Building Sales That Actually Scale

Music

Sandra: Hi and welcome to another episode of Greyd Conversations. Today I am very happy to greet, which I think is our very first guest from outside of the WordPress ecosystem. Here with me today is Doctor Christian Kurze, a technical B2B pre-sales leader and angel investor working at the intersection of engineering sales and founder led growth. Welcome to the show.

Christian: Yeah. Hi. Thanks for having me today.

Sandra: Those of you who are following us and especially, our CEO, Mark’s, channels know that we love to talk about sales, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. Today’s topic is not only relevant for agencies looking to differentiate, but also to product teams and even established firms. We are going to discuss today how to build sales that actually scale.But before we dive into today’s topic, Christian, would you please let our viewers know a little bit about yourself? What’s your background and what do you do today?

Christian: Yeah, sure. So I started to develop software quite a while ago. I was still at school and founded my first freelance gig at age 18. And fun fact. So I mainly build websites back in those days in addition to some software. So kind of closing the loop today. Later on I founded based on my PhD research at university. I also worked in several startups as an early employee, and back in 2017, I joined MongoDB, which was already known for the sales excellence back in those days, and I got the chance and opportunity to see hands on how to build a strong commercial open source play. And then since 2022, I also, actively invest as an Azure investor and have the pleasure to work very closely with multiple technical founders.

Sandra: Well, so it’s it sounds like you work with both experienced companies at a very different stage or so. Bootstrapped startups, funded scale ups, established SMBs. Is the sales topic different depending on where you are?

Christian: Yeah. So I would say the symptoms look very different. But the root cause is always the very same or very similar architecture. A problem a bootstrap founder relies on gut feeling, random wins. There is a funded startup, usually starts to higher sales a bit too early and starts to push for volume and unfortunately scales noise instead of actual revenue. And even if you’re an established company, you have a CRM, you have reporting, have all that stuff in place, but growth, some kind of plateaus because the foundation how to scale was never truly engineered. So different stages, I would say. But same missing, architectural core piece. I think that’s also something that we often see, in WordPress.

Sandra: So as you know, our audience is mainly active in a WordPress ecosystem. And while there are many things special about this bubble, one thing in particular is that hardly any plugin or product company has dedicated sales teams or even real sales systems, and it’s very similar for, for agencies. Most of their projects come from inbound off referrals and for years this has been just fine. I mean, the market was hard. There was a huge demand for websites for digital products. The pandemic has led to even higher demand for that. But we see a change here nowadays when we open our social media, obviously posts about mass layoffs. We see agencies struggling and then shutting down the business. We see product companies missing growth targets and have having difficulties for to find funding. Why is that? What has changed that makes sales such an urgency?

Christian: Now? Yeah. So I would say that as we all know, the whole economy has changed now. And with that, also how buyers and also investors take their decisions. And so with all these AI companies around, getting money now requires way more traction, way more revenue and very early phases of companies. And also with this arrival of ChatGPT, LLMs, AI for everyone. So buyers usually come very, very informed nowadays. Get very skeptical and also super risk averse. And everyone works on their fact to extend their runways as companies. And so this whole I, I don’t want to call it a bubble. This AI theme, right, has compressed the education due diligence phases and also raised the bar very high for clarity and proof of value on your side as a product company, and also especially for an agency, right? A lot of people say, well, let’s just write a prompt for that. Why do I need an agency? Why do I need a new product? And I think this is actually a real big problem for for our industry. It’s not that we don’t have good products or services, but like I said, the majority of purpose companies really lacks sales expertise.

Sandra: And Christian, you mentioned a couple of of stations and your, a track record. I suppose having worked for and with tech startups, you’ve seen firsthand what happens when create products are built without strong sales expertise, right?

Christian: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I experienced this on my very own, being a first time founder right out of university. So we had a research back product for global competitors back in these days. So that sounds super good right? But we also had some initial products, obviously products and some initial projects around it. But looking back, I honestly did not have a real clue right about educating the market during real output campaigns, building and executing real sales or go to market motion. I was I’m very honest to myself. I was relying on a bit of hope and that some magic happens. Then, after the thought of multiple early stage companies in in multiple different roles, right, in precise roles, in product management roles, and unfortunately, I’ve seen horrible results of not making the numbers, feeling myself close to burnout. But also seeing founders going to court against each other and fighting for the money they invested. And feeling all this emotional stress around it. Working long night shifts, all that stuff. So on the other hand, I also experienced these huge rewards when you are able to get a new big customer on board at this feeling of, wow, we made it! We did it. Cool. And then when I got the chance to join MongoDB, I did not hesitate. Right? I clearly said yes because they were growing so fast. And I thought to myself, they must have found kind of a secret source. So how can you actually sell something that you can download for free on the internet? Right. So I’ve worked a lot of open source software, but I was it was never clear to me, how can you build a business around an open source product? And that’s what I’ve seen firsthand for six years there. When we grow in Central and Eastern Europe from a about a million of revenue here to some solid double digit, millions of revenue per year. And during this time, I was especially lucky. And why? Because during that time, the company started to really rethink the sales approach. Now started with a very strong process, at milestones and along this process, very hot qualification of deals, you know, as a GPS system, navigating along, the sales process. And what I would like to say is excellence at an almost maniac level of attention to detail. Now, that was always driven by one key thing. How can we ensure that we are chosen in an evaluation process without losing to other competitors?
And think of it right, it’s selling a database. So there I think we even crossed the 1000 mark of databases out there in total. And so and if you think of it, it’s kind of a boring topic. So we had to get on top of this noise with the open source model. It was very helpful. And second part is we must not lose against ourselves as an open source product, which is a, to my mind, a very similar challenge. Also the WordPress community and everyone can do it.

Sandra: So yeah, absolutely. I mean, so what I’m hearing is that bottom line is if you want to succeed, especially in today’s market, there really is no way around anymore around professional sales. And you mentioned a couple of things. So what companies need is a repeatable sales engine structure discovery, qualification processes, CRM workflows, consistent execution. So I mean, while that is or at least should be standard in in large companies and hyperscalers like MongoDB, it might it might seem very overwhelming to many of our listeners who work in smaller product companies or in agencies and even if you are talking about companies who are already doing active sales, from my experience, this is always the part where most product companies fail. I mean, they have great products, but they really don’t know how to sell them. I know you’ve just been working on a very interesting project over the last years, and months. The ACT playbook, which we at Greyd also use, and from what I understand it, approach the sales the way an engineer would approach building a system. Could you explain that way of thinking?

Christian: Yeah, sure. And so this acronym ACT actually stands for Align on Value. Create the Engine and Trigger Scale with the most important thing in the acronym itself. Right. Do it. So no matter which frameworks you’re using, you need to do it. You need to get started, and execute it. Now and this was heavily inspired by one of the former sales leaders I was allowed to work with, who always said, success can only happen if you do things well. So let’s dig a bit deeper. What is this? What is this ACT playbook. So it’s a framework that approaches sales, as you said it the way, like a founder, an engineer would approach building a system. Yeah. So the basis, all the well-proven playbooks of these hyperscalers, that are broken down to earlier stage and smaller companies, and you can’t simply adopt something that works in a public company with thousands of people globally to a ten person agency, right. Or an even smaller, earlier stage startup. So, and I used, this exact framework and this is how I adopted by lots of companies that I was with after leaving MongoDB, and also a few of my portfolio companies coming to a very practical go to market framework for B2B tech companies like agencies, product companies, or hybrid businesses that sell products but also sell services around it, you know, or use services to get into the customer to actually position the product. So multiple multiple ways to on multiple angles to get into the customer sphere and at its core. And this is what most people unfortunately skip is to value architecture. Right. This helps the teams to really clearly define your target customer profiles, the different stakeholder roles, how the committees look like, and the value drivers that actually drive decisions in the target companies and your prospects and customers, and how these product capabilities that you offer translate into real, measurable outcomes. And this approach helps companies to systematically work on the value prop, and figure out which combination offer make the offer really unique now. And therefore you can start to influence which capabilities should make it into an evaluation process very early on. Right. And around this value architecture, then we use a lot of templates.
To come up with your sales playbook in a very practical, repeatable system. And these templates are they are for early stage companies so that you could quickly find and evaluate your product market fit. But also later stage companies that either need to scale, the sales or companies that need to overcome this invisible ceiling of scaling issues.
And usually companies start with more people as an answer. We need more feet on the ground, so automatically our revenue will grow. But this unfortunately does not solve the problem. If you don’t align on your core product values and how you speak about your product first. Right. And I’ve seen it many times so that, companies hire VP sales very early on, especially here in Europe, we have a very common thread.
Let’s hire we pre-sales and they will do the same for us. They know how to do their thing and they absolutely know how to do their thing. Otherwise it would not have hired them. But you, as the owner of the company, as a founder, need to provide them with very clear guidance, right? How these first or later sales hires have to work at. They must understand the product. They need to understand how to talk about the product, how to do good discovery so simply what works and what doesn’t work right. Otherwise, you’re overwhelmed by the strong opinions or the ins and their own stories about your product, right? Which are then not true. It obviously will not sell. So now you imagine you build this complete, foundation and can just plug in someone that knows how to execute in a perfect way. So this will be kind of plug and play then for scaling.

Sandra: I think that one of the things that you mentioned, this is especially interesting. I mean, I suppose most of our listeners agree on the part about, okay, we need to work on sales playbooks and we need processes and all these kind of things. But you also mentioned that, a core part of, of this. value framework is like really down to the smallest detail defining who your ideal customers are and what kind of personas the stakeholders are involved. I could imagine that a lot of our listeners today might think, okay, but why spend time on that? Shouldn’t we know whom we sell to and what we have to offer, or shouldn’t we focus on, like the actual sales part.

Christian: Their valid objection and I see this so often. Right? And many people think they have defined clear ICP, but when you boil it down, you realize they didn’t. Yeah. And it’s simply proven by the fact that it’s not written down somewhere, or you cannot translate it into a target account list. Give me the 200 accounts that fit this ICP or this customer profile, you know, or another extreme is to try to target everyone there. We have a horizontal solution that can be used by any industry, by anyone out there, which de facto means you’re targeting no one. So having multiple target customer profiles is not an issue at all, right? It’s even quite common, especially if you’re in later stages. But you still need a clear understanding who they are, what they care about, which capabilities you are offering to solve the pain, and how to go into exactly this target customer segment. Right in especially in B2B sales, there are always several personas and people involved in the buying process, and they have individual pains, and goals that that need to be addressed in the proper language at the proper time of the buying cycle. Now you simply speak in a very different language to an executive decision maker, versus a developer or a designer, in a WordPress or a website content.
And many people, including myself a couple of years back, need to understand that features are not the same as delivered value, right? Especially European tech companies and product people. They tend to sell features because we are so proud of our product, and most likely it’s a very cool product and a very good product that you build. But we need to translate this into business outcomes, right?
And this value gap that you are defining and that you are really spelling out there is the right to charge your customer without this value gap. But why should someone pay some money for your product or your support?

Sandra: Right. And spoiling because, we found ourselves in exactly the, the position and the situation you just described, like trying to sell to everybody and then ending up with messaging that kind of reaches no one, pricing that doesn’t really fit to to anyone. So I can fully support what you’ve just shared. Many of you might know that, we at Greyd have had the great opportunity to take part in the, German accelerator, which is a government program, for market expansion in our case, the, US market. And in the first phase for the first couple of months, that was actually all about us, like finding out who our ideal customer profiles are and what personas they have, what their pains are, what their challenges are, what Greyd.Suite can do for them.
And this turned out not only to be way more difficult than we anticipated, but this was really, for us, It was the the key to success. So we can really recommend working on that and really spend time on that because it’s so important. Whom would you suggest to involve? And that process of, like, defining and working on the value framework, because from my experience, these kind of topics are often handled on a management or a marketing level, completely independent from the rest of the team who might be completely oblivious of it.

Christian: Yeah, yeah. And first and foremost, I think it’s super important that you get top management attention. Now, if you CEO or your founder does not buy into these ideas and drive synergies, you’re already prone to fail. Yeah, because as you said, it’s usually handled from the managing or marketing level. But you do need or you do need a lot more people because you need to achieve a way bigger goal, right?
You are aligning your whole company on using the same language about your customers, about your product, about your whole go to market approach. And then you need to start to work on understanding your product in detail as well. And it’s not just your customers, but also your product. First and foremost, formulate which capabilities you have. And by the way, these capabilities can be features of the product.
But it can also be some kind of consulting services, onboarding, support levels, migration services, etc.. So the the capabilities you are offering to the market, and for all these capabilities, you define how you do it. How are you doing it better than the others out there. Which metrics can prove the impact on the technical and business level?
And also some good proof points where you actually did it. Now. And there isn’t usually a sidekick in combination with defining customer profiles, personas, which is, as you said, not easy. And there will always be different takes on it inside and outside of your company. You ask five people, you get ten opinions at least. But there are also many helpers available to do this, learning cycle and this evaluation cycle.
So use a good structure that, for example, we defined in the ACT playbook and then use your favorite AI, ChatGPT, and I highly recommend to work with multiple AIs right. Give the results to the other AI to to Google to Claude back to ChatGPT and let them, discuss these ideas with each other. And
Yeah. So this can help you identify these company profiles, really nailing down the problem and really nailing down the way you’re also talking about your, key capabilities and what is super important that it’s not just you think about it, but you discovered a lot of your early customers or your existing customers or the product research you did right. Profile your customers, extract as much information as possible about the real pain from every single conversations and why you’re if you already have existing customers and why they’ve chosen your solution, and not just on the technical level, but also what has improved, in the company customers more revenue, easier onboarding, less customer churn. Right? So real tangible business metrics.
And in order to make this whole value framework credible, you need this good, language and business term. But you also must involve your product people and technical pre-sales engineering and in addition to all these customer facing personnel. Right. Because it’s it’s key that you don’t come up with a story, but you come up with real, pain points that you can solve and that your product can really solve. Right. And obviously to involve the founders or, the product brains of your company. Right, because they really understand the product vision and can articulate it best. And maybe you need to help them, a little bit with I help us with a good sales person, right, to talk about the product in a different way.

Sandra: And, probably not, just like use the information that you have about customers, but really involve them. And in that process also and hear from them in person what their pains are and how they describe it and how they use the product, because probably otherwise your value framework might end up just being another marketing document, right, with like feature lists and all this in your words.

Christian: Yeah, yeah. So never ever work in a vacuum. One ivory tower here. Right. So every prospect SSA, every customer interaction provides a with a lot of insights about your value drivers which are by the way, usually around five key topics. 1. And if you need to cover some kind of regulation, where you might help people, accessibility or websites, for example. 2. you can build competitive edge super converting website when we think about WordPress ecosystem here. 3. risk and security. Now I don’t want to get user data breached or I want to mitigate some, some risk, maybe some, investor relations page that I publish. Right. It has to follow strict rules when I publish there. 3. Obviously productivity, cost, quality. How fast can I build websites sticking to WordPress again here? Or, how much quality improvement can I deliver with a support portal or whatever I create on my website? 5. And obviously reputation now also super important, very hard to quantify reputation. But if a website is constantly down. Obviously you think maybe I don’t want to work with this company. I don’t I can’t even reach the website. So as a, as a general structure I have for all these value drivers we also are discussing, you need to think about how prospects work today. So what is their is is state how they work, how it negatively affects the business. Website is constantly down. Customers move away. And how an idea stage could look like obviously super duper website fast conversions, high conversion rates. And these were already the metrics I did. Would show the positive business impact. Your more customers, more leads. And then the key capabilities, come into account because they describe the way how you get from the current state into the future state, and you already thought about and constantly enriched metrics that describe how you actually measure the success on a, on a technical level, on a business level. And you should not stop there. Because there is a lot more to add in terms of discovery questions and objection handling. Yeah. How do your prospects customers typically react? When you talk about some capabilities now, are they are resistant or are they accepted immediately? And what a good challenging trap setting discovery questions to unveal pain in your customers that they might not even have thought about and trap setting in a way that you start to position features and capabilities that only you have, and automatically you’ll kick your competitors out. That that’s what’s meant trap setting discovery questions.

Sandra: By the way, what would we found super helpful to get all this information together? And to put it all in this framework was to really analyze transcripts of all the calls that we did with and with customers with, with leads. Those were like sales calls, those were demos, but also onboarding calls, customer relationship calls, support calls. Like literally everything that that we had and were allowed to use. And that really helped us like making sure that we don’t describe what we think is our customer’s pain in all words, but really in their literal words. And and also for the value drivers to not end up just be featureless, but really detailed descriptions of how we are solving our customer’s challenges and how that’s better than the alternatives. And again, not how we would describe that, but how our customers actually talk about it. And by the way, that’s a we’ve been talking about AI already. It’s a perfect use case to let AI help you because going through like thousands or hundreds of hours of, of, call transcripts manually would take weeks. And and for us, it was a couple of minutes. And AI was super helpful also to like, structure all this information. And then you see super interesting things like, oh, okay. If someone has like a technical background, AI often highlight completely different things. Then, people who are more design related or from, from a marketing perspective. And, and we found things and on and all those conversations that we have actually been aware of. So that’s was super, super interesting.

Christian: Especially the point that you mentioned the right there was exceptional input that we were able to uncover. Also, very interesting details and phrases, how prospects and customers actually talk about the product. Right, and how they understand it. Maybe we talked about a feature they, rephrase it in a completely different way with, hey, yeah, we we need to change our talk track. It’s a way better approach so that people actually understand what we’re talking about. And it’s also something I frequently did so they will get what we are talking about.

Sandra: Now, speaking about AI, at the moment, you see so many AI based, go to market and sales automation tools, coming out there, can we just use, do we really have to spend the time or like manually like defining all this value framework? Can we just use one of these tools and, and just go for it and see what happens.

Christian: Yeah. And it’s a very good question. And especially in my LinkedIn bubble I get a lot of complex and all these recommendations, every single day, many of those and all of them are great tools. Right. And sales automation is definitely an obviously a very relevant step, in the process of building your sales engine with a big part. But if you jump to execution and automation here, AI support or not it ,doesn’t matter. You won’t see the results you’re hoping for. And why is that? Because you end up with very generic messaging or marketing copy. If you’re not able to tell the AI exactly who your ICPs, personas, pain points, key capabilities are and how you are solving and actually proving, that in a very detailed way you will only scale confusion. Yeah. And and revenue. And I mean, ask the AI to generate an outreach email, you would get some very generic stuff. So basically you go back to 2023 when all of us went to ChatGPT and said, oh, write me a poem, just of Shakespeare, right? You get generic answers, but this has nothing to do with your product, right?

Sandra: I can totally confirm that from from our experience. I mean, when we started working on our value framework analyst at our well you try was we were like, oh yeah, we have global content. And global content is a super feature because it lets you synchronize assets across any number of sites. And that’s great. And that was what we had on our website back then. But nobody’s going to buy that because nobody has the pain or the, the actual need or desire to to synchronize stuff. And then we really started working on on our ICPs and personas, and the story completely changed because we identified, for example, that one of our ideal customer profiles are franchises and most education businesses with hundreds of websites. And we then looked at the different personas and what their individual challenges are. And there’s, for example, and franchises you have, for example, the marketing people who are responsible for rolling out campaigns to a high number of websites, and they probably struggle with that, taking them weeks, because to have to literally copy and paste this new pop up or this new content to each and every one of their website, or to send out an email to all their franchisees to please do that on their on their individual websites. And some might do it, I might do it correctly, some might like change the copy. They weren’t supposed to change. Some might not even read the email and don’t publish anything at all. And why? This is super relevant for someone working in marketing a designer doesn’t care about it, but a designer cares about constantly having to fix like broken layouts and designs. When non-technical franchisees again tried to edit their opening hours on their own and accidentally messed up with the design, then at a C level, who at the same time is responsible for revenue for financial KPIs and they might be looking for ways to speed up the process of launching new website locations and location websites and tech teams. On the other hand, again, completely different challenges, probably more related to to fragmented text decks and unstable environments, security issues. So why global content solves all of the challenges that I just described, the messaging and the story and the way how we explain what global the content is and what it can do for you is completely different, even within that one ICP. But for all these personas, it’s a completely different story.

Christian: Yeah, and thank you for the summary. I could not have summarized it in a better way. Thats how the journey can look like with the value framework. And I think it’s a, it’s a very good time to actually share and show what we created, during this time.

Sandra: Yeah. Please, just go ahead.

Christian: So, Let’s go here. So what underpins it? And what we mentioned multiple times now is a good structure, right. Where to organize all this information. And it’s important that you have this also actionable. You are not just a fancy PowerPoint or a spreadsheet. You need to get this into real use in where we started with the for customer profiles that Sandra mentioned, maybe we would say, let’s open here the franchise multi-location companies. Which was also, filled with the help of AI.And there were also some AI helpers here in, this software to make and actually chat with your value framework and go to the internet or just upload a presentation, extract stuff and enrich, the existing value framework, or take a call transcript and enrich what exists here. And as you can see, we went into a lot of details. Right. What are some good examples? Not necessarily your customers but examples that the AI understands. What what are we talking about? What kind of companies industry sector or a company size geography to typical thermo graphics, but also some psychographics. Right. What’s the culture? What are the values inside of these companies? How does a decision making process, you know, like are they risk averse or more innovation appetite in these companies.
And also what drives these companies from a strategic perspective? What are their priorities? What a key change drivers. What do they want to achieve now with, your product, your tool. What are core pain points, key metrics. How do they do it today? So what are we competing against. Then we can attach, additional case studies, that we can also formulate in a very structured way, where we can say, let’s take one of these franchises here. I say, what is the challenge? How did they solve it? What are results? What are good quotes? Right. What are the involved personas that it relates to? What are the value drivers we are addressing in this case study, key capabilities and a lot of metrics that are affected. Right. And then taking this one step further to the individual personas, why do we say, and again, the very detailed description. Right. Looks like a lot of work. But with the help of AI, it’s, it’s a matter of a few hours to come up with the first iteration, and then it will improve over time with every single customer iteration, as we said, and looking at this executive, right, they want to drive, for example, sustainable company growth, profitability, market expansion. That’s the way you need to talk to an executive leader, while where you talk to a designer as under X, I can say, right, hey, they want to deliver visually stunning on brand websites. Strengthen the company’s identity and user experience something completely different. Or a developer because they want, deliver the stable, high performing website with clean, maintainable code know. Let’s have a look at this capability that Sandra described, to synchronize assets across any number of sites, which is the feature of global content. And here intentionally in a vendor neutral language, so that AI can talk about it, that you can compare it with your competitors. Right. So the ability to synchronize these assets across any number of websites, centralized management of content templates and configurations, now how we do it or how you do it in your product, how you do it better, than the competitors. Why is that important? Again, metrics how we measure this success proof points where it has been used that we can reference, and also discovery questions and objection handling as we discussed before, in one single, place where you can easily edit it. Oh, we figured out there’s a new objection. Let’s just put it here. And all of a sudden your whole company can use it. Now there are new features or new features. You’re going to roll out the next version of your product, right? 5 or 6 new features. Put it here. Everyone knows how to talk about it. You can start to generate website content, etc. etc. from this point here. And also implemented an MCP server so that you can use ChatGPT, Claude, to really talk to this value framework and, and use it in your day to day work. Right. It’s not an it is…

Sandra: This is something that is super helpful because this is also what I think a way that if you have we discuss like whom to involve in all these this process and all this, this thinking and then you have your, well, your framework and then you need, like the entire company to actually work with that. And each marketing copy that is written should have that in mind. Each sales email that is read and should have that in mind. And one way to make sure that everyone uses a state is to just like put that in as a ground input for all your ChatGPT conversations so that no matter what you do, no matter what you asked ChatGPT to do, ChatGPT knows all this information and uses that.

Christian: Yeah, and without losing yourself in so many different chat threads, right? Yeah. It’s later. Go back in time. Oh my God, my context is gonna need to start on stage.

Sandra: So, from what I understood ACT here is like, really a sequence. So. So we discussed now your architect the value. That’s what, what we’ve seen here, what we’ve discussed. So far. Then you’re building, the engine, and only then do you already trigger execution. And I think just to come back to to that point, because I think that’s very important that we see that a lot. Most companies get this backward right?

Christian: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you will use this framework integrated in sales and marketing processes and, and how to do this out. First you need to define clear steps and exit criteria for each milestone in your sales process. Yeah. And then you’ll also then need to reflect this process as the opportunity stages in your CRM system to really make it actionable. And also you need to flag your company’s, your contact with the ICPs and personas that you defined now. So this is an absolute necessary foundation to make it measurable, how efficient you are in converting your, marketing qualified lead to sales qualified leads bring them to opportunity to close and also into expungement. If you don’t record this and create a single source of truth, aka your CRM system, how do you do this? Right? So all this information will be lost. And this is very important information if you don’t start to measure it. And if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Right. And you don’t see changes because you don’t have the data. But it’s not just the sales process and the qualification framework as a system, as I said before, to navigate along this process. But you will also prepare templates for all of these stages. Yeah. How to do discovery to find the real pain and the people that really are responsible to solve this pain. How to do a tailored demo, that allows you to go even deeper into this discovery. Right. And impact, for the company. And how do you trap out your competition? So, next steps are efficient technical and commercial evaluation.
And all of this is driven by your value frame that because now you know which capabilities make your, offer unique and how you can efficiently measure the success from both technical and economic perspective. And that’s then the key to really drive, during the sales process. Yeah. How can you build your champions? How can you open up the way to your economic buyer and who usually, as we said before and does not care about features and functionalities, right. They care about money, they care about profitability, risk reduction yet and growth of the company. That’s that’s what they want to hear. And this is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done I agree here, but it’s the foundation for two continuous loops on top of that. Right. You have this pipeline generation loop. What’s under already mentioned? You you will create inbound campaigns. You can feed your website, content generation, workflows. You can, start to create a tailored landing pages for specific personas for ICPs. You can start to create thought leadership articles. And you can also use it in your outreach strategy. Right? To identify the right target companies create relevant pain hypothesis. Inside of these, companies with the help of AI grounded in your value framework. Now, all of this to find and address the right leads. Now listen, right messaging grounded in this value framework. You create it in another loop. After creating the pipeline, you need to move into a sales cycle. You know, you start with persona and ICP specific meeting preparation here. So what are the questions that you need to ask? Where are qualification gaps that you need to close, and what is the right next step that I need to position to actually move forward with very meaningful next steps. And AI and a defined architecture. Value architecture here helps you a lot, right? To come up with laser sharp discovery, personalized demos, crisp evaluations and at the end of the day faster deal closings.
And the playbook should and must not stop here. You also must ensure successful onboarding help the first use case once you’re in the company, make them successful because this opens up the path for for expansion in your customers. And obviously to transfer your champions into multipliers, you know, write a good case study with them, bring them to stage somewhere. Use it in your next marketing campaign, you know, using your sales cycles, obviously, you know, as, as good proof points where you have shown very specific outcomes. And if you really think this to an end is not a very big loop, you come up with a real continuous learning loop based on each and every single customer and prospect interaction. So if you this way, you can really create a system with compounding effects. Well so it’s this is key. And you always need to learn learn and learn which must never ever stop once you think, oh, we did it and some routine gets there, you’re already late, right? You need to get back to this, to this learning approach. And believe me, I’ve seen so many even printed value frameworks ten years back. Powerful PowerPoints that I also created for sales enablement or spreadsheets with a lot of capabilities that were not even completely filled out. I did that myself. But it was not actionable, right? It was not in a tool. You could not use it in your AI, helpers. You could not use it. Or you always had to open up a book and you forgot it at home. And, what was this key value driver again? Right. And here with this playbook, we have a real piece of software created a the core and center, of the system. Now, that enables the structured approach to real company wide learning.

Sandra: And, I mean, we found this like this foundation. If we’ve shown parts of it, we’ve talked about it, it is like very detailed. It is a lot of work to put that together. But what we see is this really helps us to to generate right. Also to use AI a lot better by the way, because I mean, there’s a lot of discussions about out there on how good AI algorithm created content is. And there is a lot of complaints that like AI fatigue, that you see all those generic obviously AI created a posts out there, From from what I see or my experience is that it doesn’t have to be like this, because it really is about what is. I mean, we all know that the AI output can only be as good as the prompt is, and if each and every question and task you give to your AI has all this value framework as a foundation, the content and and the results you see from there is, is completely different because you’re not just telling AI, can you please, create a post on on Greyd.Suite highlighting global content. Even if you get this in as a quote, if you get this in just as a very basic prompt, the AI now knows with all your, your framework content and there okay, we’re talking global content is this has all these capabilities, all these all these solve this and that pain for this person, for this, ICP and the content to get out there is it’s amazing. I mean, one one example that we did, for, earlier, we had like one demo video on our website, like, again, speaking to everybody at the same time, speaking to nobody showing feature of the feature. Okay, Greyd.Suite can do this, Greyd.Suite can do that. Now, we are changing that to okay now we have actually I think 30 different, demo videos on our website and one demo video, particularly for, I don’t know, designers in franchise companies explaining them exactly how we solve their pain points. And this is a different content than the video that is, created for C-level, and franchises because they want to hear different but different things. They care about different things, they have different pains. They have different KPIs. They need to, to achieve. And you can really use AI for that if the foundation is there. Otherwise, again, you will just end up with generic messaging.

Christian: Yeah. And now take this also to the next step. Imagine they saw a customized or persona specific demo video. Now you have the first call of them and ask very specific questions, right. That even go deeper. And you can now show a more granular demo if it gets to this point, if, if it’s available or the right next step here that can even influence is what I said earlier, this decision criteria. Right. Maybe they they don’t know about your product and they don’t know what you offer for them that can actually solve their pain that they have. Right. And maybe they didn’t even know. Oh yeah, this is exactly my pain that I have. Thanks for thanks for pointing me to it. Right. And thanks for peeling it out.

Sandra: Yeah. Absolutely.
I, I really enjoyed this discussion. I think we could probably go on talking for, for hours and have a small inkling, I think that this might not be the last Greyd Conversations episode that is a little bit more sales focused. So however, for today, we are nearing, an hour or so, I think today it’s it’s time to wrap up. Is there anything else, that you want to share that, we haven’t had a chance to to mention today?

Christian: We covered a lot of ground, but I think the most important thing is do it right, get started and don’t overengineer it. Most of, one of the questions I hear you most frequently is, where do I actually start this? That it’s so much to do. Start at one point. Go for it. Continue. Don’t give up.

Sandra: I think this is advice that, that can be that does is helpful for a lot of things. In the, in business and also and and and private, just do it.

Christian: Exactly.

Sandra: Yeah. Christian, thank you very much for being on the show, sharing all this valuable insights and experience and, and, learnings with us.We will as always put the links to the ACT playbook and other things we discussed today in the description. If you haven’t already, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss on, future, episodes. Sales based, or not. And, yeah, of course we will also continue sharing updates on our own progress related to the German Accelerator program on our channels. Thank you very much for tuning in today. And, Christian, thank you very, very much for being with us today.

Christian: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sandra: See you in the next episode. Bye bye.

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