that is becoming more and more important in the inside sales world and in the SAS world. I’m super excited about that, I think that’s super crucial.   [0:13:36] Ryan: Yeah. This is definitely one of the recurring themes with essentially all of these interviews, is how no matter how many tools and different pieces of technology roll out, it’s never going to replace the actual salesperson, in the B2B world specifically at least, right? So, you’ve got things like outbound calling, outbound emailing, so do you have any best practices or principles in mind that you would give to people watching today who want to either get started with outbound calling or to revamp their process?   [0:14:09] Steli Efti: Yeah. So, I think that when it comes to calling, there’s a lot of waste that typically happens at the top of the funnel, what we talked about earlier with like reach rates being very low, for instance, that can be addressed with some best practices, but also with technology. For people that are interested in that, Close.io has the best calling, integrated calling, in the CRM world, hands down. I’m willing to challenge anybody personally who disagrees with me. I want to hear from people if they do – steli@close.io. So, there’s technology that can help it, and we can talk about that a little bit, but, overall, the fundamental way that people get calling wrong, and outbound calling wrong, is they don’t think about it like a product. I think about calling like a product, and what I’m concerned about is the user experience. When I call you, you’re my user, and I’m thinking about the journey you’re taking as the phone rings and as you pick up, from the hello to the end of the conversation. Most people, when they let’s say design an outbound calling campaign, they just go, “Let’s buy as many phone numbers as possible and then let’s just smile and dial all day long and just brute force our way into success.” Then they are encountering a lot of emotional pain and rejection. The sales reps’ morale tanks, and now they don’t have to just brute force it to the customer, now they have to brute force their sales team and push them to be motivated and do their job. It’s kind of a, you know, it’s a campaign that’s doomed to death. So, here’s how I want you to think about a calling campaign, right? Step one is you need to reach people, right? That’s your number one problem, is do we reach enough people. How can we make sure that we will reach the right people at the right time? If you cannot get a good answer to that, your calling campaign is dead. That’s step one, but that’s the step most companies will spend the least amount of time thinking about, right? So, how do we get good phone numbers, how do we … Are we sure that the type of buyer we have is somebody that communicates over the phone, that picks up the phone, right? There’s certain people, like if you sell software to doctors or lawyers or teachers, these are professionals, these are people where it’s fairly easy to find their phone number and they do pick up their phone when an unknown number is calling, right? They’re in the habit of doing that. There are people out there, let’s say the chief technology officers of Fortune 500 companies, these people do not tend to just pick up randomly the phone if an unknown number calls. So, understanding who I’m trying to reach, understanding if the phone is a channel that they respond to is step one. Having good data, good phone numbers and all that is step two. Thinking about and being considerate about when we call them, right? Good example is Monday mornings usually, on average, bad time to call people, right? Friday evenings might also not be the greatest time in the universe to call people in their office. But, often times, I’ve seen startups find amazing success calling at unusual times, especially when you call executives. Sunday evenings at the office might be a really fucking good time to call, because the CEOs, they are in the office on Sunday evenings. You know why? Because nobody else is in the office, and they like have peace of mind and they can plan the week. Sometimes super early or super late might be a lucky time to call. So, you have to experiment with the day and the time, and be a little bit curious, and not just assume let’s just call everybody from nine to five, right? So, now, once we reach people, we need to sound good. This sounds trivial. This is one of those fundamental truths that’s so obvious that it’s easy to neglect and ignore. Sound good. But, sounding good is fundamental to phone sales. At the hello, as I pick up the phone and I say, “Hello,” your voice, your tonality, will paint a picture in my mind of who you are. That picture is not as solid as reality, right, otherwise we’d be schizophrenics, but there is … I have to imagine somebody, otherwise I cannot compute what words you’re telling me. It’s the way we actually language, is that we have to create some kind of imagery of who that person is. Depending on your voice, I’m going to imagine widely different people, and who I imagine you to be will influence dramatically how much I want to talk to you, right? If you sound depressed, if you sound angry, if you sound nervous, I don’t want to talk to you, right? I will paint a picture of somebody that is failing, that’s a failure in life. I will paint a picture of somebody that is suicidal. I will paint a picture of somebody selling something nobody wants. I will paint a picture that’s very unattractive, a picture that I want to run away from, right, versus if you sound energetic, if you sound enthusiastic, if you sound confident, if you sound like you’re smiling even as I’m telling you I’m not interested, if you sound authentic and like an expert, eventually, I don’t even know why, I’m going to keep listening. The why of why I keep listening is because you sound good, right? Then I’ll go, “Huh, I don’t know why, but I feel like I might want to keep listening to you.” So, calling people and having some level of enthusiasm on the phone, not whispering, not talking very slowly, right … The three simplest hacks and … The easiest hack to sounding good is feeling good. So, whatever you need to do to feel good before you call people, do that. But if you want some theory behind it, it’s very simple. Three basic things. You don’t need to book seminars or read lots of books about tonality, all you need to know is most ears will interpret talking slowly with being slow up here, and talking a little faster than average with being fast, fast meaning smart. So, talk a little faster than average. Most ears will interpret low volume with lack of confidence, nervousness. Most people will interpret a really loud voice as aggressive. If you want to be above average, a little louder than average, that most ears will interpret as confidence, right? If you put a smile on your face, funny enough, they’ve done many experiments on this, we can hear if somebody’s smiling or not even if they say the same words in the same volume. If you smile, if you’re slightly above average in terms of your volume and your speed, you’re 90% ahead of the curve, right? So, you’re calling me, if you’re not excited to talk to me, why the fuck should I be excited about talking to you? Make sure you sound good. Now that you reach me, you sound good, you need to basically just, at the beginning, explain to me what the fuck it is you do or why you’re calling me. Think about it again, user experience. I pick up the phone, it’s a phone number I don’t recognize, it’s a voice I don’t recognize, what is going on through my mind? Who is this, who is this, who is this, who is this, and then oh shit, is this person trying to sell me something, are they selling me something, are they selling me something, right? That’s it, that’s the thought process that’s going on in my mind. You need to address these two questions really early on, and you cannot talk and tell me anything else, because as long as you don’t address these two things I’m not listening, because I’m in my head going oh shit, who is this, who is this, who is this, who is this. So, don’t lose me at the hello. How many times have people done cold calling campaigns and they say, “Hey. My name is Steli, I’m calling from Close.io. What we do is duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh,” and I haven’t heard anything of this. I was in my head thinking who is this, who is this, who is this, and then I have to go and say, “Sorry, who is this again?” When somebody tells you to repeat what you just said, you’ve fucked up, right? You’ve messed up right there and then. So, you don’t want to lose me at the hello. You want to say, “Hello. My name is Steli Efti. Here’s the reason why I’m calling in a sentence. I’m calling people in the area to find out they might be a good fit for a beta program that we’re running.” Now I’ve addressed who I am and why I’m calling. The person now is thinking, okay, some dude in the area, beta program, trying to see if it’s a good fit, and now they’re thinking but what the fuck is it. So, now you go, “What we do, in a sentence, we offer sales teams a tool that will enable them to do more calls, send more emails, close more deals.” Now, once you’ve given me the elevator pitch, the … So, I went who is this and why are they calling me, and then I went, okay, but what the fuck is it. Ah, okay, I get what it is, now I’m making a judgment call, right? Now I’m going to decide not interesting for me most of the time, or I don’t fully get it, I need to know more. You need to empower me to say it, so instead of just going, “What we do, in a sentence, is we offer sales teams an inside sales tool that allows them to do a better job,” and then keep talking, I go, “Does that in general sound interesting to you?” I empower you to give me feedback at this point. I realize and expect that 9 out of 10 times people will go, “No, it doesn’t. This is not for me. I’m not interested.” That’s totally fine. At that point, I will then move over to now trying to qualify you, ask a few questions to uncover if this could be a good fit. I realize that at this point, you and I, we don’t have enough information to really make a good decision if this is going to work out or not, but I know that you made a judgment call anyways. So, I want you to say it. I want to go, “Hey, does that in general sound interesting to you?” If people go, “No,” I’ll say, “Interesting. Tell me about your sales process.” If they go, “Maybe,” I’ll say, “Interesting. Tell me about your sales process.” If they say, “Yes,” I’ll go, “Interesting. Tell me about your sales process.” I don’t really care at this point because we don’t have enough data, but I still want you to get it out of your system. I realize that the listener at this point, when I told them what I do, will decide in their mind this is not for me, and I want them to be able to say it so it’s not in their head anymore. So like, “No, this is not for me,” and I go, “Cool. Tell me about your sales team right now.” So, you just go step by step and you think about the journey. In the first few minutes, the I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re calling me, I don’t know what it is you do and I have decided this is not for me. These four steps in cold calling are like universal. You have to assume that every person you’re calling, they’ll go through these four steps. You need to address these four steps in this sequence, right? You can’t start with like, “Close.io is doing a sales software tool,” and I’m like, well, who the fuck if this person? Why are they calling me? You can’t start at step four, right? You go sequential, one step at a time, so I, as the listener, can follow along. If you do that, this is just basic math. If you have a good reach rate, if you have a sales team that knows how to be high energy, high passion, high confidence when they’re on the phone, so they sound good, they literally sound good, they have a voice that the listener likes to listen to, and then you take those first four steps and you address them in sequence and you address them with logic, then you’re like ahead of the curve. You should be in really good shape. At this point, if they’re a qualified lead, you ask them a bunch of questions, you discover if they’re qualified or not, if they’re qualified you go to your conversion, whatever that is, maybe a demo call, maybe whatever the next step is, you’ll do really well. You will do really well. You teach them how to manage certain objections. Everybody will have like, “I don’t have time. I don’t have money,” like some basic, fundamental things everybody says, you need to have some kind of a framework on how to address these things, and then calling is not that complicated, right? This is basic stuff. But, I’ll tell you, I’ve listened to a million sales calls in my life, and 99% of the time they do an outbound campaign and they reach almost nobody, and the people they reach, they sound terrible, they jump around on these four points or they don’t address any of these four points, and then they’re like whining and crying about why there’s a disconnect with the person they’re trying to reach and why they’re not succeeding with their cold calling campaign. So, they’re some basic, fundamental things. You get those right, you’re going to be in really good shape and your chance of success is going to be pretty good.   [0:26:50] Ryan: I love that. You sound like you’ve made a few cold calls in your day.   [0:26:54] Steli Efti: One or two. Not too many, but just enough.   [0:26:58] Ryan: Okay. So for people out there watching today, maybe they’re trying to make a decision between going all in on having a sales team that’s about calling, or about emailing first and then booking appointments. Do you have any way to help people sort of decide which one is right for their organization, the stage they’re in, or just personal feelings on which one you feel is most effective?   [0:27:22] Steli Efti: Yeah. No, not really. I would just try both things and see what gets us better results. But better results is really holistically, so I would have a funnel that just calls people directly and then a funnel that sends emails before you call those people, and then see, in a given framework, maybe a month, maybe two months, what’s the activity, what’s the quality and what’s the conversion of these two funnels. That in theory sounds simple. The reason why most people will fail doing this is the humans involved in this. If you have the same person doing one as the other, that person’s preference will dictate what will work better, right? A lot of times, I find that a lot of salespeople, a lot of people in sales shouldn’t be in sales and are not really sales people. One good indicator is a person that just doesn’t feel comfortable just calling somebody and talking to them, and wants that something to hold on to. That type of person often times will appreciate and like the idea os sending an email, not because the person opened that email or because they looked at it, or because they remember it or it made any difference, just because it made the salesperson feel good about calling. It made them hold onto something, feel safe. “Oh, I sent you an email,” they have a good reason to call. So, often times, the reason why these sales teams do a bunch of stuff is more psychological and emotional for themselves than really making a difference with the prospect, but sometimes it can make a difference. We talked about CTOs, CTOs at Fortune 500 companies. You might have a lot more success communicating to them via email prior to a call than trying to brute force your way to a call, and calling the receptionist at the headquarters and trying to get your way to their desk phone. It’s probably going to be a pretty brutal journey that’s not going to really be successful. So, I would just test both things, but I would also be aware of the bias there. Sending emails to schedule a call can be a really good tactic, sending emails with material to then call and say, “Did you look at it?” is basically just bullshitting. You could just say you’ve done it even if you haven’t, because you’ll see that, you know, you’ll have like a 10% open rate, and even the people that open don’t really open the brochure and read it. So, it’s almost irrelevant if you send it or not, people will not remember it, it won’t make a difference, so you can just pretend you sent an email. But, if you want to send emails, especially with the predictable revenue model where you send an email a few levels above the person that you really want to reach, asking for referral down, if you do that, that can work, and that can sometimes be more effective than calling directly. I would just experiment with both things, but I would be aware of human bias. I would be looking at the people that are executing on these experiments and just ask myself do they want one experiment to work, do they have a strong bias towards one or the other, because if they do, you don’t even have to do the experiment. What the thinker thinks, the proof will prove. They’ll just do the thing and make the thing work that they believe in, or not make the thing work that they don’t like. So, be aware of that.   [0:30:22] Ryan: Have you ever been the recipient of any particularly interesting, effective outreach campaigns where there was a phone call, email or something else entirely?   [0:30:35] Steli Efti: Well, I’m the recipient of a shit ton of sales emails and calls. It’s funny because half of them use templates that I’ve published and taught. It’s kind of weird to see people emailing me with the stuff that I posted on our blog. I’ll give you a bad example, but I think there’s an important lesson in there. People always ask me, “What was the most effective subject line?” I always rant about subject lines in emails because I think that 80% of the … Most of the sales team, they’ll spend all their time with the body of the email and almost no time on the subject line. I spend more time on the subject line than on the body, because if you don’t open the email, it didn’t exist. So, that’s the most important piece, is that first step. So, often times, people send me their emails to give them feedback, and I’ll always send them an email back going, “I cannot give you feedback because you didn’t include the fucking subject line,” right? I don’t know if I would ever open this, so I cannot tell you anything about your email. So, people always ask me, “What’s the most effective subject line, what’s the best subject line ever that made you open?” I’ll tell them this story. I was on vacation once for two weeks. I come back, my email inbox was a fucking mess, and there was like hundreds and hundreds of emails. Intuitively, I zoom in on one email, like , where I read the subject line “Really disappointed …” It’s funny, right, out of like hundreds of emails, I instantly zoomed in on that one. Why? Because I’m like, “Oh, shit. What did I, or we, fuck up?” What did I mess up? I’ve disappointed somebody, right? Instantly, like this was a kick in the nuts or a punch in the face. I’m like, “Oh, shit.” So, I open that email. So, subject line was “Really disappointed …” and then it continued “… That I was not able to connect with you. I’ve left you two voicemails and what we do,” duh duh duh duh duh … It was like a pitch. I laughed out loud, I was like, “Motherfucker, you got me,” right? As I’m thinking that, I go delete. Because, here’s the deal. If you trick me into opening your email, our relationship started off the wrong way, right? I don’t want to be in business with people that trick me into things. So, if you use a subject line that tricks me into opening, that’s a win for you, but it’s also a loss because this is a relationship … Again, thinking about the journey, you need to think about my user experience reading your email. If my experience is you tricked me, you lied to me, you created an expectation that didn’t match reality, I’m going to be pissed. I tell people all the time, “You know what the most effective subject line on earth would be? I already know it, I don’t need any tests on it. The subject line would read “I have your parents in my basement.”” Even if your parents are dead, I guarantee you open that email, right? But that’s not a great way to start parents in my basement. Ha ha, lol, was just joking, wanted you to open my email. Let me tell you about my SAS tool. That’s never going to fucking work. It’s a horrible human being doing that. So, my lesson here is that the subject line is making a promise that your email needs to deliver on. Now, sometimes it’s fine to be ambiguous, right? Your subject line could … I’ve taught this. Please don’t send me emails with this subject line. “Quick question” is a really effective one, it’s been taught a lot. If you actually have a question, like who’s the right person in the team to talk to, that was a subject line that’s fair. You didn’t lie to me, you didn’t trick me. You delivered on that promise. But don’t say things in the subject line to get people to open, when then what you really want to tell them had nothing to do with it. When you write a subject line that says “Really disappointed” you know you’re creating a sense of panic in the recipient, because they think they’ve messed something up, and that sense of panic and attention is false. You being disappointed you didn’t reach me on my fucking phone is not my problem. You know, there’s always a balance to strike. Sometimes you can do things, again, looking at your funnel, you can do something and then you can be like high fiving each other. Wow, our open rate in our email campaign went up 90%, we’re amazing. But, you need to think about the entire journey, the entire experience. It’s not just getting certain percentages up. Ultimately, these percentages are all part of a relationship that you’re building with somebody, hopefully from someone that doesn’t know you, to somebody that gets to know you, to somebody that trusts you, to somebody that does business with you and receives value from the relationship. So, don’t trick or lie just to get the numbers up in any piece of the funnel. That’s my lesson learnt.   [0:35:26] Ryan: I love that. It always comes back to the user experience. Awesome. So, Steli, I want to shift gears. We’re winding down the interview now, I want to shift gears over to … One topic that you wrote about recently on the Close.io blog was vulnerability, and why that’s important for salespeople in particular. So, can you elaborate on that?   [0:35:45] Steli Efti: Yeah. This is a fascinating topic for me. I think that most of us intuitively, we think that showing vulnerability is a sign of weakness, so we all … We’re all programmed in one way or another to try to hide our weaknesses and to hide moments of vulnerability in order to protect ourselves. The funny thing is that I’ve found that if you show weakness, but you do it from a place of strength, right, you don’t show vulnerability and then you run away, or you show it while you’re shivering, while you’re afraid about the response, but you’re just radically transparent about it, you go, “You know what?” … This is an example in sales. Saying the words, “I don’t know the answer to this question,” is something salespeople hate to do. They’re so insecure about this, they don’t want to be perceived as lacking knowledge or being junior, and so instead of saying, “You know what? I don’t know the answer to that question,” they bullshit. They just make up an answer, they just try to guess the answer, and they’re creating a lot of harm along the way. Why? Because they’re afraid to just say, “I don’t know,” because they think if they say, “I don’t know,” they’ll not be taken seriously, they will be put into some kind of a super junior bucket. But, it’s not really so much about saying, “I don’t know,” it’s about how you say, “I don’t know.” So, if you say it and you’re like super apologetic, and you’re like super in turmoil over it, again, that’s going to influence the person that’s listening to you and make them feel like, oh God, this person’s really insecure, they don’t really know much, they’re really junior. If you can say, “I don’t know,” while keeping eye contact, you can say it with confidence and you say … You don’t just say, “I don’t know,” obviously, that’s a dead end, but you go, “You know what? It’s a good question, I don’t know the right answer. I don’t want to give you false information, so let me do this. I’m going to talk to an expert on the team and get you the right information. Now, let me ask you, why is this important to you? What would you like the answer to be? In a perfect world, what would you want me to say, and why?” Then you write down these things, and you go, “All right, good. I’ve got you. I’ll come back to you later today and I’ll give you the correct information on this topic.” That has never made somebody go, “Oh my God, this person’s so junior. I never want to deal with them.” And then on top of it, because 99.99% of all salespeople are never vulnerable, would never say, “I don’t know,” it makes you stand out. It makes you stand out from the crowd and they will translate what you said into, holy shit, this person I can trust. Holy shit, this is finally a salesperson that’s not bullshitting me. Finally a salesperson that’s not lying, right? Somebody I can trust. “I don’t know,” is one thing, but saying to people, “No,” is another thing, right? Salespeople, they hate when a customer or prospect says, “Hey, I really like your solution, we’re thinking about buying it. Here’s some features we’d like you to have that you don’t have yet. Are you thinking about building these features?” Salespeople love to say, “Yes,” and they hate to say, “No.” They’re so afraid to say, “No.” Why? Because they think if I say no, I’m going to lose this deal. They go, “You know what? That’s a really great idea. Yeah, that’s definitely something on the roadmap, definitely something we’re planning to do.” It’s kind of cheap. It doesn’t cost anything to say, “We’re thinking about this,” and I’ll get the money from the customer right now, and I have this false assumption that if I tell you no, you’re not going to buy. You know what’s beautiful? It’s beautiful to be honest, right, and it’s possible to be honest. When a prospect tells us, “Hey, are you going to do whatever, some … Are you going to heavily involve social media? Can we integrate Instagram into Close.io so we know peoples’ Instagram feed?” My answer is, “No.” I would ask people again, “Hey, why is this important to you? Is this a must have or a nice to have?” But, ultimately, if it’s completely misaligned with our roadmap, I’ll tell the customer, “Listen, I don’t know of another tool that does this, otherwise I would recommend you to that, but I can tell you we are not going to work on this. This is absolutely not on the roadmap. Never say never, but it’s definitely not going to happen in the next two or three years, I’m pretty sure of that. Is that a deal breaker for you?” You’d be surprised, again, you know how many times I’ve told people no, and then they go, “No, it’s not a deal breaker. I was just curious.” They’ll buy anyways, right? But it’s that insecurity and vulnerability of not wanting to reject any of the ideas of the prospect that makes salespeople lie, to pretend they’re strong, to pretend, yes, we can do everything, we will do everything, I know everything, and that … Again, that’s the beginning of the end. User experience, user journey, relationship, right, it starts off with lies and will end with heartbreak, right? And with a divorce, it’s going to be costly and painful, versus just saying, “This is not something I enjoy,” or, “This is not something we’re going to be able to provide to you, and if this is a must have, we’re not right for you. If it’s a nice to have, then you know not to expect this.” It’s these things where if you’re honest and authentic, and if you do it and you deliver it with confidence, you’re not apologetic, you’re not fearful, you’re just saying, “You know what? I don’t know this,” or, “We don’t do this,” well, yeah, you’re right, you know, a customer might go, “Well, you guys are doing a really poor job on how you handle XYZ.” You can say, “You know what? In fact, I agree with you on this. We do do a poor job.” “Well, are you going to not fix this today?” “No. We’d love to fix it today, but based on priorities and resources, there’s other things we’re going to do first, so you’re going to have to live with this for at least another three to six months. I just want you to know that. If you can live with it, let’s work together. If you can’t, I’d rather have you not be disappointed.” If you communicate with people, if you tell these types of things to prospects, you’d be surprised they will want to buy from you, even if … They will not know why. I tell people all the time, “You should not buy my software,” and then they start arguing with me why they should buy my software. There’s something incredibly attractive and powerful about vulnerability because offering honest … Being vulnerable with confidence is the ultimate sign of strength. It’s an incredibly attractive thing because it’s so rare. It’s honest, authentic, but it’s also strong. They’re somebody that goes, “Here, I’ll put down my armor. If you want, here’s a knife, you can push me and I’m not afraid of that. You can do something if you want to,” that’s the ultimate sign of strength. Not like being in a bunker with 10 machine guns and being afraid to see sunlight because somebody might hurt you. That’s not really strength, that’s weakness. So, I think that especially in SAS, where the relationship has to be reconfirmed every fucking month … Every month they are paying you money, and if they’re not receiving value, they’re not feeling they’re treated well, they’re going to leave. It’s very easy for them to go somewhere else. In a business model that depends on longterm, happy relationships, you need to be vulnerable, you need to be honest and authentic, but do all that with strength and strength. I think it’s those simple things … This is not complicated to do, but it’s emotionally challenging for many people. But if you can overcome that, it’ll make a massive difference.   [0:43:23] Ryan: Yeah. I would agree with you. I think the radical honesty component of that is particularly powerful to me. It also helps people self select out of being a target customer too, when they’re not the right fit.   [0:43:34] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:43:34] Ryan: So, Steli, this is going to be my last question for you. What’s been the best investment you feel you’ve ever made in the context of building your selling skills?   [0:43:45] Steli Efti: The best investment I’ve ever made … I think investing, focusing on consistency over charisma or over any kind of hack. I’ve spent my whole life studying sales, studying communication, studying the mind. All these books, all these workshops, all these seminars, every little bit of it was all worth it. But the thing that made the biggest difference were not like learning certain language patterns or learning certain flashy pitches or learning how to negotiate. What really made the biggest difference is learning how to be consistent in sales, how to have discipline in sales and how to perform every single day, forever, no matter how I feel, no matter if I feel like it or not. That was what was slowing me down and holding me back for the first part of my career as an entrepreneur and salesperson, was like being very inconsistent, having moments of brilliance and moments of like total disaster, and relying only on my charisma and not on my character to succeed. The biggest shift that happened is me realizing that consistency is key and it’s king, it is the most important thing, and character is really longterm how you win the game, not charisma. Investing in that, making that my priority has made the biggest difference in sales and in any other area of my life, to be honest.   [0:45:09] Ryan: I love that. Beautiful. All right. Well, Steli, for everyone watching today, where can they go to learn more about you and everything you guys are up to?   [0:45:17] Steli Efti: Yeah, so just shoot me an email. You can always get in touch with me directly just as steli@close.io, ask me a question. If you want, I have a bundle with like seven books that were written about inside sales, how to do the calls, how to do the emails, how to negotiate, how to do a product demo, all that good stuff. If you want to have all the books and all of my email templates and sales scripts, there’s a bundle link, for free, waiting for you. All you have to do is shoot me an email, say, “Bundle motherfucker,” or anything equivalent, and I’ll shoot you back a free link. You click on that and you’ll get a nice little folder with all my best content, ready for you. But if you want to get in touch, just to ask a question or talk about a challenge or problem you have, always happy to hear from you. Besides that, make sure to go to blog.close.io, subscribe to our blog. Twice a week we publish tactical content around sales and startups, so if you haven’t done that, make sure to check out the blog as well.   [0:46:13] Ryan: Beautiful. Right, thank you again for joining us.   [0:46:16] Steli Efti: Thanks for having me. [0:46:17] The post 266: Steli Efti’s Inside Sales Tips for Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about NPS surveys, the importance of carrying them out and how they can be beneficial to your startup as a whole. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score and is a customer satisfaction score created by Bain and Company. When carried out properly, NPS surveys give you an idea of how your customers feel about your company. They have become very popular with startups in the last few years. However, due to the nature of the surveys, they also have some criticisms. For example, some critics point out that results are arbitrary and “made up”. Tune-in to find out more about NPS surveys, at what stage to conduct them in your startup, the importance of tracking your business’s progress through customer ratings, and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 What NPS is all about. 01:08 Some criticisms of NPS surveys. 01:45 Some benefits of carrying out NPS surveys. 02:47 The current state of NPS surveys in the startup world. 04:00 A mistake Steli made at Close.io. 04:30 How Close.io surveys their customers. 05:30 Why we’re talking about NPS surveys today. 07:28 A major reason why companies are not consistent with NPS surveys. 08:12 What “Allergies to processes” means. 09:05 Another major benefit of carrying out NPS surveys 09:20 Some tools you can use to carry out NPS surveys. 10:22 Some things to keep in mind when carrying out NPS surveys. 3 Key Points: Surveying customers is not a bad thing. Annoying them with lots of surveys is a bad thing. If you’re not doing it on a regular basis you’re missing out on a key part of your learning process. NPS surveys help you figure out if improvements you’re making at your startup are good for your customers. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: All right everybody, Hello, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today, we’re gonna talk about NPS surveys. See, we like talking about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:10] Steli Efti: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life, and hopefully while we’re doing that, provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:15] Hiten Shah: The world’s best business podcast. Shit.   [0:00:17] Steli Efti: Oh, shit.   [0:00:20] Hiten Shah: For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:21] Steli Efti: Done, yeah. We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah we want you to do your best. Which is short for Net Promoter Score and we talked about it in a prior episode, about early access and competitor research. It’s something, I think … NPS, Net Promoter Score is a customer satisfaction score. It’s a methodology created by Bain and company. It’s actually a registered trademark, but there are a lot of tools that let you do it. It’s a simple zero to ten question, which, the question is basically how likely are you to recommend this product, and it’s very popular. Lots of companies have adopted it and more recently, in the last few years, startups have really become drawn to it. There’s also some controversy around it because some people say it’s just arbitrary and made up, because based on the response from zero to ten that someone gives, they are bucketing it into one of three groups. They are either promoters, detractors, or do you remember the last one, Steli? promoters, detractors, or …   [0:01:26] Steli Efti: Passive! Passive.   [0:01:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:01:27] Steli Efti: Passive. Yes. And you, it’s just based on their score. Nines and tens are promoters, and the rest is split up between detractors and passive. And so it’s become super popular but it’s arbitrary according to many, some users, experienced folks. So I just wanted to point that out. That being said, I’m gonna throw the first kind of nugget about it. For me, what’s important is that we have some way of knowing whether people care about our products or not. We have a simple way to do it, even if it’s not perfect, and then the most important piece of it, for me, is when you, after they tell you the score of how likely they are to recommend it from a zero to ten, you ask them what’s the most important reason for your score? And it really changes the sort of feedback you get. And then you can segment that feedback by promoters, passive, and detractors. And then you get a lot of valuable information. And I’m gonna say something, because Steli, you don’t know this, but I’m actually working on something related to this from a software standpoint that I’m not ready to talk about yet but I thought I’d talk about it right now, because we’re talking about NPS so we won’t get more into that, it’s just a teaser for anyone listening. But yeah, you wanted to talk about this I think, Steli, so let’s talk about it, what’s on your mind?   [0:02:43] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so first of all, my Ahmed, there’s almost not a thing I can talk about where you’re not like, “I have a product in the pipeline that is brewing.” You’re killing it right now, so that’s awesome to hear. I think honestly I just think that NPS is one of those things that most startups are not doing early enough, and when they’re doing it, they’re doing kind of one-off, they’re very, it’s one of those things that companies are like not doing, not doing, not doing, and then they do it once and then they don’t do it again, right? For a really long time. And I think, just like everything else, consistency is really key and I’m not a huge like, survey guy. I know you’re really good at doing surveys really mindfully, and we’ve had super popular episodes in the past on how to do customer service and you’re killing it on that front. But the NPS survey, to me, is so powerful because it’s A, a survey that so many fucking companies have run so you have so much data to compare with, right? There’s a lot of data, there’s a huge dataset and sample set of companies that you can compare with, but also because of its simplicity. It’s just a very, very, it’s not perfect, but it’s very simple and I love simple. And I think that if I could run back the clock to Day 1, this is a mistake that we made as well. We didn’t do an NPS Survey at all for the first, I think, year and a half of Close, and then we did one NPS survey and we looked at the results and we had discussions, and whatever, we made some decisions based on it and then we didn’t do it anymore for another year and a half. I think that’s just dumb. I wish we would have done it the way we’re doing it today, which is we’re using a third-party tool that’s in-app, and every single month we survey a certain amount of customers and users and then we track and report how our NPS score is moving every single month, but even more importantly we’re actually looking at every single comment people make. As you describe, that’s really where the gold is. Not just the score, the number, but the explanation for why they’ve given a certain number. And we’re trying to learn from these things and in many cases we’ll reach out and call people, especially when they’re unhappy or when they have a problem, and issue, or we make a mental note when somebody is really suffering because we’re lacking something in the product that we know internally is upcoming, so we’ll make a note and we’ll make sure that that person is gonna get a personal email from us or get an early invitation to it. But just like doing, surveying our customers every single month, or like every day automatically, basically like looking at the survey results every month and reading the comments every single week and responding to them, emailing people, calling people, and collecting context and insight, I think has been incredibly valuable. And then looking at, and I wish we had done that from Day 1. I wish it didn’t take us three years to start doing this. Or four years to start doing this. So that’s really one of the reasons that I wanted to quickly talk about this is because I think it’s an incredibly valuable tool, I think if you do it consistently over real long periods of times, you’re gonna really know how your churn and relationship with the happiness of your customers is moving, you’re going to have a lot of data to understand where the direction of your company is going in terms of how successful and happy your customers are. There’s a lot of benefits to it, right? You can send… There’s just more insight and information about your customers, like people that are super happy, we’ll reach out to them now on NPS course, and we’ll ask them to do a case study with us. Or we’ll send them a little gift. It’s just, we learn these things from customers because we do these NPS surveys consistently, and I can’t believe that it took us so long. So that’s one of the main reasons why I want to talk about it.   [0:06:40] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think it just goes back to being customer-centric as a company and realizing that there are some easy things you can do. Surveying customers is not a bad thing. Annoying them with lots of surveys is a bad thing, so I think a lot of companies forget that like, those two are completely on opposite sides. You can find a tool like Net Promoter Score and send it regularly to your different cohorts, different groups of customers, and get really valuable feedback. If you’re not doing it on a regular basis, then you’re missing out on a key part of your learning. It’s that simple, right? And so I think, it’s something I used to say also about interviewing customers and customer development, of learning from customers, talking to them, that companies are really good at doing it early on and then they stop doing it. One of the reasons they stop doing it is they just get caught up in the rest of it. They get caught up in scaling a team, get caught up in those things and they don’t make it a core process, or core part of their business. Move a little bit slower and build a little bit of those customer-centric processes into the company much faster, even if it slows us down a little bit, just because then you don’t stop doing that. And so it’s very much like that allergy to process that I’ve found as to one of the core reasons why people don’t continuously do things like Net Promoter Score in order to kind of learn from the customer.   [0:08:04] Hiten Shah: Can you say that again, allergy to process?   [0:08:07] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s like startups have an allergy to process, right? They’re like, look, we’re just getting shit done. Okay, you’re getting shit done, how do you know you’re gonna be able to get shit done in a month? The shit that works, the shit that works, you know that shit right there? You want to do it again, right? Right. And they’re just like, “Oh, crap.” I get this look all the time, because I can look at a business these days and say okay, you’re early, cool. A bunch of stuff working, a bunch of stuff isn’t working and they ask me, “Hey , how do we do marketing?” And I’m like, “Well what have you been doing that’s already working?” I don’t know. Yeah we’re doing a bunch of stuff that’s working. Okay, can you repeat it? Oh, really? You can repeat it? Yeah, you can repeat it if you have process, you can repeat it. And this Net Promoter Score thing is one of those things. It’s like, hey, how do you know whether the improvements you’ve made in your product or even in your business are and if you can’t answer that question to me, you know, definitively, then what are you doing? How do you know that you’re making improvements? And Net Promoter Score helps you figure out if the improvements you’re making are leading to better results for your customers or not.   [0:09:14] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any excuse anymore for not doing this. We at Close, we use Wootric and it works really perfectly well, we’re super happy with it, but I know there is other tools out there. There’s Promoter and a bunch of them if you just Google them, you’ll find an NPS survey tool from… Simply if you want even something better that doesn’t exist yet you probably just email HNShah@Gmail.com and he tells you what he’s got in his computer’s pipeline.   [0:09:43] Steli Efti: Yeah actually, actually yeah. You should email Hiten, H-I-T-E-N at producthabits.com on that one. I’ve looked at all the tools, there’s another tool called delighted.com as well for doing this, and I promise whatever I’m going to create will be very disruptive in the market because that’s the goal. But on a high level, just do it. It doesn’t matter what you use, you could even use SurveyMonkey to do it. You can use Typeform to do it. You can use anything to do this survey, it’s not really as much about the tool, it’s more about how are you doing it, how often are you doing it, and are you actually getting the learnings you need from it?   [0:10:19] Hiten Shah: Yeah and I think that my tip there is also don’t do it and then try to compare whatever the numbers that you have with some number that some other company or startup published in the space, or with Apple, or whoever. Don’t worry about comparing yourself immediately with others and creating anxiety or creating false positives and thinking, false confidence, and thinking oh my God, we’re having a better Net Promoter Score than Apple, we’re gonna rule the world. It’s just like chill out. Just take whatever the number is, I think the first few times you do this it actually doesn’t even matter that much. The comments matter, right? But the number itself I don’t think is that important. What is important is how that number moves over time. If it gets better and better and better, you know you’re doing things right, you know you’re on to something. The number is getting worse, you might know that you are, you know, getting out of touch with your customer, that you’re building the wrong things, that you’re not serving them the right way. Like it’s a great way, a great compass, for you to know if you’re moving in the right direction, the goal should just be to improve that score every single quarter versus to do it once and then compare yourself with others to either think that you are failing or succeeding based on one NPS survey. Like that’s not gonna really do anything. And then make sure you do it consistently, make sure that you read the comments, you respond to the comments, make sure that you use those as an opportunity to set up calls, as an opportunity to learn where to upsell somebody on a feature that exists and they don’t know, how to train people better, how to product prioritize, how to do more customer case studies. In many cases maybe you want to start reaching out to customers that are saying yes, I want to tell everybody about you, and give them some gifts and some, an easy way to tell more people about you. There’s a lot of benefits that you can gain from that and you don’t have to over-complicate it, just get started doing it in a small way and do it consistently over long periods of time and then that number, and the data that you’ve collected, will be really, really valuable. It’s going to be more and more valuable every single month that you do it. It really compounds its usefulness. And that would be kind of my biggest piece of advice, and don’t push this off to next month, next year, next quarter. If you have customers, if you have users, if you’re not like at day zero, but if you have already a few hundred users or even just 20, 30, 40 customers, implement this and just make it part of everything else that you do and part of the way that you run the business. And I love, and don’t be allergic against this. I love, we’re gonna have to use this term and do a future episode on process allergies that startups have. I love that term.   [0:12:53] Steli Efti: Yes. Yes. All right, have a good one, happy NPS-ing.   [0:12:59] Hiten Shah: Happy NPS-ing everybody, bye bye. [0:13:01] The post 265: How to Use NPS Surveys to Grow Your Company appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to use inspiration to your advantage in your startup – a topic that is rarely discussed in the business world. They also talk about how “too much inspiration” can be a problem and whether your moments of inspiration should take priority over an existing strategy.   During a moment of inspiration, you may feel as if you’ve come up with a great idea that could really benefit your startup, and you may feel the urge to share it with as many people as possible.  However, ideas are fragile and although it may feel like an “ah-ha” moment, there might be major pitfalls that can occur if you actually executed the idea. Steli and Hiten talk about a more deliberate approach to dealing with moments of inspiration. They argue that, at all times, your focus must be on what’s important for your business right now. And only after that should you move on to more creative ideas that can enhance your startup. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn what inspiration means for a startup, as well as Steli and Hiten’s top tips for dealing with those unplanned, inspirational moments whenever they occur. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic: how to use inspiration to your advantage. 00:30 Why we’re talking about this topic. 01:14 The dictionary definition of inspiration. 01:56 Typical moments of inspiration in the startup world. 02:17 How to deal with moments of inspiration. 03:26 Some tools you can use for writing down your moments of inspiration. 04:27 Why writing down your moment of inspiration is a good idea. 06:09 How to decide if you should follow up on an inspiring idea or stay committed to a strategy you’re already executing. 15:25 How “too much inspiration” can be a problem. 16:04 How to make sure you keep being inspired at work. 3 Key Points: When inspiration hits, write it down. It’s better to write down your ideas than to just talk about them. When you’re truly inspired, when you have an “ah-ha moment”, it’s an awesome feeling [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and today on the Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about how to use inspiration to your advantage. We like to talk about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:12] Steli Efti: We just wanna bullshit and chat about business and life, and hopefully while we’re doing that, provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:17] Hiten Shah: The world’s best business podcast.   [0:00:19] Steli Efti: Oh, shit, we got it.   [0:00:22] Hiten Shah: For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:24] Steli Efti: Done. Yeah. We don’t wanna give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:26] Hiten Shah: We want you to do your best. And it’s a topic that I think is never really talked about because everyone has ideas and usually they jump right into doing something about it. But, really, an idea or inspiration for anything, even if it’s: “I wanna eat Mexican food today,” or whatever that is, it just comes onto you and then most of us are not thinking a lot about it, and we go act on it. I thought this would be just an interesting topic to explore because you can’t run a business, you can’t work in a business, do a startup, cause this is a startup chat so we’re supposed to talk about startups, right, Steli?   [0:01:05] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:01:05] Hiten Shah: Without some level of inspiration. I think there’s so many aspects to this so, just a topic that I felt like would be great to explore with you.   [0:01:13] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. Alright, so first I’m gonna do the most Hiten thing ever, I’m so glad I’m beating you to the punch of this, what do you think I’m doing right now? I’m gonna read the dictionary definition of “inspiration.”   [0:01:25] Hiten Shah: Yes! Perfect!   [0:01:28] Steli Efti: For long time listeners, you might know that Hiten loves words and communication almost as much as I do and loves to pick up and actually read the definitions of words at times. So, here’s the definition of inspiration: “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.” Inspiration. So, let’s talk about, maybe a little bit like what our typical moments of inspiration in startups and then what do a lot of founders and startup people do right after or at the moment of inspiration, sometimes to their disadvantage; and what are some ways to take advantage of those inspiring moments.   [0:02:18] Hiten Shah: Oh, man. I mean, you can get inspired any time. This also is the whole idea of in the shower, you get an idea, right? And inspired. For me it’s like: be open to those moments of inspiration. That’s like, step one. And step two is:before you do anything, write it down. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve done in my life, which is, write shit down, or start writing shit down, or remember to write shit down. I have right now, I might’ve done this before Steli, I don’t remember, but I keep going through different notes apps, right? And this notes app I have right now, I don’t even know, I’m still scrolling and finding newer and newer notes. I just restarted it literally about a year ago, and it has countless notes. I get inspired, I put it in there, I can search through it and find some things. Sometimes it’s about a product I’m working on, or a business, or something I wanna tell a friend. I think when inspiration hits, write it down. That my first advice for people and I know they’re not doing it.   [0:03:21] Steli Efti: Yeah. I love that. And I know that people are gonna be dying to hear this, so let’s get that nugget of information out for people; what app do you use to write down your notes, or your thoughts, or your moments of inspiration?   [0:03:33] Hiten Shah: My favorite app that has stood the test of time as I’ve flirted with other apps, is called Simple Note.   [0:03:39] Steli Efti: Okay.   [0:03:40] Hiten Shah: Because I can use it across desktop, and web, and all my devices. At the same time, a lot of the features that they have are now also in the Notes app by Apple. I’m an Apple user, I use Mac’s, I use iPhones, and iPads and all that. Actually, I don’t use an iPad. Honestly, I’ve been using Simple Note, I use the Notes app. Probably my all-time favorite, it doesn’t exist anymore, is an app called Vesper, v-e-s-p-e-r, and it’s by, his name’s John Gerber, who runs Daring Fireball and he actually created the app. There’s just something about the smoothness of it. That being said, it doesn’t exist anymore and you can’t download it. So, that’s my list.   [0:04:28] Steli Efti: Cool. So, your do when you have moments of inspiration, is write down your thoughts, your ideas, your feelings, whatever it is. Just write it down, put it on paper, put it in writing. This is kind of the smallest step often times, or one of the smallest steps, to move something from thought or emotions into manifesting into reality, right? Even just writing it down makes it real now, makes it permanent, if you use an app it makes it searchable, it can be there forever. So, you take something that was just a fleeting thought and you turn it into something real that can be shared with others, that can be found, that can be read. I think that that’s a super powerful tip. And I would say that as a do or a don’t, I’d rather have people, or I think it’s usually more valuable and advantageous for people to write down their thoughts, their ideas in moments of inspiration, than to necessarily instantly talk about it. Would you agree with that?   [0:05:35] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think Steve Jobs has a line where he would call ideas fragile. And I think inspiration is usually just a form of an idea and it’s fragile in the beginning. Writing it down helps you really put it into, like you said, manifest it, start thinking through it instead of just running with it. Which is really important, cause some of these ideas, they are fragile and they’re very delicate in the beginning. Talking to people, telling other people might not be the best strategy in the beginning.   [0:06:10] Steli Efti: Yeah. What do we tell people about, how do I decide when I should follow inspiration versus when I should follow, let me use the word, commitment? So, to paint a picture of a scenario; we’ve set certain goals with a startup, communicated with a team, everybody is heads down and executing. And now, I had a moment of clarity or of inspiration in the shower, or a walk in the park, or wherever; and I have what I feel in that moment to be a brilliant idea or creative idea of something that could change everything, or something that could have a massive impact. Now, I might have a dilemma, even if I write things down let’s say that that fragile idea of moment of inspiration survives, which is kind of one of my first tips often times, it just doesn’t, right? Often times you’ll feel very strongly about an idea in its inception, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll feel as strongly about it an hour later, a day later, a month later. And that’s fine. You wanna have lots and lots of ideas, lots and lots of moments, inspiring moments hopefully all your life; to be able to let go of a bunch of them cause they’re not always gonna be great. For many people there’s a dilemma where they have this idea, they feel so passionate about it that they’re now wondering: “okay, what do I do? Do I go and tell my team about this and change our plans, and try to sell everybody on this new inspiring idea, vision that I had? Or do I let everybody just continue with their work because we committed to this goal, but now I feel super bummed because I know we could be doing something much greater.” How do you decide? One key part of inspiration is that it’s usually not scheduled, right? You’re not planning a 5 AM being inspired meeting, you know, where you all sit there, you all have inspiring ideas and thoughts. So, it happens in the shower, on a walk, it happens at random times a day, you can’t really plan for it necessarily. So, what do you do as a founder when you have that? Do you give that priority over all your other ideas and plans? Or do you run it through some kind of a test before deciding if you want to share it with the team, or if you want to sell the team on this new vision, goal, idea, thought that you had?   [0:08:40] Hiten Shah: I think this is why you write it down. You write it down because you might not know when it should be brought up again, or useful to you. One of the things, and I think, we’ve got some episodes on this, maybe we’ll do more but – is deciding what to work on. For your team, for yourself, and for everybody. To me, the inspiration might be about something that’s important a year from now, or six months from now, or hopefully not that far out, but something that might not be important right now. A lot of these things when you’re inspired, you wanna think through them. Cause thinking through them helps you actually develop them and then bring them back up in a timely manner. So, to me, just from all the mistakes I’ve made, I think it’s really important to not distract your team and instead, write it down and bring it up when it makes sense. It’s like there’s a whole art to this. My advice for anybody that’s thinking through something, or gets inspired on a regular basis, is more so: think about when it’s timely to go execute on the idea that you’ve just had or what you got inspired on. A better approach is: make your brain think about the things that are important to your business right now, and focus your thoughts and your ideas around that. Get inspired for that. That’s, sort of, the way I think about it. Cause a lot of times an idea will strike and it has nothing to do with what’s important right now. And this is why I said write it down, take it slow because you could go distract your team really easily. We have a whole episode on founder bombs that we recorded awhile ago related to a story that really changed the way I do things with my team once I realized the impact I was having that wasn’t positive. You don’t wanna drop founder bombs, you want to be a lot more deliberate than that. You want to do things at the right time.   [0:10:29] Steli Efti: I couldn’t agree more with you, but there’s one thought that I have as I’m thinking about this, which is when you have moments of inspiration one of the awesome things about it is that you usually feel above average emotions, you know? Much more emotional state than usual. It’s a very positive emotional state. When you’re truly inspired or when you have an a-ha moment where you think, wow, you just had a brilliant idea – it’s a fucking awesome feeling, right? It charges you up, it gives you energy, it ignites your passion. It’s typically when we feel the strongest that we wanna share that with others, right? We don’t wanna just sit down and write it down and deliberate, and think about it logically, and meditate on it. We wanna scream and we wanna interrupt people, go over and go “hey, dude! Listen, I just had a brilliant idea!” Which, you know, it’s the worst thing to say ever, it’s like saying, “I’m just about to say something really funny guys.” It’s the best way to ensure that it’s not gonna be funny or brilliant. But anyways, you wanna interrupt somebody and share that with people because you feel really strongly. I’ve learned this as well, a.k.a, founder drive-bys or bombs where if you interrupt people at any time when you have a random idea, you’re making your team unproductive, you’re slowing things down. And you also don’t realize or learn, it took me a while to learn the difference between urgent and important. And even if an idea I think is really, really brilliant, could change everything, it probably can wait a few hours or a few days, right? If it’s that big of an idea it can wait a day or two. So, taking the time to really sleep on it, think on it, write on it, deliberate on it, and then start sharing it mindfully, I think, is the right way to go. But one thing that bums me out about this is that there’s the fun part of just sharing a moment of inspiration, even if it’s dumb, that you might lose if you write it down and you wait before you share with people. How do you think about that?   [0:12:26] Hiten Shah: There’s always someone on your team that can handle the energy that you’re bringing at that time and won’t be distracted. That’s what I’ve learned. Sometimes they’re the people that will show you your own patterns with the inspiration, so it can be a little painful. So, that’s one way. Another way is I go to people and say, “hey, this is kind of a weird idea, it’s a crazy idea. I don’t know if it matters right now, I already wrote it down, but I need someone to talk to about it cause maybe there’s something to it right now. Cause obviously I got it right now. I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff.” So, I think a lot of it is just communication.   [0:13:02] Steli Efti: I agree. Being mindful about the people in your life and who is the right person to talk about what, or to work with on what at what time, I think is really, really important. Yeah, you’re right. There are people that you can be really raw with your moments of inspiration. Some you might even have different flavors. You might pick one person; I know I have a friend of mine where if I just wanna have somebody that’s gonna instantly jump into the inspiration and be just with it and go crazy with me, I know a few people that I’ll call because I know right now what I want is just somebody to be like: “that’s awesome! And you know what else you could do…?” And I just wanna go crazy with somebody. And I want somebody to really be like a sounding board, I know I can call that person go: “you know what? I just had this idea, and yada, yada, yada.” The person says: “yeah, but what about this?” And just kills a lot of it, or points out the flaws in my thinking. And I’ll use both, right? It’s important to just know who the people are that you need for a certain situation. And also think about them, like, who am I either helping sharing my moment of inspiration? Or who am I not helping, slowing down or making unproductive? Just being mindful instead of just having it blow out of your mouth in front of whoever is in front of you and not thinking about the context of what they need to accomplish, what they’re working on, what their relationship is with you, how helpful or unhelpful they can be in this moment. It’s a lot of times when people are inspired and they wanna communicate, it’s a very impulsive and very selfish moment, right? They just feel amazing and they just need to blow it out to whoever is in front of them versus being considerate, mindful, and going: “okay, who do I wanna talk with about this? And who will also have a good time talking to me about this, or productive time?” I think that that’s really, really crucial. A lot of startups in the early days they might have too much inspiration because it’s all fresh, it’s all new, it’s exciting, there’s more possibilities than problems, probably, that exist, right? Since you don’t have anything or you just launched a landing page, how many problems can you have at this point, on day one? So, inspiration is really abundant often times in the early days, but I do see that over time, especially I know that a lot of our listeners are self-funded entrepreneurs that have been working on a side project for a year or two and are now doing it full time, now thinking about growing their team, but they’ve been at it for a minute. Often times I see that people struggle having as much fun and having as many moments of inspiration down the line. You’ve been an entrepreneur your entire fucking life almost. You’ve been doing this for a really, really long time. How do you make sure that you keep being inspired at work? Let me ask that question. And maybe that also can be the tip to wrap up the episode.   [0:16:13] Hiten Shah: When you read the definition, the definition had a lot to do with creativity, when you read the definition of inspiration. Focusing on being creative and letting your creativity out is what keeps me going, personally. I think that can apply to any kind of founder, any kind of entrapreneur. Doesn’t matter if they’re really into sales, or really into marketing, it’s often easy to think that what we’re doing in business is not creative. Yeah, we’re not making art in most cases, but there’s an art to it. This inspiration concept and idea of being inspired, and what to do about it, even the idea of having lots of ideas, really, like if we have a foundation of – this is what’s important in our business today, then we get that out of the way and we can throw our creativity at that most important aspect of our business. So, this is what I’ve learned to develop over the years. Often times I’ll have an idea and be like: “it doesn’t matter right now, I’m gonna write it down in my … You know, for this idea, this product down the line.” And it usually comes up again, right? So, for me it’s just about knowing that I’m focused on the most important problems in the business today, so is the team, and we’re throwing all of our creative energy at that problem, not at these problems that don’t exist or don’t matter yet.   [0:17:33] Steli Efti: I love that. I think for me, the tip I’ll throw in there and the way that I’ve been able to continuously be inspired … I mean, one is obviously, I think we’re very similar in this, surrounding myself with just inspiring people, creative people, people that are different from me, people that have lives that are very different from mine, that have backgrounds that are very different from mine. It’s inspiring to be with people that can teach you things, that can show you a different perspective on life. The other thing is that I’m always seeking a fairly diverse diet in terms of the content I read, the books I read, the podcasts I listen to, the movies I watch, the stuff that I consume. I always try to be very, very diverse and mostly out of the bubble that I’m operating in. So, these days I read very little sass content myself, but I’ll read tons of content about martial arts, I read tons of content about the military although I’m not a military dude, but I just got fascinated for a minute and started reading all this stuff about Navy Seals and their training regiment and all that. I’ll get fascinated about something weird. Or I’ll listen to stand up comedy shows for like hours on end at times, and I’ll be at awe and inspired by other people’s art forms and creativity, or commitment, or life. Usually that helps me come back to what I do and look at it from a different more creative perspective, or have new ideas around it and be inspired, and refreshed, and energized at work. So, having kind of a diverse content diet that’s outside the bubble that you work in has always been super helpful for me to be inspired on a consistent basis. Alright, I think that’s it for us for this episode.   [0:19:28] Hiten Shah: Yup. See ya. [0:19:29] The post 264: How to Use Inspiration to Your Advantage appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we talk about being a people-pleaser, the problems it can create within a start-up, and whether being one can a strength or a weakness when you are hiring team members. When it comes to hiring staff, especially customer-facing roles, you may be tempted to hire someone who loves to please other people. This can be a great thing, as people-pleasers are usually awesome people and can make great team members. However,  there’s a risk that a people-pleaser’s inclination to please others may be abused or taken advantage of by other team members, and this can lead to that person becoming very unproductive and ultimately this can hurt the company. Tune into this week’s episode to hear more about Steli and Hiten’s personal experience of working with people-pleasers, their distinction between being selfless and being a people-pleaser, what you can do to stop being a people-pleaser and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:04 About today’s topic: Being a people pleaser. 00:26 Why being a people pleaser may or may not be good for you. 00:38 Context of a people pleaser. 03:08 Hiten’s definition of whom a people-pleaser is. 05:04 Pleasing the company and the team vs pleasing the customers or the users. 06:26 The big distinction between being selfless and a people-pleaser. 07:27 What does a people-pleaser mean to Steli? 08:16 The act of people-pleasing. 09:14 The downside of saying “yes” all the time. 10:40 The risks of being a people-pleaser at work. 12:17 Steli’s recommendations of what to do if you’re a people-pleaser. 14:05 Are you a people pleaser? 3 Key Points: The most selfless people I know are people pleasers. If you have the ability to be a people pleaser, it’s a skill, it’s a talent. But you can use it in a way that is not beneficial to you or your endeavour. The risk of being a people pleaser is that you’re not dealing with truth and conflict in the most effective way possible. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:03] Steli Efti: In today’s episode we want to talk about being a people pleaser.   [0:00:08] Hiten Shah: Here we like to talk about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:10] Steli Efti: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life, and hopefully while we’re doing that provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:15] Hiten Shah: The world’s best business podcast, shit.   [0:00:20] Steli Efti: Shit, we’ve got it.   [0:00:20] Hiten Shah: For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:21] Steli Efti: Done, yeah. We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:24] Hiten Shah: We want you to do your best.   [0:00:26] Steli Efti: Why that may or may not be good for you in life in general but also specifically for you when you work in startups, either as a founder or somebody often times that is working with any other person. Here’s the context why I want to talk about people pleaser specifically. We’ve had this case a few times, where people on our team, especially people on our team that are very customer facing, that a few of them at some point identify themselves as, “You know what, I am somebody that, I am a people pleaser, I’m somebody that likes to say yes to others, that likes to help, that likes to be liked, and that avoids often times any kind of thing that would get in the way of that.” Which means usually avoiding conflict, avoiding rejecting people or saying no to people, avoiding being critical to others or avoiding anything else that can create … Anything that stops other people from really, really liking you. People pleaser are really awesome people, and often times in customer facing roles you would assume that that’s the type of person that you’d want hire in support or in success or in many other roles where it’s about taking care of the customer. You would want to have somebody that loves to please other people. But it’s also a big problem, and we can talk about this, in a startup how you need to be mindful of that yourself if you’re a people pleaser, but also if you’re managing a team how to think about that. Because I’ve seen this, we have an engineer that’s a people pleaser and we’ve seen how that created problems for him and the engineering team an others. I’ve seen this in sales. I’ve seen this in so many roles. Yesterday I was talking to a candidate for a position with our company. One game that I like to play is always the game of weakness at the end. Where I’m like, “I’m going to tell you something that sucks about our company, you tell me something that sucks about you. We’ll go back and forth and if we can discourage each other from wanting to work together, awesome, then we’ve accomplished something useful. And if can’t that’s awesome too, maybe that we should work together.” One of the weaknesses that that person shared with me, that was one that nobody had picked up on in the interviewing process prior. It was that she identified herself as somebody that’s been a people pleaser and it’s been something that’s a weakness of hers and something she’s working on. I love that she identified that as a weakness instead of a strength in her position. I wanted to talk about this a little bit and share some of mu thoughts and get your input on this, because I’m curious. But in general, does any of what I just described resonate with you? Have seen this in yourself or with other people? What is your definition of people pleaser? Do they struggle or do they thrive in environments?   [0:03:08] Hiten Shah: Yeah, such a good question, such a good topic. I think a lot of this has to do with psychology in a lot of ways, and someone’s own personal psychology around it. I’ll say some things, I don’t mean to judge anybody in any way. I would say there are people out there that don’t have this affliction basically, of wanting to please other people. They are just going about life looking to please themselves. Again, no judgment. This is like something that you either learned when you were growing up or something you’re dealing with as a human based on your personality or whatever, whatever you want to believe in about why you are the way you are. Then there’s people who have actually a more balanced approach to it. I call it balanced because they have a tendency to be able to think about others in certain situations, while are really good at thinking about themselves in other situations. Then we have people that are on the other end. So this is almost a spectrum I would say and you could almost peg somebody on the spectrum. The last side of it would they’re completely selfless and that’s their mental model. I use the word selfless very specifically, because to me the most selfless people I’ve met are actually people pleasers. They are looking to give themselves to the other and provide whatever they can to the other person in every single scenario that they see, just because they want to make other people happy. In a way, it is a selfish act in itself to do, because that’s what gives you joy. Making other people happy gives you joy. So this person that you’re talking about, she might be somebody who gets pure joy out of making someone else happy and pleasing them so to speak. Honestly, some of the folks that I’ve met in certain disciplines tend to be more like that or less like that. For example, I found a lot of the designers I’ve worked with to be really excited about pleasing other people. They can go wrong on this, and this is where my point is I guess. They can go wrong on this by pleasing the company and the team, versus pleasing the customer or the user. It’s a tool you have. It’s a skill. It’s a talent if you have the ability to actually be a people pleaser. The thing is, you can use it in a way that’s not beneficial to you or whatever organization you’re doing. So yeah, I’ve seen this. I have this tendency. I kind of have this tendency both ways to be honest. I don’t think I’m balanced at all in this, I’m working through a lot of this type of stuff personally around, do I please other people a lot? Am I actually thinking about myself in those scenarios? What’s going on here? For me it’s more existential, which is more like, I’ll say it like this but like, what does want? I went there, but yeah, that’s kind of like for other folks I know, like my co-founder Neil, he doesn’t have a problem with what does Neil want? What does Neil want is on his mind and he’s doing it right now. Like literally, right now I can guarantee you, whatever he’s doing it’s thoughts, right? I’ve learned a lot from it, because I am, for the majority of my life I’ve been a lot more about what does the other person want, not what do I want. That’s lead me to please other people even when I probably shouldn’t be.   [0:06:24] Steli Efti: Yeah. I actually think that there’s a big distinction between being selfless and being a people pleaser, in that I think they do overlap but I do think they’re distinct in that I think somebody that’s selfless is interested in helping others in the best way they can. Which might mean being not liked, which might mean telling them something very inconvenient, or something very harsh. Or which might mean doing something that is in the best interest of the other person, although it might not be making them the most popular person. A good example of this is a good parent, right? Good parents, you don’t want to just please your children all day, because if that’s your goal you’re probably feeding them chocolate and letting them watch television all day long. If you just go by whatever is going to make the happiest the next moment, you’re going to do a lot of things that will make you momentarily popular but long term are not in the best interest of the child. To me that’s not a selfless act, that’s a pretty selfish act. So people pleasers to me can be selfless, but also can be very, very selfish in that their number one priority is not helping others or doing what’s in the best interest of others. But their number one priority is being popular or being liked, and that is very selfish in my mind. There’s a distinction. As I said, those things can overlap, and people pleasers can be amazing human beings that really care about others, that are very selfless at times. So it’s not really black and white, it’s very, very all kinds of shades of gray here. But when you are people pleasing, when you are doing the activity, not even to say, to tack somebody as a people pleaser. If it’s like you’re a man or woman, or you’re this tall or that tall. It’s like of thing that can’t be changed. But when you are people pleasing, when you’re doing the activity of people pleasing, I think that that’s oftentimes not a great activity. I think that the reason for that is because you’re probably changing your own tune, your needs, and changing your version of what’s happening or what reality is or what needs to happen next, based on what you think the person wants to hear. I don’t think that that’s a great way to operate in the world. But I do think that people that have done the activity of people pleasing for a really long time, they have very valuable skill sets. They have typically a very high level of empathy. They have a very high emotional compass and they pick up on how people feel and they pick up on communication clues. They are much more in tune socially with how other people feel and what’s going on around them than other people, and I think that that can be a very, very valuable skill but you have to use it wisely. I brought up an example with an engineer that we have that used to be people pleasing a lot. What that did was that everybody in the company knew that if you had a request to engineering, you just went around the head of the engineering team and you went straight to that guy. You asked him, “Hey, could you do me a favor and help me with this little project?” And he would say yes, and then another person would come and would say, “Hey, we need help. Can you run this queries and give us that?” He would say yes. He would just say yes to too many people and then struggle with his core work. He couldn’t do the stuff that he was responsible for because he was trying to help everybody else with the stuff that they needed a little help in. These people would gravitate towards him, they would not go anybody else in engineering because most engineers were not people pleasers, were not concerned about saying yes and being liked and everything. It’s funny because that very engineer the other day was showing me his current reading list, and one of the books was No More Mr Nice Guy, which was funny to see. But you have that example, like when you try to say too much within the team. It can be abused in a way that makes you very unproductive and ultimately harms the company. It could be abused in a way that, as you said, trying to please what other people in the company want to do, versus focusing on the customers. But to me the worst thing about being a people pleaser, or the biggest risk of it, is that you’re dealing with truth and with conflict in the best way possible because you usually try to avoid conflict and you usually try to adopt your truth to match the other persons around you. I think that that’s probably the least productive part of that. It’s something that I think, in myself, in other people on the team, but also as hiring, is something we’re looking at. It’s not a reason not hire somebody, but it’s something to be aware of and something that I think most society looks upon positively. “Oh, this person’s an amazing person. She’s so liked and she’s a people person and everybody loves them.” But I think that when you look under the hood you can see also the risks of that behavior. You need to look at it holistically, versus just the, “Oh, this person should be in customer success or sales because everybody loves that person.” Everybody loves is not the only criteria that really matters oftentimes.   [0:11:38] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think you nailed it in terms of description. So, what does a people pleaser do?   [0:11:45] Steli Efti: What does a people pleaser do? I think first you realize that you are one, that you’re involved in that activity. It’s funny you identified yourself in that bracket because I would do myself as well. I think that for most of my life, especially as a kid, I was growing up, I was absolutely a people pleaser. Somebody always concerned about being loved and liked by everybody and adopting the way I was communicating with people that way. I think that when I told this to one of my colleagues in the team, she was shocked that I said, “I think I was a people pleaser for most of my life.” I think identifying yourself is step one. I think step two, realizing that’s it’s not just a positive trait and that it has cost associated with it. Meaning maybe not being fully truthful, maybe not helping people the long term, just in the short term, maybe avoiding difficult conversations and making them worse. Focus a little bit on the negatives because I think people, especially superficial relationships might have encouraged the positive sides of the people pleasing too much. You might have gotten so much positive feedback of how awesome of a person you are and how much people thank you because you say yes to them all the time, that you are not seeing the downside of it enough and looked at that enough. So making a list maybe of what are the things that I failed at, or the cost that I’ve paid in my life, because I’ve been people pleasing or because I’ve been a people pleaser, might be the second step. Then, I don’t know if it’s buying a book, No More Mr Nice Person, or whatever it’s called. Or maybe finding a coach or a mentor or a friend, that you’re telling, “Hey, you know I want to get better at this. I want to be liked but I also want to be better at times, not having that be my number one concern.” Find somebody that is maybe good at this, that’s not a people pleaser at all, and have them either officially or unofficially as your coach and somebody you ask for advice and somebody you get feedback from. I think once you realize the downside, I think that’s the thing that’s missing for most people that involve themselves in that activity a lot. But once you realize the downside, I think it’s finding somebody that has learned how to deal with this, so that is really good at this type of stuff. And then just talking to them, checking in with them, giving them updates, asking them for help. Find a coach that will help you to get better at this, would be my advice.   [0:14:05] Hiten Shah: I really like that. I’ll give one more, which is try to figure out why you’re a people pleaser. Where does it come from? I think that can really help you come to terms with it and realize that you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.   [0:14:18] Steli Efti: Awesome. I think that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:14:21] Hiten Shah: Happy people pleasing.   [0:14:23] Steli Efti: Or not people pleasing.   [0:14:26] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:14:26] The post 263: Being a People Pleaser Is Bad (in Startups and Life) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s Startup Chat we talk about email newsletters. It’s a misconception that emails are dead and no longer relevant. In fact, “Good emails are dead but great emails are alive and thriving”. We share some great tips and tricks to write a good newsletter. In sending out a newsletter, you must put in effort and provide value to your readers. Tune-in to learn how to write a great email newsletter that will further reader engagement and benefit your business in the long run. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:48 – Most startups have newsletters; of-late there is a shift towards personalized and sophisticated newsletters 02:00 – Generic emails are a thing of the past and no longer working 03:16 – A common misconception is that emails are dead and no longer serve any purpose 04:15 – You will have to interact with people who still use ONLY emails 04:59 – Think about the user experience and user journey when you are writing an email 05:11 – How can you write a GREAT email newsletter 05:11 – Use a subject line that is honest and captures the imagination of the reader 05:49 – Send short, specific and valuable stuff instead of generic junk 06:38 – Segment your readers and send customized content 07:31 – Reach out to clients coming from lucrative sales areas and try and push them down the sales funnel 08:32 – Important to segment your list into customers and non-customers 09:01 – Start engaging your email list in whatever way you can; asking a question is great way to further engagement 09:42 – Remember that people who sign up to your email list want something from you 10:25 – Good email is dead but GREAT email is alive and thriving 11:51 – Develop the capability to intuitively know what salespeople want 12:44 – Most emails are sent selfishly with the intent of manipulating your prospects and clients 14:08 – Ask yourself why you think certain emails are dumb to discover what you should NOT do 15:12 – Think how you can come up with an email newsletter that differentiates you from the rest 17:00 – Hiten comes out with a mailing list that compiles information on some of the best SAAS products in the market 17:50 – Spend time and effort to read and prepare your newsletter instead of just sending our shared links 18:48 – Send out short but condensed information that addresses what people want 20:13 – Send out an email to Steli or Hiten with your suggestions 20:23 – Review and subscribe us on iTunes 3 Key Points: Think about the user experience and user journey when you are writing an email. It is important to segment your customers and send our customized newsletters – generic emails are a thing of the past and no longer work. Good email is dead but great email is alive and thriving. Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. Hiten Shah: And this is Hiton Shah. And today we’re going to talk about email newsletters, and  the reason we’re talking about this is both us have email news letters for different  reasons. I probably have, I don’t know how many, but a lot of them. And  a few ones that I’m spending a lot of time on, so this is a  great topic. Let’s give some context though, what kind of email newsletters are we talking  about here Steli? Steli Efti: Well that’s the big question right. So the reason I wanted to talk about this  is two fold. One, I feel like almost every startup has one, right? So startups  do this activity where they collect emails and then they send these emails a regular  generic message, a newsletter of sorts. But I’ve also seen that recently, the behaviors of  many startups when it comes to the newsletters has changed. I think that people have  gotten a bit more sophisticated and smart about it. I see a rise in individual  newsletters, like your product habits newsletter started as just an individual curated newsletter. So I  see a lot of changes happening, I see a lot of things happening with people having email lists and sending out newsletters, so I wanted to chat a little bit  about what’s going on today and what we recommend, especially for startups in terms of  how to use a newsletter in a purposeful way that either grows your audience, grows  your engagement, or converts your audience to more customers, not just doing it mindlessly. So  I’ll start with the mindless shit that people were doing in the past, and many  still do today I guess, and then let’s talk a little bit about some of  the things we do that we see other people do that are inspiring or particularly  effective that we think startups should steal and copy and learn from. So I think  the typical newsletter template that everybody has in their mind is this generic email that  is sent to everybody that marketing at a startup has an email on. And it’s  typically this HTML format that here is anything of potential generic interest to people on  this list. So startups will have like here are a few news items about us,  here are some articles we’ve written, here’s some new features we’ve developed, here’s a promotion  we’re running, here’s a little funny thing we’ve done because it’s Christmas season, and here’s  something else. It’s usually pretty long, and it’s super generic, and it just includes a  number of ‘news’ items about the company, hence why probably the name newsletter. Like here’s  everything new about us, everything that could be of interest, and it’s very generic and very long, and it’s send to an incredibly generic list, just everybody. That I think  is how most companies were doing newsletters forever, and I see that changing now, and  in big favor so I wanted to talk about that. Hiten Shah: Yeah. People think email is dead, Steli, that’s I think something that comes up every  fricking three months. Someone says “Email is dead,” and I want to shake them and  say “Why would you tell anybody email is dead?” How often do we as Knowledge  workers, if you want to call us that, or people building products, or founders, or anybody on the planet that is doing any work, how often do we use email?  Even Slack cannot kill email with the ubiquity Slack has. Even any of those things,  even text message cannot kill email. And I’m not talking about the Snapchat generation, I’m  not talking about pre millennials, which I think you and I both have, a few  little ones that are pre millennials. I have this great picture I have to post  somewhere of them looking so millennial it’s funny. But anyway, it’s not pre millennial sorry,  post millennial, see I’m even getting that wrong. You and are probably more pre millennials.  Anyways, I’m border line, I was born in 81, so … My point is even  once those folks get in the work place, email is still going to be where  it’s at to a great extent, because they are going to have to interact with  folks that only work through email. And, you know, to me people open your emails  if they are good. I’ll even say it even better, people will continue to open  your emails if they are great. And what does great mean? That to me is  what the discussion is all about. How do you write great email? Not how do  you write good email? Not what tool do I use? It’s how do you write  great email? So Steli my first question for you about this is how do you  write great email? Steli Efti: Well, that’s great question. So the way I write great emails, very fundamental, I think  about the user experience, and I think about the user journey with it. So to  me, an email starts in the inbox with the subject line, which is something I  want to … So I first I get into somebody’s inbox. I need to know  who that person is, and hopefully it’s the right person, and the right day and  time to even be in their inbox. Then I want to write a subject line  that will both capture your imagination and make you feel intrigued enough to want to  open the email and read it, and also is honest enough that what I’m promising  you in the subject, I’m delivering in the email. Then, I’m asking myself, I had  the base assumption that people are really, really busy, and so I don’t want to  send large, generic junk. I want to send short, specific, really valuable stuff. So I’m  asking myself how can I make this as short as possible, but not shorter? How  can I make this as valuable to the reader as possible? And how can I  make sure that I’m formatting this in a way that allows the reader to quickly  figure out what is this about? What does Steli want from me? Where can I  get more? What do I do with this? And so for us it meant going  from doing what I described earlier, of sending an email to everybody, like once a  month, that was a nicely formatted HTML thing that just included everything, to really start  segmenting our list and saying okay, here’s the people that we want to send our  best content to … Because we know they really love our content, and they read  it, and they open the emails, let’s send them more emails, right, because they want  to have more of our stuff in their lives. And let’s take some of the  product announcements that we’re going to do, and focus those announcements on the specific users  that care most about them, and need to know more about them, and send them  those very highly targeted messages. And then let’s think about the intersection, the people that  we know have never tried our product, but have been reading and appreciating our content  for a really long time, come from areas in the world that we know we  get lots of customers from. Let’s make a frequent effort, once a month in our  case, to approach these people and tell them hey, we’re sending you all this stuff,  we’re teaching you all these things, you’re getting all this value from us. Did you  know about our product? Here’s a reason you should check it out, and push them and convert them to try us. And just being more segmented, being more focused is  one thing, killing the newsletter, the generic newsletter was another thing. But then from an  individual email point of view, it’s always the same thing. I’m thinking about the journey  that the reader has from seeing the email in their inbox to opening it, to  reading it, to asking themselves the inevitable question, what do I do next? Sometimes I  want them to just think what I do next is click this link so I  can read this entire article on how to negotiate a million dollar deal, or how  to do a cold call, or whatever it is. And sometimes it’s what they want  me to do is hit reply and tell Steli my number one question about sales.  Or what they want me to do is click this link and sign up for  a trial for . Going through the journey, and keeping that in mind that people  receive this, and wondering what their needs are, is I think at the fundamental level  how we approach every single email we write, and why many people like our emails. Hiten Shah: I like that. So one of the key tactics there is honestly segmenting a piece  of the list, right? Steli Efti: Yeah. Hiten Shah: Between customers and non customers, right? Steli Efti: Yeah, absolutely. Hiten Shah: I think that’s an important thing a lot of people don’t consider. That’s like super  useful and critical. So what I would add to what you’re saying that I’ve learned  over the last couple of years with email especially, which I wish I had known  before, is that if you have an email list, the best thing you can do  is start actually engaging with that email list in whatever way you can. One of  my favorite ways, which I’ve used a few times this year, is I just ask them a question, and I just tell them they can reply to the email. I  don’t make them fill out a survey all the time, I don’t do any of  that, and I just ask a question. And that question that I ask should be  designed around providing them with . And I’ve found that to be one of the  key ways to really understand what their needs are, and what I can do for  them. And that helps me create content over any other thing I’ve ever tried. And  part of the reason is, think of the experience, they’ve signed up for my email  list for some reason or another, and they are receiving my emails, they’re opting in,  and they want something from me. If I don’t know what they want, then I’m  just giving them bullshit that they don’t want. So my key driver of writing great  emails is first and foremost knowing what they want. My second driver is basically making  sure that once I know what they want, I’m actually delivering on it, and it’s  better content for what they want than anything else out there. And that’s a really  high bar, but today, if people are still running around saying email is dead, one  of the reasons they’re saying that is that good email is dead. Great email is  thriving, it’s alive. It gets you everything that you could possibly want, but it takes  so much effort, and so much work, that most people aren’t willing to do it  today. Steli Efti: I love that. I have to go back and highlight this to make sure nobody  misses this, right? Email isn’t dead, good email is so rare that if you … Hiten Shah: Great email, great email. Steli Efti: … Great email. Hiten Shah: Good email is dead. Good email is good. Those templates, those images, those ecommerce emails  with sales, those are dead. Those are dead. What you need to do is you  need to write great email, and you cannot do that, sorry Steli, taking your time,  if you cannot write great email, do not do email. Learn how to write great  email, and I just told you how in two steps. Steli Efti: I love it. I almost want to just stop here because this is so good,  and I butchered it, I thank you, you saved me actually, you didn’t take my  time. I was thinking great, good email is dead. I was like good email is  good, and you’re like great email, and I’m like oh yes, okay, sorry. Hiten Shah: Come on Steli, people read your emails because they’re awesome. People read your content because  it’s awesome, it’s better than anything else they can read today on that topic that  they asked for. And in your case, you guys have turned into a machine of  intuitively knowing what sales people want. But it’s not because you didn’t do any work,  it’s because you spent many years building sales teams for other companies. You know exactly  what this market thinks about all the time, right? Steli Efti: Yeah. . Hiten Shah: So you didn’t have to ask that question, but you know. Yeah, go ahead. Steli Efti: But also I think this is really the obvious truth that everybody will go “Yeah,  I totally get this,” but nobody does, which is we cared about them getting value.  Most people are very selfish in the way they do things, right? They’re like alright,  I want people to open my emails, or I want people to hit reply, or  I want to drive more trials. So since I want this, how can I manipulate  people, into just bullying them, or pushing them to do the thing I want them  to do? I just want to send an email, I’m in the marketing team and  we have a 200,000 email list, and I just want to be sending out 200,000  emails once a month, because that makes me feel excited. Or I really like to  do nice designs for an HTML email, and there’s no other place that’s good than  a newsletter, so I’m fucking around for a whole week designing the most beautiful looking  newsletter with the most generic, useless information in it. Most emails are sent incredibly selfishly  without a single care in the world for whose receiving it, or what their needs  are. I think that’s really the differentiator here, because if you don’t think about the  person receiving your email, and if you do care about what they need, they don’t  care about you, and they don’t give a fuck about what you want, and they  don’t respond to it. And that’s the end of it, right, and you don’t need  to be an expert email … Like every fucking person on earth right now that  has a job and is in a business, and is not like a six year  old, is already an expert in email, in bad email, in good email. Just ask  yourself what are the emails every day that I get that are total bullshit, that  I delete, archive, or that I’m shaking my head in disbelief, why are they sending  me this crap? Or I’m puzzled, what does this person want from me? Any of  these emails are an example for shitty email. Just ask yourself why am I puzzled  about this? Why do I think this is spam? Why do I think this is  dumb? And then don’t do that. And then think about the rare cases, it’s so  rare that you get an email that you think whoa, this is awesome, how many  times does it really happen? Not often, but it happens. When that happens, just ask  yourself what about this email do I like so much? Don’t just respond as the  recipient, also respond, or take the chance to really be a good student of good  email and good communication, and ask yourself why is this great? Like why is this  different? I just got an email yesterday, I get tons of emails every day from  developer shops, out source. Like “Oh, we see you’re hiring developers,” it always starts with  something like this. Either great energy in the subject line, and then I know it’s  a recruiter or it’s a development shop, and it says “Well, we have many great  engineers, and we work really cheaply offshore,” from whatever place in the world. And I  get so many of these crappy emails, and it’s always spam, spam, spam. Yesterday I  got one of these emails, but here’s the differentiator, I don’t remember what the subject  matter was, but I opened the email and his first sentence was “Steli, I know  you’re just seconds away from hitting spam or delete, and I totally get it. Please  just give me two more sentences before you make that decision. Yes, we are a  developer shop, and we do out source engineers,” blah, blah blah. And then he just  continued, and I was like this is actually really good. It doesn’t mean that I’m  a good fit for his service, or that we are going to become a customer,  but this person realized that almost everybody he’s emailing, the first thought they have is  is this another out source developer shop email? And let me go as quickly as  possible to the spam or delete button? And he since he knows that everybody’s thinking  this, he’s addressing it in the email, right. He’s telling me dude, I know you’re  going to delete this in a second, please just for the love of God give  me three more sentences before you make that judgment call. And I was like yeah,  that’s a fair call, that’s a fair ask. I’m intrigued now, I’ll give you three  more sentences. I’ll read on for three more sentences before making a final decision. It’s  these little things that stand out. I’m getting, I don’t know, 30 of these emails  a day, and I can’t think of the last time I got an email that  I read four or five sentences of. And his I did, because he seemed to  care, he seemed to know, he was standing out with his email from all the  other ones that I got. And I assume that he’s getting a lot more success  with it, right? It’s a tough product market, and very competitive, but it’s these little  things. When you get a great email, it stands out. I’ve been on your email  list, it used to be the Hiton Shah newsletter where you curated all the best contented sass. Today it’s product habits. You guys are if you’re not already on it,  got to producthabits.com, and get on the fucking list, because this is one of the  few lists … There’s like two people or so that I’m on their curated list  because I know I’m going to get really fucking great content. If he likes an  article, I know the sheer amount of content that you read Hiton, if you put  it in your newsletter, it’s good. Your summaries at times are often better than the  fucking article, so I’m like , I just read your email. I read it word  for word, I read the summaries of the stuff that you post. I get an  incredible amount of value from it, and it’s one of the few emails that I  open every single week that I get from entity or personal company. Why? Because you’re  putting in the effort to really have amazingly valuable content. You put in the effort  to not just have a link share, like just have here’s the top 10 articles  I read, just the links. Or here’s the top 10 articles I read, here’s the  first two sentences I copy and pasted from the blog post, with like a dot,  dot, dot, and then a click here to read the whole article. No, you actually  put in the work and time to read the fucking thing, and then summarize it  in two or three sentences for your audience. And you do a pretty damn good  job at it. So you’re receiving email every single day. Learn from the mistakes of  people based on your reactions, and learn from the things that people and companies do really well based on your reactions. So study great email by your inbox. It’s the  university for greatness, and for poor examples as well. Hiten Shah: Yeah, it just quickly wanted to double click on what you said, which is, you  know, I did my best to not to have to write those thorough summaries, even  if they’re short, they’re thorough, and they’re descriptive. And like you said, sometimes it can  be better than a lot of the content in the introductions, et cetera, in the  content. One I love finding the best links each week, and I have a really  good idea of the audience and what people are looking for. But two, I tried  to lazy it out Steli, and you know what I got? I got replies from  people saying “Can you go back to the old format where you actually describe the  link in your own words?” And I was like damn, I’ve got to spend that  time. Because look, this is the difference between a good email and a great email.  So good email is okay, Hiton’s a good curator, here’s a bunch of links. A  great email is here’s his opinion on each link. And then it’s like you said,  you know I spent the time, more important you wanted to know what I had  to say about it, because you’re signing up for my newsletter, right? And that is  so powerful. And again, good email, dead. Great email, more alive than ever. Steli Efti: I love it. All right, we’ll end on this power quote from the legend, the  myth, the man . Hiten Shah: You’re the myth, you’re the man, not me. Steli Efti: All right, that’s it from us. Hiten Shah: All right. Steli Efti: We’ll hear from you soon. By the way, do us a favor, if you haven’t  done it yet, if you like the podcast and you appreciate it, we know from  the awesome feedback we get from people that you do, and if you haven’t sent  us an email please do, and if you appreciate the podcast, if you have suggestions  for topic shoot us an email at steli@close.io, or hnshah@gmail.com. And make sure to go  to iTunes, give us five stars, give us a review, it’s going to help us  rank higher, get more people to discover the podcast, and hopefully more people in startups benefit from the things that we’re discussing every single week. That’s our call to action  for today, and that’s it from us, we’ll be here very soon. Hiten Shah: Later. Steli Efti: Later. The post 262: How to Write Killer Email Newsletters appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about big picture thinking, its importance and some ways through which you can develop this skill. Oftentimes, we find that people are so caught up in day to day tasks that they fail to stop and prioritize. Steli and Hiten talk about being mindful in order to develop good prioritization skills. Tune-in and discover how you can cultivate mindfulness and build your prioritization skills which can help you execute tasks of greater value. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:03 – Today we are going to talk about big picture thinking 01:14 – Most people struggle with big picture thinking 01:28 – Steli is great at prioritizing and showing the bigger picture to his team 02:34 – Prioritizing is a skill that anyone can pick up by cultivating mindfulness 03:31 – Go-getters continue to attack what is in front of them 04:23 – Yet, there are some people who get bogged down by intense work activity and have yet to develop those prioritization skills 05:16 – Keep your to-do list short in order to develop your prioritization skills 06:20 – Important to touch every area of the business and be aware of what is going on 07:58 – Someone who is involved in day to day operations will find it much more difficult to see the big picture view 09:10 – Easier for someone not involved in day to day tasks to be MINDFUL; mindfulness is the driver of good prioritization skills 09:42 – Step back physically, spiritually and mentally every once in awhile to develop mindfulness 10:27 – If you don’t stop to ask BIG questions, you will never be good at prioritizing 11:17 – If you wish to create VALUE, you need to be in control of your time and mind 12:20 – Mindfulness enables you to take a step back and look at everything with a more clear mind 13:47 – Have an inner discussion with yourself or someone else who can help you see the big picture 15:05 – A CEO or a manager has a high level viewpoint that others simply don’t 15:34 – Take a step back every morning to reflect upon what you did or what you are going to do 16:57 – Look at the smallest items on your to-do list and think about what will happen if you do not do them 18:08 – Oftentimes, it is easier to keep doing things than to stop doing them; do not replace an inconsequential activity with another one 19:58 – Replace a mindless activity with a productive, high quality one 3 Key Points: Prioritizing is a skill that anyone can pick-up by cultivating mindfulness. Step back physically, spiritually and mentally every once in awhile to develop mindfulness. Oftentimes, it is easier to keep doing things than to stop doing them; do not replace an inconsequential activity with another one. Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti. Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Steli Efti: And today in the Startup Chat we want to talk about big picture thinking, and  how to prioritize better for your startup. So here’s the reason I want to talk  about this, Hiten. Ramin, big shout-out to Ramin, who is an invisible man behind this  podcast and is helping and organizing a lot and is working on the marketing team.  Ramin has been asking me about, or suggesting this topic to me for a really  long time now. And he keeps coming back, and any time I ask him, “Hey,  do you have anything you think Hiten and I should discuss on the podcast?” whenever I run out of ideas, he goes … Well, he offers a few topics, but  this is the one that’s been most consistently shared. And he always goes “You know,  you are amazing at prioritizing and keeping the big picture in mind”. And Hiten seems  to really, really amazing at this. And it’s something that most people struggle with, and  I think Ramin struggles with this directly in marketing topics. And I’ll talk a little  bit about this when I join team meetings. When I join marketing calls, and Ramin  is on there and I’m on there, I’m usually the one that is pushing to reprioritize some things, bring in the big picture of thinking. I think that’s an unfair  dynamic and I’ll talk a little bit about that. But he experiences many, many times  when I join a discussion and will help the team think differently about what is  the true priority and what isn’t. He’s been dying for us to talk about this.  I honestly have not been that excited about this topic, I don’t even know why,  I was like “I don’t know, prioritization,” but finally I’ve cracked and I was like  “all right, all right, I’ll ping Hiten, we’ll talk about this.” It’s probably something that  maybe, I don’t know, maybe you and I feel that this is not that big  of a topic or we don’t feel like it’s a big need in our life.  But I can see that a lot of people will benefit from this, so let’s  chat about it. Hiten Shah: Yeah, you know, first of all, shout out to Ramin. I know he’s behind the  scenes doing a lot of stuff for us that I don’t even have to think  about. I honestly, just ’cause he wants it I’m down to do it on my  end. Steli Efti: Nice. Hiten Shah: So yeah, let’s do it. On the prioritizing, you know, I think that it’s a  skill anyone can learn. It has to do, honestly, I think, I’m gonna get a  little foo-foo for a second, but you and I might be good at it ’cause  I know how mindful we are. That has to do with mindfulness. I’m not saying  either of us probably meditates every day religiously. But I think we are the type  of people that can easily … I mean, I was walking with you yesterday for  a few blocks, ’cause we happened to hang out. It felt like for a bunch  of time we weren’t talking, we were both kind of like meditating, so to speak,  or just being mindful of where we are. I felt that and noticed it. I  think a lot of that has to do with … Everyone I know that’s not  good at prioritizing fits in one or two camps today. One camp is they’re just go-getters, the just go, go, go. And they are just very good at attacking what’s  in front of them. Or just what’s on top of mind. And that’s interesting. I  have a co-founder who’s very much like that, very, very much like that. He’ll just  go at it, and attack whatever’s in front of him, whatever’s top of mind, and  he does a great job of it. But one of the reasons he’s very good  at it, without actually having to prioritize as much as, I’d say, you and I  probably do, is that his horsepower, so to speak, being able to do something and  just get it done and pull people into it is uncanny. So the speed at  which he can get people to do things, and himself do things, it’s pretty strong,  pretty high when he puts his mind to it. I’d say it’s much stronger than  mine. The other camp, I would say, would be someone like Ramin. And I don’t  know enough about what he does, exactly, every day, but I can hypothesize, being in  marketing, he’s probably just got a lot of shit going on and his to-do list  is massive if he even has one. And his prioritization skills are probably just not  developed. The reason is, there’s just a lot going on. So those are two different  modes for me, because my co-founder Neil, he has a lot going on, but he  just demolishes through everything and is very good at just being mindful, not mindful but  anti-mindful. Just whatever’s top of mind for him, whatever he’s thinking about. And he has  a very singular goal in mind in life. And that goal is what drives him  to just prioritize, essentially, without having to think about it the way you and I  would. Steli Efti: Yeah. Hiten Shah: And then on Ramin’s hand, I think the to-do list is long. And when your  to-do list is long, it is definitely a challenge to learn how to prioritize it,  ’cause the short answer to prioritization is keep the to-do list short for what you’re  trying to do right now. And that’s not how everyone is, so I don’t know.  That’s what I got so far. Steli Efti: Yeah, no, this is good shit, I think. So one, I want to start with  a disclaimer, and I think this is an important one. And I mentioned this earlier,  with the … You know, he might feel this the most significantly when I join  a call. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a fair comparison. So oftentimes, people like  you and me, Hiten, if you’re a founder of a startup or the CEO of  a startup, when you have some kind of a leadership position, oftentimes you, we’re a  little bit of a unique case because I know that both of us are a  bit more hands-on and do have some deliverables, more so than other CEOs might have.  But even us, we are operating most of the times from a position that has  the most context, the most context-rich position in the team, in the company, because we  touch every team and every area of the business, most of them probably, any other  person in the company. So you have a much better idea of what’s going on  all around the company. You probably have a much better idea of what’s going on  in the market in general, and you’re not as hands-on, like your list, typically, as  CEO or co-founder, probably is not gonna be as long, with as many little to-do  items, so when you join somebody else’s meeting, you can come in without that tunnel  vision. You can come in with a little bit of a distance, which gives you  the power of perspective, right? You can see the big picture because you’re just not  drowning in the tasks and to-dos of every single day and deadlines. And you also  come in with the benefit of knowing everything that’s going on in the overall business  and market. So when I join a marketing call and Ramin might have four to-dos and I might challenge him on the four things that they are working on and  I might challenge him on those and go “Why are we even doing these things?  Are they really important, are they really gonna move the needle?” Or I’m bringing up  something that was not on the list but that is of much greater importance, I  can feel, I can easily see how after a call like that or a meeting  like that, Ramin is like … And in this case, Ramin and myself, we’re just examples for this happening everywhere, I could see Ramin thinking “Holy shit, why didn’t I  think about these things?” Or “Why is it so easy for someone to just walk  into randomly a meeting or call and just know with such level of certainty what’s  more important and be right about it?” And I think it’s an unfair comparison, because  I come into the conversation with the ability to have much more higher-level, big-picture thinking,  and a much easier time for me to have the distance to see what should  or shouldn’t be a priority, probably, versus him, who’s in the day-to-day operational role. It’s  just easier to do that. If he joined a call from another meeting, it might  be much easier for him to see the big picture of what they’re missing or  what they should be doing there. So I think that it’s important for anybody that  has experienced this, especially with the founder or CEO-level person, to not compare yourself one-on-one,  like “Why am I not acting like this other person, exactly the same way?” Because it’s easier for an outsider to have big-picture thinking sometimes, or to see what’s blatantly  obvious but everybody else in that meeting or conversation is missing because they’re so drowned  and buried in details and to-dos and deadlines. So that’s one thing. You need to  be careful how you compare yourself with others, you need to understand that when somebody  else comes into your meeting that is not doing this stuff all day long, ten  hours a day, eight hours a day, and drowning in all these tasks, it’s gonna  be much easier for that person to be mindful and see the big picture, have  perspective, enhanced … You know, probably be better at bringing up priorities. So that’s one  thing. The other thing is, I think what you said is a really killer thing,  which is mindfulness, I think, is really the driver for being good at prioritizing things.  And mindfulness just means, if you don’t stop frequently, multiple times a day, a week,  a month, step back, physically and spiritually and mentally, to think “What is truly going  on in my life, in my team, in my business, on my projects? What are  really the things that drive and make a significant difference, that I’m working on, and  what are the things that aren’t really?” And what would happen if I just stopped  doing some of the things that I’ve been doing forever that are unfulfilling and not  really driving results? Is it really gonna be that bad? Versus “What if I double  down with the things that truly matter?” Or what is something that truly matters that  I’m not working on because I’m drowning on all these little tasks? If you don’t  find ways to slow down, to stop to take a break, to take a pause,  to step away and ask some of these big questions, you will never be good  at prioritizing. And to stop is much harder than to just keep going. It’s easier  to just keep going, go with the flow, be interrupted, let your inbox and people  emailing you and the people on your team that are chatting you on Slack and  the people in your office that walk up to your office and push you and  go “Hey, can you do this for me? Hey, what about … ” People come  to you with their problems, with their tasks, with questions, and you just let the  world around you dictate what you’re worrying about, what you think about, what you’re working  on. That is much easier because it requires zero mindfulness. You just allow everybody else  to dictate what you’re doing. But if you want to be good at creating tons  of value, which means being good at having big-picture thinking and prioritizing well, you are  forced to develop the discipline to be mindful and to be in control of your  own time and your mind. I think that’s just something that most people have not  yet had. And I didn’t have this my entire life. Ramin knows this directly because  Ramin worked with me on a company 15 years ago, and he will tell you  I was not good at big-picture thinking or prioritizing back then. I was horrible, terrible  at it. So it’s not like … Going back to what you said earlier, this  is not some kind of a personal gift, it’s not a personality trait, you’re not  born with it or without it. It’s a skill set you can cultivate or not, I couldn’t agree more with it. So maybe for the, to end and wrap up  this episode, maybe you can give a tip each on how to cultivate that mindfulness  allows, particularly well, to be good at prioritizing things. Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I think mindfulness helps is because what it  enables you to do is take a step back and look at everything you’re doing  with a more clear mind, a more blank slate. You’re not so much in the weeds, trying to get every to-do list item done. Instead, what you’re doing is you’re  taking a step back and actually thinking through what needs to get done, what’s the  most important thing. The interesting thing is, you know, I’ll give a quick short story.  I was at … I saw you yesterday, Steli, and then, I saw you with  my business partner Marie, met her for the first time, and that was awesome. You  came up with some ideas for the pilot cast, but we’re not gonna share them  right now. And after we met you, we actually went to Cyclops Coffee in San Francisco, I guess I’m a hipster like that. Steli Efti: Yes, you are. Hiten Shah: And … Or I can at least say Marie is and blame her. And we  actually had a meeting, her and I over some coffee, at the Cyclops instead of  at our office, which is her apartment. And we actually had one of these meetings  where we prioritized. And literally, we just took a step back and said “You know,  we just launched this product, there’s these seven, eight things that we actually have slated  to do. What’s most important?” And so to me, the mindfulness part is more about  stepping back, not looking at your to-do list, not even writing anything down yet, and  having either a discussion with yourself, which is totally doable, or having a discussion with  the person that can help you or is helping you, and responsible equal to you  or even not equal to you, just in whatever capacity makes sense. And just talk  about it. And literally, we reprioritized, in that fifteen-minute talk about this topic, and figured  out “Oh, crap, what we were thinking about and all this jumble in our head  about all these eight or nine things, boils down to these two things that are  most important right now.” And we were able to discuss why. And I don’t think  that conversation could have happened unless we were both being mindful about wanting to have that conversation and stepping back from the to-do list. Otherwise we would have went back  after seeing you, ’cause you know, it was a fun meeting seeing you and we  were definitely not talking shop as much, and going back to work directly and being  like “All right, we’re gonna go crank out our stuff.” But I don’t think the  decisions would have been the same. And so that’s what I mean by being mindful,  from my perspective. It’s like when you’re in the weeds, literally I call it “in  the trees,” not the forest, you’re not able to look at, from a higher level, what’s going on, what are we working on or what are we proposing to work  on, and how can we just focus on what’s the most important thing? Usually that  discussion just doesn’t happen in people’s heads. And like you were saying, like a founder,  a CEO, an executive, a manager tends to have a viewpoint on the situation or  the details or the high level of something that other people don’t. And so we  have learned to manage all those inputs and prioritize and keep people on message, on  task, etc. But an individual person who’s working day to day like Ramin, he’s probably  not stepping back. And I can give you hacks, ’cause it’s probably about that time,  right? Steli Efti: Yep. Hiten Shah: One big hack for me is, take a step back either every morning or every  evening. This is one reason I love all the content out there. Every time I  read something about this, about that dream of making your three things you need to  do tomorrow, or making your to-do list in the morning or the evening before. All  those things, to be honest, are very good, very, very good. We don’t do them,  nobody does them, I’m sorry, but they are very good because they give you that  opportunity to spend five or ten minutes to reflect upon either what you did, which  is always good, or what you’re going to do. So for me it’s like, I’ll  reflect on what we did or what we think we need to do to figure  out what we do next, and so it’s about “Okay, what did we do, what  do we need to do, or what do we think we need to do?” All  the things, and then how do we make sure we’re focused on the most important things? And if you can just have that discussion with yourself either every morning or  every evening before you go get at it … I actually like the evening, ’cause  sleeping on it is helpful and writing it down. It’s not a to-do list, ’cause  I know that formalizes it too much for most people, at least for me. But  it’s more of just a discussion with yourself about it. Even if you don’t write  it down it will be in your head. And so I think that can help  you reprioritize and stay a little more sane regardless of what level you are or  what you’re doing inside of a company. Steli Efti: Absolutely, love it. All right, so I’ll give a tip before we wrap this up.  My tip is, do two things. One is, look at your current to-do list, especially  at the smallest of items. And really challenge yourself frequently, you know, maybe once a  month, maybe every two weeks. What are these things, if I stop doing them, what  would really happen? And oftentimes it’s like “Wow, then this wouldn’t exist.” And the important  thing is to keep asking the question “Okay, and then what would happen?” Well, then  we wouldn’t have that number in our reporting. Okay, when was the last time that  number really led to an insight or to an action? Are we just looking at  that number because it’s interesting, or have we ever learned something or changed our behavior  on this? Well, we haven’t really ever done anything with it. All right, then kill  it. Right? Or, this is a small thing I do every day, but if I  stopped it … There’s a lot of small things that accumulate in our lives, to-dos,  that if we really challenge ourselves, we would come up with answer of like “Yeah,  if I stopped doing this nothing would really happen.” Nothing of consequence would happen. And  so finding ways to simplify your to-do list or to take away, especially the noisy,  little, tiny tasks that really, some of them are necessary, but oftentimes we do these  things out of habit and it’s easier to keep doing them than to stop them.  So it’s important to once in a while just do house cleaning and stop some  of these items. But then even more important than just stopping them is to make  a conscious effort not to replace them instantly. So if I, every morning if I  spend ten minutes doing this one small task, then my challenge to people would be,  not just to kill it, ’cause when I kill it mindlessly I will just, some  other small, dumb task will just fill up those ten minutes. Or I will just  use these ten minutes, you know, going on Facebook or Twitter or doing something else  that’s mindless activity. I will replace one mindless activity with another one that’s inconsequential. Maybe  better, maybe worse, but I’m not in control of that. What I would challenge people  is, kill a few of these little items, save yourself ten, twenty, thirty minutes a  day, and then consciously use that time for mindfulness. So you say “Tomorrow from 9:00  to 9:10 AM I’ll go on a walk.” Right? Or every day now I’m gonna be doing a 30-minute walk or meditation, I’m gonna go out in the park and  read a book, or I’m gonna have a call with a friend talking about big  picture, what we want to accomplish, setting goals, or I’ll talk to somebody on my team. But not to-dos, but big-picture, creative thinking. Just take those thirty minutes and don’t  instantly replace them with other small items, ’cause that’s a lot of times what happens  and what I see happening is, people will reprioritize, or kill some of the items,  it will create some gaps, and these gaps again will be mindlessly filled with other  random shit. And then you really haven’t accomplished anything. So an important thing to think  about is, when you kill something, ask yourself “What am I going to replace this  with? How am I gonna fill up my time instead?” Making sure that that replacement  is of higher quality, is of higher priority, and if you can’t come up with another specific item, just make sure you don’t do anything during that time, right? Rather  go on a walk or drink a coffee by yourself, or chit-chat or daydream, or  take a nap, than just spend another 15 more minutes a day on Twitter or  Facebook or some other site. That’s my tip for becoming better at prioritization, big-picture thinking, and keeping perspective and mindfulness in life and in business. All right, I think that’s  it from us for this episode. Hiten Shah: See you later. The post 261: Big Picture Thinking / How to Prioritize appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s Startup Chat, we talk about account-based marketing and how this function has become increasingly relevant due to the availability of marketing automation tools. It is important to adopt a holistic view and market across the entire organization instead of marketing to individuals. Tune-in and find out how account-based marketing can provide your marketing and sales a framework which can help you sell faster. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:03 – Today, we are going to talk about account-based marketing 00:45 – The term “account based marketing” is bringing to the surface what people have been doing forever 01:32 – Instead of marketing to individuals, you are marketing to businesses 02:33 – There are often redundancies within an organization as the same instructions are sent out to sales, marketing and product teams 03:04 – Bring a framework to what marketing and sales people have been doing for a long time 03:33 – Adopt a holistic approach which making a sale 03:52 – This holistic approach has been a part of enterprise sales for a long time from a methodology point of view 05:08 – Implementing “account-based marketing” in start-ups 05:45 – You can sell to organizations FASTER 06:00 – Marketing is done by sending out automated emails 06:34 – Instead of mapping the organization as a part of the sales process, map it as a part of both the sales and marketing processes 07:05 – Map out the emails belonging to the same domain and trace who those people are 07:41 – Figure out who is your best internal CHAMPION within an organization 08:56 – Analyze behaviors of multiple people within the organization who sign-up with you 09:21 – While working at Kissmetrics, Hiten discovered the importance of using company level data as opposed to individual data 10:08 – Drift has a great, account-based marketing feature where company-wide information is displayed 11:11 – Has turned into a marketing feature because of the numerous marketing automation tools 11:46 – Do not let Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) drive your decision making 12:23 – 99.99% of startups do not do have account-based marketing and are still successful 3 Key Points: Adopt a HOLISTIC approach while making a sale; instead of marketing to individuals, market your product across the entire organization. Keep it simple and start off by sending out automated emails to prospects. Do not let Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) drive your decision making±—most startups do not use account-based marketing and are still successful. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: Hi. This is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about Account Based Marketing. It’s one of the new terms that’s coming out in sales. I have questions for Steli, but he has questions for me on this topic. It’s one of those topics where I think it’s a bullshit term, to be honest with you Steli. That being said, this is one of the most bullshit terms I have a lot of respect for. The reason I have a lot of respect for it, is that it’s just bringing to surface what people have been doing in sales forever. I’m going to start like that, and throw that one at you. What do you got?   [0:00:38] Steli Efti: I love it. I love it. Yeah, okay. Let me even tell you, I’ve seen this term ABM, a company’s marketing, it’s popping up more and more. There’s a bunch of marketing automation tools. It lives mostly in the marketing and sales loop right now. There’s a bunch of just software companies that start talking about it, and start talking about how they are introducing a company’s marketing features and tools, methodologies. The idea at its core, right? The name actually gives it away. The idea at its core is that instead of marketing to individuals, right, even if you’re in the B2B space, you run an ad and you’re usually very individually focused. There’s users, and views, and email addresses, as marketing leads that are signing up. You’re really thinking of marketing to an audience of individuals. You’re now starting to think about accounts. Account typically meaning some kind of an organization, usually referred to as a business that people work for, right? The B2B space, if there’s a thousand people that work for a specific company, you would do marketing and you would take that into consideration all these people work for one business. You’re thinking about how to do marketing that takes that context into consideration, versus marketing to every single individual as if they’re completely disconnected people. Would that be right? Is that a definition that makes sense to you as well?   [0:02:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I was talking to someone yesterday, and they have SaaS business. It’s a startup. He was saying that we email sales, and marketing, and product, these three people in the same company all at the same time about what we’re doing. To me, on the most basic level, that’s Account Based Marketing. Again, some Account Based Marketing experts, although there should not be any right now, because this thing does not really exist yet and probably shouldn’t. But I’m going to keep saying that until it actually exists. Because I’m actually a fan of this. The reason I’m a fan of this is it’s really bringing a framework and process to something that great sales people, great teams, great marketing teams have been doing forever in enterprise and B2B. It’s also something that used to work really well in enterprise when you do what they call map the org chart, and all that stuff. To me, the artifacts of why does it exist, come from there. What it means is what you said. It’s an account. It’s not a customer. Not an individual customer. It’s an account. An account is a company. You treat the sale as a holistic approach to the company. It starts by literally almost brute force, emailing everybody in the company. You’ve got to do it smartly, not be annoying. But it does work. Because what happens is you’re hitting multiple people in the company at the same time that are probably a part of the decision.   [0:03:42] Steli Efti: Yeah. In sales, you’re really right, especially in enterprise sales, this has been around for a long time. Not from a technology tool point of view, but just from a methodology point of view. People would map out these okay, what are all the different departments in this company? What are all the individuals we already are in touch with? How do we get from there to the other people we think are stakeholders? On a step by step basis, people would always wonder, worry and consider who they’re currently talking to within the overall account, and how to approach this, right? Instead of emailing the same information to the same people, the timeline, instead of setting up full redundant meetings for different people within their company, without telling them that you are having these meetings with other people within the organization, you would really try to take a holistic approach and consider that the entire business is the account that you’re trying to win. The individuals that you are interacting with are the individuals that are going to be all stakeholders along the path. But you’re just not thinking about every individual you’re talking to is a unique person that has nothing to do with the others, and that it has no relationship to the overall organizational account. Now, if you want to bring this back to earth, to today, if I’m a startup and I start reading all these blog posts, and I start hearing more and more people saying, “Can’t we do Account Based Marketing? If you consider our company’s marketing, do this, do that.” Now I understand what it is. How do I take that understanding? What’s the simplest way to actually put this into practice in some way that will help us with winning those accounts, help us with building a better brand. I think you alluded to it already earlier, but I really want to highlight that. What’s some of the most practical, easiest things to do, gaining some of the benefits of Account Based Marketing?   [0:05:47] Hiten Shah: The benefit is that you sell into an organization faster. Isn’t that the goal? It doesn’t matter what part of the company you’re in, whether it’s marketing or sales. I think marketing is now starting to get more responsible for this, because they tend to typically send out some amount of email. That being said, if you have an outbound team, an outbound process, a lot of times it’s sales and marketing teaming up to send these emails out. Usually I’ve seen this done via email. I don’t know what you’ve seen. But, a lot of stuff has changed where these email addresses of people are much easier to get and obtain, and really get accurate. You know who you’re emailing in if you’ve never emailed them before. This is a lot more around the outbound sales process to me that has become more and more automated through a bunch of the tools that are out there. My biggest tip is, instead of mapping the part of your sales process, start mapping an organization as part of your marketing process.   [0:06:46] Steli Efti: Yeah. The best place to start with that is just your email list, right?   [0:06:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:06:52] Steli Efti: Take a look at the email list. Doing things that are most sophisticated, even if they’re cool ideas and like, how do we show people different landing pages based on IPs that we can associate with a specific … Don’t go nuts on this stuff, right? Just start simple. You have an email list. You send these people emails. How about taking a look and mapping out how many emails you have for certain accounts or that have the same domain, right? Trying to figure who are all these people? Then think okay, who’s missing in the journey? Who do we want to add to that list of email? How can we make sure that we don’t email 10 people in the same account, the exact same stuff at all times? Sometimes it might make sense, but sometimes it might make sense to just customize that a little bit. It moves from the marketing to the sales process, to make sure that you don’t have two sales people that do each two different demos to two different people associated with the same account. But you find a way to bring these together, find a way to identify who is the best person to be your internal champion. Then maybe ask that champion if these other few people that have shown interest from the same company should be invited or one of them should be invited because he or she will be able to help progress the deal and bringing them whatever the right amount of stakeholders to make something happen. Just taking a look at your email list, and even trying to understand how many companies do we have where we have multiple email addresses, where we’ve collected multiple people’s email addresses associated with one company? What can we do with that knowledge? How can we utilize that knowledge? That’s a very, very simple step. Doesn’t need that much. You can just export it and do that in spreadsheet, or do it with a simple query. But it’s a nice first step to start thinking more account based versus just individually based.   [0:08:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of looking at the email list you already have if you have one. We noticed some of our email lists, that what happens is in succession, literally within an hour or less, multiple people from the same company sign up. There’s a behavior that’s going on there that you can totally capitalize on when you’re considering doing Account Based Marketing or moving more to a model where you’re thinking of a holistic company. I have one quick anecdote, which has been really interesting, and a plug just because I think it’s a pretty powerful one. Number one, when we were working on Kissmetrics, we had a lot of SaaS businesses using us. They always wanted to know the company data, not the individual’s data. What I mean by that is, we would show funnels and signups, and all those stuff. A lot of times, we would show it most of the time by individual user. What a lot of people wanted to see was the company level of that. Which is, how is the company interacting as a whole with the product. It was one of the most challenging things to actually do, just because the way analytics tools work today and even the ones that I use that aren’t Kissmetrics, they are not based on the account or a company. They are based on a user or a person. What I’m seeing now though is that there’s tools that are not analytics. The one I’m going to plug is Drift. I posted their new Account Based Marketing feature earlier this week, a few weeks ago now, once this podcast goes out. It’s really nice to see that people are centralizing the information about individuals into company wide information inside of tools that are the tools that people take action on, around those customers. They’re able to show you these are all the accounts that you actually have, not just all the users. I watched them to this because I’ve been a user of the product for a while now. I saw that they have accounts that they never really did anything fancy about it. Now they let you do a lot of interesting things around messaging and account, versus just messaging an individual user. We’re starting to see a trend that I saw many years ago that SaaS companies, especially B2B companies really do want to look at account based activity. But now we’re moving it at top of funnel, and they actually want to message on an account level. I can’t stress the importance of this. At the same time, I think people who are really good at sales have been doing it for years, and now it’s turning into a marketing discipline just because there’s 5000 marketing tools out there, and it’s easier than ever to do a lot of these stuff from a marketing perspective, not a just a sales perspective.   [0:11:36] Steli Efti: Couldn’t agree more. Let’s wrap this episode out with one last tip that I want to share with people. Because we know that our audience and a lot of our listeners, some of our listeners are running bigger startups already, all kinds of awesome listeners. But a lot of our listeners are early stage startups. But my one thing here is a recurring theme on the podcast, is don’t go crazy on this shit. Don’t let FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out and anxiety drive your decision making. If you’re doing marketing, and if you’re just in the early days, and you’re just focused on getting early traction, getting the first 10, 100, 1000 customers. If you have an email list or you want to take a look and ask yourself, can we do something cool that takes accounts into consideration, please, for the love of God, do it. But if you’re not there yet, don’t worry about this stuff. It’s not like you have to do it to succeed. 99.99% of all companies and all startups I know don’t do this, right? Most of them have succeeded despite not doing it. It’s not a must have. A lot of times we read these new terms. Because there’s a lot of writing, and a lot of hype and buzz around them, we think, especially early stage startup founders think, “If I don’t do this, we cannot succeed.” It’s just not true, right? Often times it’s also … Come on. You guys, you’re two months in, you have three paying customers, you’re like an email list of 800. Don’t worry about Account Based Marketing so much. Do try to come up with some kind of a crazy landing page of customized based on IPs or businesses that visit your site. People go nuts on things that just don’t matter. If you can do it, do it. Think long term. That is the direction the world is moving to. I agree with you Hiten, I am squarely in favor of that. I think that just makes businesses communicating to other businesses, doesn’t matter of it’s marketing or sales, better. But don’t stress yourself out as well. Don’t think that that’s the number one priority in your three-week old startup. It most likely isn’t.   [0:13:52] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Good tip.   [0:13:54] Steli Efti: All right. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. The post 260: Account-Based Marketing for Startups – What you should know appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.