Secrets to Break Into Top-Tier Accounts with Product-Led Growth (Andrew Johnston, Superhuman)

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1. 3:43

   And so understanding that is really going to help you excel. It'll also help you map to what the right motivation behind the conversation might be. Love it. What's number two? Number two is something I like to call a 2468 pipeline. And it's about why you should build it and why you should have it. Essentially what a 2468 pipeline means is that you're matching your deal sizes or a “number of deals to make sure you always have the right pipeline coverage.” So take for example, $250,000 quota on a quarterly basis. You'd have two deals that are 125K, four deals that are 62.5 and so on and so forth. Each of those numbers adds up in its own right to 250. So essentially you have three to four X pipeline coverage.

   In Pipeline coverage math

2. 3:51

   Love it. What's number two? Number two is something I like to call a 2468 pipeline. And it's about why you should build it and why you should have it. Essentially what a 2468 pipeline means is that you're matching your deal sizes or a number of deals to make sure you always have the right pipeline coverage. So take for example, $250,000 quota on a quarterly basis. “You'd have two deals that are 125K, four deals that are 62.5 and so on and so forth.” Each of those numbers adds up in its own right to 250. So essentially you have three to four X pipeline coverage. The way that it works though is that in practice as a rep, you could close two deals at 125 to make your quota. You could close all four to make your quota or you can close a combination of those deal cycles.

   In Pipeline coverage math

3. 7:34

   Yeah. So we're trying to always fit into our ICP, right? And look at not only what the buyer persona is. So are they someone who likely receives a lot of email, but also are they a company where they might benefit from Superhuman? We look for companies that like a B2B SaaS company, like my former employer Twilio, where they're working externally with a lot of customers, “they have a high volume of email, and then following up faster, going to my last point,” could enable them to be a better resource and use less tooling. So we really look at the domain. Is that domain the right type of company that we want to work with? Professional services is another one that works really well. High volume of email, high need to respond to customers, and then high importance. Obviously, they're working with these clients that typically have a lot of money that they're paying these companies.

   In Email sequences and follow-ups

4. 16:33

   I guess it doesn't even need to be competitors. It might be other programs where they're getting leads of that nature. Yeah? That's right. And one company might care about if we're selling to a sales team, their productivity by rep. Very common theme in today's market, what's happening with cost cutting. And productivity by rep for them might be, “is superhuman allowing each rep to respond to more emails or more customers? That's what it nets out” to. Another company might say, hey, I'm buying superhuman because everyone's stressed out and I want to see if they're getting the inbox zero. Is it making their lives happier? Very different metrics. We can measure both, but one is going to be very ROI focused. One is focused on are they hitting inbox zero? Are they using superhuman a lot? Do they feel better? Do we run a survey or

   In Cost per meeting and efficiency

5. 17:45

   And so the worst case thing you can do by having good success criteria is you can make yourself realize that a pilot should never make sense in the first place because their expectations are massively unreasonable, or they haven't even thought for two seconds around what it would “take for them to buy, right? So it allows you to slow down so you don't waste your own time.” I think there's a really important factor of, a lot of people think, do I make a pilot or a POC free? And I think it should always be paid. We used to do this thing at Scale.ai, we called it a quick hit. So how can you get a quick validation point that would be free? But we're talking like a day or two, but if it was a pilot, anything longer than a week, you're paying for it. And

   In Buying process discovery

6. 25:57

   methodology of, I'm going to unread an email, I'm going to start, I'm going to fall back to it later. What happens is you just clutter your inbox and you're like, what in the hell do I have to do now? You get to the end of your day, I had 15 calls or whatever how many calls, who do I follow up with first? What do I respond to? Whenever you have 15 minutes, you should be triaging, or whenever “you have time. What I mean by that is it's either marking done, you're reminding it for later,” or you're responding to it now. The way that we view it at superhuman is like, if you can respond to that email in less than five minutes, get it out of the way. If it's going to take later, it's just something for your knowledge, mark it done. Then if you need to spend more time with it, remind it at a time, set aside a block, an hour at the end of your day for those

   In Reply triage and prioritization

7. 30:52

   this is what Slack sees in terms of usage. Here's what you should expect from Superhuman. And you use that as the barometer, not a number that your customer just pulls out of their back pocket. Number three, if we go all the way back to prospecting, break your accounts, your prospects, “the people who are using your product into high usage and low usage. For the lower usage group,” your goal is to coach them up. See if you can help get them using the product more, introduce them to your success team, et cetera. For the high usage group, you just reach out and you say, hey, how can we get this in the hands of other people? And the sale will start to roll. And then lastly, number four, if you find four people in the organization, but they're all in

   In Behavioral segmentation