Startup leaders share the GTM basics for technical founders to hit their first $1 million revenue
I won’t shut up about the upswing of the infrastructure tech community here in New York City (more here). Both the exceptional founder and exec talent and the deep experience of technical enterprise buyers. Since I moved here one year ago, I’ve been looking for new ways to bring the community together to accelerate the startup ecosystem.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hosting a go-to-market workshop for an intimate group of infrastructure startup founders in New York City with my Vertex Partner Insik Rhee. Attendees were all technical founders in the early phases of building their company, there to learn about enterprise sales and how to build the foundations of their GTM strategy.
First, we heard from Jorge Sancha, the co-founder and CEO of Tinybird, who shared his hard-learned dos and don’ts in building a GTM function that took them to their first $1M revenue and why their first commercial hire wasn’t who you’d expect. Then, Adrian Kunzle — CTO of tech unicorn Own, former Executive VP Platform at Salesforce, and one-time Head of Engineering at JP Morgan Chase — shared insider secrets from his rare experience as both a buyer and vendor of complex infrastructure software. I learned there are some common mistakes most founders make when pitching enterprise execs and they’re easily avoided.
I can’t repeat all the secrets they shared (sign up here to be in the room next time), but here are some lessons I took away from both sessions.
Jorge Sancha — CEO and Co-Founder, Tinybird
Enterprise sales is a trust game
Jorge explained that when you’re selling a complex technical product that sits in the critical path of a company’s infrastructure –trust is key. For larger contracts, offering the new prospect a customer referral early on before they ask for it can help build that trust quickly. Even better, if it’s a particularly large or important contract, and you have a particularly engaged and willing happy customer, asking them to reach out directly to the prospect saying how happy they are they chose to work with you can have a huge impact. It shows you have a great relationship with your customers, but also that you’re hungry for their business.
The best first GTM hire may not be an AE
For more technical products, there is often a lot of hand-holding with early customers, Jorge said. You want to build trust, help customers understand the value proposition, and ensure the product is implemented correctly in an often complex system. Once you start learning how to sell your product and who the right customers are, the bottleneck quickly shifts over to onboarding and support. Jorge shared that the first thing they got right was the technical sale: their first hire on the commercial team at Tinybird was a solutions engineer doubling as customer success, in this case a technically brilliant data engineer that loved solving problems.
Jorge shared more lessons on the best way to build your presence at conferences as a small company and how to leverage “influencers” in your market, in a conversation that generated lots of Q&A from the founders in attendance.
Adrian Kunzle — CTO, Own (ex-EVP Platform, Salesforce)
Everyone in a large organization is suffering; lead with informed empathy
The first thing that would shut down a sales conversation with Adrian during his time as an exec at JPMC was a founder asking: “what are your goals for the year?” The question is generic and suggests the founder/salesperson has no insight into the actual problems he’s experiencing. To get to the real problems you need to show that you understand them first. A more successful opener involves a higher degree of specificity: “I see the market is tough and budgets are down. I’m sure you’re having to rationalize a lot of people, have you thought about how you’re going to manage product development velocity in this landscape?”
Founders need to understand how a company works before they try to change it
Another mistake Adrian saw founders make was not spending the time learning how an organization is structured and what a potential buyer’s incentives are. This is a critical step in the sales process. A common pitfall would be something like pitching the value of your product as cutting headcount — when you’re speaking to an exec that only wants to grow their team or empire-build. Similarly, you don’t want to make the same pitch to an exec who would be responsible for cutting headcount in someone else’s team — this won’t make you or your product very popular. Reframing the value proposition around productivity or shipping products to market faster will likely work better. Know your audience!
Adrian also shared why MEDDIC is still the enterprise sales bible — a big topic that warrants its own post so watch this space.
We had great feedback from the founders that attended, both for the lessons learned and the personal relationships built between peer founders and the speakers. If there’s more interest from local NYC founders building technical startups we’d love to expand the group or even run more sessions. If you’d like to participate in a future workshop or as a speaker, please apply here with some information about your company.
This is just one of the events that I run as part of the infra.nyc community — if you want to join 300+ other infra nerds for more casual drinks and meet-ups in NYC, sign up here to get on the list. Hope to catch you there!
