Attention! Blogstorm of Inside Stories Alert 🕵🏽♀️
Workshopping our way into Enterprise Sales 🏎️
Selling to enterprises is a dance of persistence and finesse. The sales cycle stretches longer than a giraffe's neck, with hurdles at every turn. You must juggle the expectations of C-suite executives, balance the demands of different functions, and keep your act together while waltzing through endless meetings. Despite these challenges, enterprise sales can be very rewarding!
Introducing our business teams to new perspectives of making their enterprise sales journey more rewarding, we invited Kadambari Chakravarthi to host a live workshop. Given the shared ICP, our interactions with Kadambari go back to multiple opportunities for exchanging learnings.
We couldn’t empathize more with the key takeaways -
Identifying your champions among the prospect’s teams. Also, identify multiple champions!
Always look at the end impact that your offering is going to make on your customer
Build relationships beyond transactions
Tap into the financial goals of the customer accounts you’re targeting
Think about the customer first and your product second
A Rollercoaster Ride 🎢
Just like two interdependent instruments in an orchestra, Customer Success and Engineering collaboration can create a symphony of exceptional customer experiences. To truly strike a chord, these teams must not only harmonize their efforts but also empathize with each other's challenges. By stepping into each other's shoes, they gain an appreciation for the complexities faced on their respective journeys.
To simulate the challenges of both these functions, we played a game. The teams were divided into four heterogeneous groups, each one with the objective of building a roller coaster. In addition to two hours of fun & laughter, both teams learned that:
Managing customer expectations while still keeping them happy, isn’t easy.
Understanding the detailed how and why of requirements is necessary before getting into the act of building.
It is always better to ask more questions than to make assumptions.
When working together, collaboration and honest communication is the fuel.
Building a solution isn’t as simple as it may sound. If not thought through, it can do more harm to other processes running in parallel.
Customer Success and Engineering are allies and not competitors but allies.
The Investor’s Mindset 🧠
Investors play a crucial role in the growth and development of startups, providing not only financial support but also valuable guidance and industry connections. By understanding their perspective, teams can align their strategies and actions in a way that set them up for success. They can focus on building a scalable and sustainable business model, showcasing market potential, and effectively communicating the value proposition.
Our team had the opportunity to live-interact with two notable investors who shared their stories of success & learnings.
Our key takeaways?
Every startup has different goals and orientations. One standard approach to business doesn’t fit all.
There is always going to be some or the other fire burning. The skill of the founders is in measuring the size of the fire and making decisions based on impact analysis.
Most younger teams are not thorough in processes. While agility is imperative at that stage, setting up strong ground rules is a good indicator of the startup’s attention to detail.
Scaling is great but scaling too fast too soon is also not a verified indicator of the business’s success. It requires the alignment of strategic plans with the vision, to make the scaling become successful.
The most recommended approach is to compound. It is not about how high you went, it is about did you take a steady path to build a good company.
Well-managed companies focus on the customer, and prioritize the growth of the product, as opposed to the valuation.
Let the LeadTribe Blume 🌻
In an initiative to empower women founders to become better leaders and achieve their professional and business goals, Blume Ventures launched a cohort-based learning program. Conceptualized in 2020, the Lead Tribe program has observed three seasons so far.
As one of the speakers for this year’s cohort, Satej Sirur (Co-founder & CEO, Rocketium) shared his journey of building a B2B SaaS business and his learnings from building products at Microsoft and Amazon.
If you would like to tune into what went behind the scenes, follow Blume Ventures’ LinkedIn space for updates.
The Blog Day! ✍🏽
How often do you find yourself in a situation where you really want to pen down a masterpiece but the work and personal distractions don’t stop playing their part?
We have all been there and that is why our Engineering team experimented with a new initiative in the name of #TheBlogDay
All our developers took time a few hours out of their weekday routine to dedicatedly spend time writing about the ground-breaking work that they’ve done and solutions they’ve built. The intent was to share our knowledge with the community and express how we at Rocketium approach problem-solving.
Interested to read more? - Check out this space here!
