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patio11's profile
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

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Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.

東京都 Tokyo
kalzumeus.com
Joined February 2009

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    Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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    I wrote a bit about scrappy early sales for founders: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales … Some thoughts on this:

    8:27 AM - 23 Oct 2017
    • 74 Retweets
    • 433 Likes
    • James Hill-Khurana Vicente y David The Man With A Plan Piotr Ch josh 🐇 Misbah Ashraf 🤷‍♂️ Agust Thorkelsson David R. P. Morris 김연옥
    14 replies 74 retweets 433 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        There's a skills gap for many founders which frustrates sales, but overwhelmingly it is more of a comfort gap.

        1 reply 4 retweets 23 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The engineering community massively culturally devalues sales skills, and we largely lack role models for folks doing it in a positive way.

        1 reply 19 retweets 66 likes
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      4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        This results in founders attempting to either Field of Dreams their way to sales or spin up the passive SaaS marketing engine.

        1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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      5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The passive SaaS marketing engine is a wonderful thing to build. Unfortunately, it takes ~18 months to get running. That's a long, long time

        1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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      6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        When we did my last company, I tried to roleplay as someone who was actually comfortable doing active sales. It worked pretty well.

        1 reply 2 retweets 29 likes
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      7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        I cannot emphasize how much absence-of-rocket-science is in Sales 101. If you could get hired or do a conference talk, you can do sales.

        2 replies 6 retweets 37 likes
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      8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The fundamental primitives are just identifying someone in the world who would be helped by your thing and then having a conversation.

        1 reply 5 retweets 38 likes
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      9. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        Devs get *massively* skeezed out by the first part, because cold outreach sounds "spammy", but that's largely alleviated by doing it right.

        1 reply 0 retweets 24 likes
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      10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        e.g. Here's a cold pitch from two Irish guys who had never talked to me before, trying to woo Bingo Card Creator away from Paypal.pic.twitter.com/okCyE7Hd5x

        5 replies 21 retweets 236 likes
        Show this thread
      11. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        (I'll take "Most expensive spam filter false positives in history" for $1000, Alex.)

        1 reply 0 retweets 30 likes
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      12. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        Business owners spend most of their day pitching and getting pitched. They/we are FAR less offended by it than engineers are.

        2 replies 4 retweets 25 likes
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      13. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The bar for a good pitch is *shockingly* low. You get into the top 20% in my inbox by getting my name and company right. 5% for humanity.

        1 reply 9 retweets 52 likes
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      14. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The best pitch I've ever gotten was ~1 paragraph. "I read you were looking for X. I have an idea about X: $IDEA. Want to talk turkey?"

        1 reply 3 retweets 27 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        "Actually cares about my expressed needs. Clearly not a bozo." That sales over my bar for "Worth 15 minutes to investigate."

        1 reply 0 retweets 19 likes
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      16. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        Sales calls are intimidating. Believe me, I get it. It's easier if you treat them as goal-oriented geeking out about a problem space.

        1 reply 3 retweets 31 likes
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      17. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        The only thing that distinguishes them from other geeking out is that you have one sentence of next steps at the end of the call.

        1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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      18. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        My last company's canned ask: "It's been great chatting. If this has been interesting, can I send you an LOI for your review?"

        1 reply 0 retweets 24 likes
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      19. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        If a prospect said no (or if I had disqualified them during the call when talking about their business), I thanked for time and parted ways.

        1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        If they said they were interested in getting an LOI, I spent a few minutes customizing our stock one, mailed it, then followed up.

        1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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      21. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        I enthusiastically subscribe to the @steli school of following up, which is that you're not done until you get Yes or No. Either is fine.

        2 replies 10 retweets 60 likes
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      22. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        Engineers should believe sales folks more often, especially on the specific topic of "Deals come in, frequently, on the ~19th email."

        1 reply 0 retweets 33 likes
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      23. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        I have been the guy buying things after 18 unanswered emails. Life gets busy; that's the nature of being a business owner.

        1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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      24. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        If you've ever worked at a company, you know how much of work is not convincing people that you're right but organizing them to do things.

        2 replies 4 retweets 32 likes
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      25. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        A significant portion of sales, as distinct from order taking, is project managing the implementation of your thing at their company.

        2 replies 1 retweet 30 likes
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      26. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        Friction-free available-any-time onboarding has made a lot of SaaS companies very happy, but a little friction in the early days is useful.

        1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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      27. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        You cannot buy market research as good as a user telling you, in real time, that your setup process/etc is broken. You can compensate.

        2 replies 1 retweet 19 likes
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      28. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        One way to compensate is to take the implicit software offer (you're not just buying software, you're hiring expertise) and make it explicit

        2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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      29. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        If you're selling e.g. email marketing software, for your first ten customers, you can literally just write all the campaigns.

        1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
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      30. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        For every reason people have for today not being a good day to do it, test whether a fanatically dedicated free person fixes that or not.

        1 reply 1 retweet 19 likes
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      31. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 23 Oct 2017
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        We made a sale for Appointment Reminder from someone whose only way of getting data into the system was to fax it to us. Guess the cheat.

        1 reply 3 retweets 20 likes
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      32. 1 more reply

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