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This show is made for B2B marketers who are tired of the same old advice. Ugi Djuric, CEO of ContentMonk and B2B Vault, sits down with some of the best minds in B2B to talk about what’s really working, what’s broken, and what nobody tells you about growing a company. This is the show where people share their deepest insights and secret knowledge they wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: 00:00
And you can have everything on green and still lose a deal. You need to create what I call pole position in the minds of the customer. What we are competing on in the software world is your approach, how you solve a problem. But all these frameworks don't really focus on which is actually the most important is the third question, will they buy from us? Area where most software companies leave an enormous amount of money on the table starts with problem definition. What you often think that's the problem. What the customer is saying to you is often not even the problem, it's the cause of the problem. If I was in that person's shoe, would I wake up in the middle of the night sweating because I had this problem? You start seeing things and digging and finding problems that they didn't even know they had. When they react like, okay, I think you're right, we need something simpler, perfect, 10 minutes, no waste. But when they see that what you have is what they need, they start selling to you. You think you have this problem and I think you have that problem. And then most of the time, of course that's correct. Customers like, gosh, never thought about this before.
Speaker 2: 00:57
Hey guys, it's Oohgi here from content Monk. And welcome to the last episode of.
Speaker 3: 01:01
The B2B show with Oohgi for season one.
Speaker 2: 01:05
Today as a guest we have Ton Dobbe.
Speaker 3: 01:07
And this episode is a real masterclass on positioning. We are going to learn how to.
Speaker 2: 01:13
Find your perfect positioning in the market, how to define your customers problems, how to communicate these problems in your marketing efforts, marketing campaigns, how to communicate these problems for sales so the sales has an easier job of clients closing, closing leads.
Speaker 3: 01:30
So if you ever wanted to watch.
Speaker 2: 01:32
One episode on positioning for B2B software.
Speaker 3: 01:35
Companies, then let it be this one. Enjoy.
Speaker 2: 01:38
So my team prepared me a ton of research on you and I've been following your work for some time and I've been really fascinated with, you know, positioning, all that narrative messaging, all that kind of stuff very lately. So we're going to have a lot of fun. So tell me, Ton, how can software companies avoid being commoditized right now?
Speaker 1: 02:06
Very good question. Avoid being commoditized. I wrote a long essay on that. At the end it comes down to focus. I mean, how stupid it all and how simple it actually sounds because commoditization is happening everywhere. At the end, you need to find one particular place where you can win the bulk of the deals that come your way. And that is about that is trade number one in my book acknowledging that you cannot Please, everyone. So it's about not only like, who are you focusing on, but more actually on who are you not focusing on. And by the time that you start doing that, because many people think, okay, I got a horizontal software product, everybody can use it. Well, if everybody can use it, you're going to be, yeah, that's defocus on like solving a couple of problems like no one else can. Because there will always be someone else, someone coming to you and say, hey, you're missing this, you're missing that. Because everybody is using it in their own way, in their own use case. The moment you start focusing on, okay, yes, a product can technically be used by everyone, but we don't believe we are the best for everyone. But if it's about this and that, then there's no one else. And just their focus allows you to solve problems in a better way. It accelerates sales cycles, it increases win rates, it stops discounting. But more important also, it trickles down further into the organization. So it's, you have faster implementation, customer success will be more successful in getting the value out faster. And what's even more important, that is.
Speaker 2: 04:01
About.
Speaker 1: 04:03
Not being commoditized. You're freeing up precious R and D resources because the stupid questions or the questions that you, that don't belong to you don't come your way because you're focusing on a particular niche whereby customers that you win are going to be fans. So that's, that focus is just helping you also align and becoming far more resourceful. And what I typically see with a lot of software companies is they're always short in resources. So they're like, yeah, it's, there's. So there's far too many things to do. They don't have all the people. But it starts again with like, where you, where you don't focus. And if that's the case, then you can follow your own path. That is really important when it comes to not being commoditized and losing your edge.
Speaker 2: 04:52
And how do you.
Speaker 1: 04:53
Long answer. But there's so much to it.
Speaker 2: 04:55
Yeah, I love long answers. How do you find that focus? How do you find that gap in the market that other products are solving? Does it only necessarily need to come from the founder's personal beliefs on how specific problems should be solved and then building, orienting the problem around that, or there are some other other ways to do that?
Speaker 1: 05:22
That's a good point that you make there because, like, it's not about that. You're solving a problem that no one else is solving. I Mean, that's not, there's, that's not what it is because you're solving a problem that a lot of others are solving. And in a lot of markets there's a lot of options. But what you were just saying about the founder is believe how to solve the problem. That's where the nuance is. We're not competing by feature level. I mean, I came from the ERP world and we had a product that was 15 years, 20 years in the market. Technically we have every feature you could, you could think of. Then we competing against SAP and Oracle, companies that are 10 times, 20 times bigger than we were with. We did a bit have, I mean we were actually luxury with that product. We had 300 people in R and D. Well, guess what, SAP has 3,000 or, or 30,000, I don't know. So you never out compete them on the feature function level. So it comes down to not that because that is always a race that you cannot win. And technically of course, everybody can keep up. Okay, what, what do these guys all have? And we need to have the same. So we can also say, yes, we have that as well. That's not what it's about because future function comparison is very bad when it comes to winning business. What we are competing on in the, in the software world is your approach, how you solve a problem. And that is very hard to copy because yes, you can find the features on a page and we have this, we have this, we have this and we copy that. But you cannot copy how it was built because that is about the thinking of the people, the tools that are being used, how long you've been in the market, what is the technical infrastructure behind it and all of those type of things. That is about the belief that, okay, yes, this is a problem and everybody has been going this way, we believe it should go that way. And that is where, if you find out like what is, what are those fundamental decisions that you took early on that allow you to solve one particular or two particular or three particular problems in a way that others cannot? And that has to do with context. Not with, okay, this is the problem, but the problem put in a particular context, that's where you then start winning. And we did that, for example, with a product that I was responsible for back in the days and we took win rates from 20% to 80% without changing the product.
Speaker 2: 07:51
Last night I had a webinar in the XE5 community and I was talking about, at certain point, I was talking about how do you find like a content market Fit. And we came down to talking about categories and subcategories. And I told them like a very quick story about the cold email outreach space market. Are you familiar with that market?
Speaker 1: 08:19
Unfortunately, yes.
Speaker 2: 08:21
Yeah, so, but basically, right, for. For it's a very crowded space, right? And for a lot of years you there had like, you know, software such as, I don't know, like outreach, IO, mailshake, reply IO, many of them, right. And then Lemlist came, right? And I had an opportunity to be a head of content for Lemnis back in the day, and Lemlist came. And the sole reason why Lemlist became so successful was because they offer another way to do marketing, to do cold email outreach. And I said, okay, now this is the era of image personalization, dynamic personalization on scale, you know, that kind of stuff. And we communicated that kind of, I call it like a point of view through product. Basically we communicated that through content, and that's why we grew so quickly. But a few years later, another company came with a different view on how cold email outreach should be done. That is instantly right. And they said, okay, personalization does not make sense anymore. That much like everyone is now receiving, you know, personalized images, you know, with a cup of coffee and picture of you or a picture of your dog, you know, that kind of stuff. Like, so the new best way to do cold email is through volume. The more emails you send, the more replies you get. Right? And they built their product simply around the fact that they don't price you per email account that you connect. Like, like all the other products, like Clamless for example, and all the others you are paying like, I don't know, like 80, $90 per account, right? But instantly came in and said, okay, we are not going to charge you per account. You can connect unlimited number of email accounts, but you're going to charge you per amount of leads that you contact each month. Right? And that also changed the game. And that's why instantly grew from zero to like 20 million in like two years, three years, something like that. I would say that's a perfect example of that.
Speaker 3: 10:31
That.
Speaker 1: 10:32
Exactly. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's. I mean, but the issue at the end with, with taking an approach or taking a point of view is that a lot of companies are afraid to do that because taking a point of view is taking position. I talk about it a lot. And because you take this position, you don't take that position. And a lot of companies think, but then I'm losing business, which actually works. The opposite around. If you know that your point of view, your approach solves a particular problem for a particular group in a way others cannot, then it's about, okay, how big is this size of the market? And that's another aspect a lot of companies think, okay, we need to have a total addressable market of a couple of billion and it needs to grow by 10, 20, 30% because if we didn't get 1% of it, it's, we are, we are, you know, we're successful. So they are actually agreeing that winning, I mean I'm typically talking not about the product led growth world where of course there is no sales team, but I'm talking, yeah, my whole business is about the sales at SaaS World, the sales at software world. So they're actually agreeing that 10% win rate is good enough, which, yeah, it's a very ineffective way. So you can also turn it around and say it's 90% loss. So the moment you, you find that niche whereby these companies that are believing you, they are thinking also. Yeah, what it makes sense what you're saying, this is true. And suddenly you become number one in their, in their minds and the whole sales process starts to go a lot faster because people at the end are opinionated as well. And if it makes sense and if they trust it, then you get easily on the same wavelength. And that is of course the foundation of successful companies.
Speaker 2: 12:24
Tell me something I've been really thinking a lot about very recently. So very quick backstory. Six, seven months ago, we hired for ourselves, for our agency, we hired a person who basically became head of AI engineering. And that's all purpose of that, of that person was to help us, you know, eliminate thousands of wasted hours across our operations. You know, for writing, for managing clients, support, whatever, reporting, whatever it is. We basically built a ton of, you know, really a ton of AI systems that are like really personalized to, you know, what we need, right?
Speaker 1: 13:10
Yeah.
Speaker 2: 13:11
And recently out of, you know, accidentally I started talking more about that. I thought some things that we were doing were like a common knowledge. But it turned out that many people were actually like very fascinated with the things that we build internally. And a lot of people started asking us, hey, can you build these flows for us? Can you build these flows for us? And so on. So we decided, okay, like let's do some kind of a few filer projects. We still have to see what's going on. But that made me think like if we can, if we have software that gets us data, right, and we specific kind of Software that sends things out such as, for example, cold email outreach, you know, that kind of stuff. Like is there a need in the future for these kind of middlemen Software, right. Such as, for example, the CRM or you know, Docs or whatever it is, customer support software, you know, all of the kind of stuff. We can build everything that's personalized to us with software and use first party data. What do you think about that? Where will software be in the next, in the next years? And how can also another so sub questions to continue. How can then. What would then be the role of positioning when now, you know, if they need, you know, if a company has a very specific needs, they can just build it themselves very easily.
Speaker 1: 14:42
Well, first of all the question is whether people will build themselves. That's another thing. Because at the end, technically, even if you go decades back, people have been able to build things themselves. It's just how deep do you want to go from a technical perspective? Because you know, when I started my career back in the 90s, I've got gray hair, you know, we created finance systems and there were people that were, you know, doing a lot of things with Excel back in the days because it was still working for them, you know, and it's still going on. There were other companies, large companies that built all kind of custom software. They had a development department for that and it worked as well. So there will always be a, this balance between okay, what do I want to achieve as a, as a company? What is the problem that I try to solve? How critical is that problem for our organization? And how much do I need to have internal and how much can I actually outsource to someone else? And that bar is constantly shifting. Just look at what type of software we were buying 10 years ago versus what the software we're trying. Right. Buying right now. We couldn't have, yeah, you couldn't have imagined in 2010 or 15 how different the world would be today. So that, that is always shifting. The, the, the norms are always recreated, expectations always recreated. So what was good two years ago isn't good enough now anymore. And hence people start acting in a different way. Questions that people asked five years ago in particular sales situations are not asking us anymore. They ask different questions now. How do you position again? It's starting again with acknowledge that you cannot please everyone, find a problem that you can solve that is highly valuable for a customer, highly critical for a customer, for a particular segment of the market or a particular context of the market that you can solve in a way that Others cannot. And that's how we're constantly evolving. And that said, you made a very, very strong point. The moment you've done that and you're positioning around something, that's where you have taken that position and you got your edge. Yeah. Don't believe it'll stay because the half life of product, the half life of products out there, any product in consumer world, but also in the software world, in the software world even more, it's shrinking and shrinking and shrinking faster every single day. So for example, when if I like let's say go 20 years back, we were on a release cycle of maybe two years, three years. No, no, not three years, but two years, one and a half year. And that for a lot of customers was fast. You cannot imagine that anymore. You know, if you now say you have a release cycle of 15 weeks, it's like that's slow. So with the tools today, with the infrastructure that's available, with the abilities for people to, I mean he had this whole wave of no code, low code tools. All of that is also going away because you now prompt and you start vibe coding for a lot of problems. Solving things through vibe coding can be, can be good enough until it breaks. You know, so that again that, that is also shifting all the time. So it depends there's notion, there's no golden way. And I mean we are now finding problems that were not there 10 years ago. So there will always be new opportunities to create something new and to move to raise the bar again. I mean now we have seen, we've seen this like the last three, four years Gen AI. Now you see this wave coming with agentic AI. Two years later, I can guarantee you there will be a new one.
Speaker 2: 18:26
Yeah. Tell me Tauno, why, why have you decided to work only with sales letter companies?
Speaker 1: 18:33
Again, that's about acknowledging that you cannot please everyone. It's as simple as that. I mean I have, this is where I got 30 years of experience. I've helped dozens and dozens of companies to break through growth barriers and. Yeah, well the, the difference between sales LED and product LED is in essence, of course, if you put it really simple, Product led growth companies grow because people swipe their credit cards, sign up for something that there's €10, 15, 20amonth and then you move on and maybe you add someone in your team, you have two users and then maybe another one is one. But the world that I'm part of, it's not about that at all. Know the, the average investment at a minimum is like 10k a year. But then it quickly goes to, to, to 30, 40, 50, 100k, sometimes a million, which requires to convince a lot more people in the organization. Yesterday I was speaking to a company that said we have on average between nine and 15 people we have to convince. Uh, it takes six to nine months. Well, that is horrible. In the product las world, you would have that. It's like the sales cycle in productless size is nine to ten minutes. It's. Yeah. So there's so many nuances to this. And tell me, okay, this.
Speaker 2: 19:58
Okay, let's do something very interesting. Right? So you don't know me, right. I'm also like, I also love more sales led motions than the product led. I mean, for the projects that I'm running, I have always been sales led. Right. So I learned a thing or two about sales demos, you know, qualifications, outreach, all that kind of stuff. Right. But without knowing how I approach sales. Right. What would you say to me, can you give me like a five minute masterclass on how can I close more deals? What would be the secret knowledge that you have that's timeless, that can be applied to any kind of a business situation or any kind of a sales process sales deal. So what are those? Let's say psychology backed, data science backed on how sales sales work?
Speaker 1: 21:00
Okay, well, I'm not going to say it's. It's science backed. It's just what I see working over the last. Yeah, that is good enough.
Speaker 2: 21:08
Good enough.
Speaker 1: 21:08
Good enough. It's good enough. Yeah, exactly. So I don't just say, okay, this is said by Gartner.
Speaker 3: 21:12
Hey guys, just a real quick sorry for interrupting the episode. Did you ever feel overwhelmed with the amount of low quality and crappy content that you find on Google and LinkedIn? Well, B2B Vault, the producers of this episode, solved that problem. B2B Vault is a database of hundreds and hundreds of expert levels, insights and articles written by 300 B2B marketing experts. And B2B Vault monitors hundreds of websites every single week to uncover new trends and new articles. So you are the first to learn the new trends, insights and playbooks from the best B2B marketing minds. And every Monday morning, we send out a newsletter with a few most important reads every B2B marketeer should read at the start of their week to make sure that you hit your quota and get more deal deals in the pipeline. So just very quickly, if you're interested in this, go to the B2B Vault.com newsletter and join thousands of other B2B marketeers in our Monday Newsletter see you there.
Speaker 1: 22:21
And whatever, you know, the likely will be that I think I have a more. What is a controversial approach to this? A lot of people will say, you know, follow. I have a process, you know, that is medic and medpic and this spice and this whatever, all of the type of things which in the sales led SaaS World on the sales software world is a process that you need to have in place. The problem with that at the end is it focuses really only on will people buy and will they buy now. So are you speaking to the right people? Do they have budget is a timeline there and you can have everything on green and still lose a deal. What all these framework don't really focus on, which is actually the most important is the third question, will they buy from us? And ideally, if you're in sales already in your first meeting, you need to call. Need to create what I call pole position in the minds of the customer. Which is about taking a different. Yeah, taking things in a different approach. I recently wrote a long essay about it. It has been in my mind for maybe a decade right now in terms of how I do it, but I never really documented it and it's like a four level sales confidence essay. So what I see a lot with sales and I'm actually training a group of about 10 salespeople from an ERP company in Germany right now after I've done the repositioning. All these people are, you know, they're young, they're driven, they're not stupid, they know the product by heart and, and still only close 15, maybe 20% of the deals. And where it all starts is yes, they know the product really well, but it's also their Achilles heel because they know the problems the product so well. When a customer comes to them and say, says I literally had this example this week. We have payroll solution. We need to have a new payroll solution. But now we need one that is integrated with, with our finance system. Okay. The first thing these people think is like we have that actually it's natively integrated. So it's almost like they're stopping there because that's the problem these people want to solve. They think, well, the moment you, you do that and you forget to start looking deeper for what is the actual problem they're trying to solve. And you also only say okay, well what you ask is what we have, let me show it to you. And then you can make a decision what these people are then going to do. They're going to compare you to all the other things they See, and they're going to compare you. Guess what, is the user interface nice? How much does it cost? Are you cheaper than the rest? Because they are. They're looking at some. Yeah, what, what they have today can be. Can be. Yeah, changed by what you. But by what you're offering. So the biggest problem and the area where most software companies leave an enormous amount of money on the table is to start with problem definition. Problems are layered. And what you often think that's the problem or the customer is saying to you is often not even the problem, it's the cause of the problem. Because for this very particular example, integration wasn't there. Well, now we add integration and now the problem is solved. Well, no, what people actually are and what buyers are not capable of is describing what the problem is really all about. And I always say to salespeople, don't ask this question immediately or directly, but every answer you get from a customer when you ask them, okay, so, so tell me, what's the issue? What are you experiencing in these type of thing? Always kind of in your head? Start asking the question, if I was in that person's shoes, would I wake up in the middle of the night sweating because I had this problem? And until you get to a clear yes, that's the case, you're not deep enough with the problem. Because talking about this payroll example again, I mean, who cares that the payroll product is not integrated? Well, when we started digging into it, okay, we have a new CEO and he wants to have all kind of reports. And it takes us a lot of time, a lot of manual time to do that. Okay, so there's manual time here. Okay, how much time do you need? Well, we need on average about 50 hours with about two or three people to create these reports. So you can now put a number to it. Is that the problem? No, it's not. You give it to the CEO. CEO, he either does two things. He either sees a problem and he starts asking more questions so you need more time, or he's actually saying thank you, looks at the report, sees a problem in the report in terms of how the business is doing, but it's incorrect information. So now he makes the wrong decision. So, for example, he sees that in one particular part of the company, they go over budget when it comes to salaries, and he knows that he has to save 10% cost. So what is the instant idea? Take 10% of the people out. But there was an error in the report because of manual work. So now suddenly this person in payroll is responsible for a layoff of 10% in this department, that would wake me up at night. And then you can go on and on and on, you know, so the problem definition is one. Now another thing talking about these four layers. The moment you've got that, it all gets easier. And that is to me is level one of sales confidence that you understand your differentiation inside out. And we talked about this before. What is, how is your product offering and creating a different level of value that others cannot deliver to your customer? That has to do with the problem, that the customer has the value of the problem, the criticality of the problem, which is another story again. And how you, how do you solve it? So your approach, you first of all need to understand what is that differentiation and dream it, you know, be able to play with it. Because the moment you know that, now you know the context and now you can start asking different questions. Because the customer comes to you this way, because they don't know that they have, that they might have, that you have a solution for them that is specifically built for their context. They come to you, they ask, they offer you a certain level of information. You start challenging them. And because you know your differentiation, you can, you can just start digging in a particular area. And because of that, you start digging around, you start collecting dots. That becomes your. That's actually level number two. You start seeing things and digging and finding problems that they didn't even know they had. And then because you got various number of dots, you can this level three. You can say, based on what you just told me, you came to me, you need this. We understood that this is a problem. This is a problem. This is a problem. This is a problem. What I'm seeing is something completely different when I connect the dots. You think you have this problem and I think you have that problem. And then most of the time, of course that's correct. Customer is like, gosh, never thought about this before. You're right, we're actually solving the wrong problem here. And that is of course how you already start positioning yourself in a completely different area, whereby they are looking at other players doing it the right way. And if you got the right prospects, you come pole position in the head and then the level four comes in that you actually take that genuine value creation as something that you also use for qualifying at. If you believe that you can technically help them, but you see red flags on their end because of a number of things that need to be in place as well, start saying, okay, well, we can technically help you, but we don't think that you are the right type of customer for right type of solution. So I think we should, you should actually, you're better off with this solution or that solution and then see how they react when they react like, okay, I think you're right, we need something simpler, perfect, 10 minutes, no waste. But when they see that what you have is what they need, they start selling to you. So this is like how this, how this builds up. We did that at Unit four, for example, same product, we had one product that we sold international, we had a couple of countries that, where this software had been sold for 10 or 15 years. People knew how to do this. This was sort of their day to day drill. They closed about 20% of the deal. We started introducing this product in a new market where there was no one that knew about it. We repos, we repositioned it in the right way, started using that approach and we had very short sales cycles and very short disqualification cycles, but we won 80%. And at some point even our biggest competitors like SAP and Oracle started qualifying out because they knew that if Unit four is in for this type of customer, we have no business here which is, you know, technically, of course we could, we could help a lot more customers. And the pipeline was sort of, yeah, unpredictable. But at least we closed 20% then. It's like a volume game. Well, guess what? In the ERP world there are no, there's no real volume because it's about far too, far too large deals. But yeah, once we figured out where we should very quickly run out and disqualify. We did that. And we can also figure out very quickly whether we were the right ones and we were pole position in their head. So it's about sales confidence at the end. And it starts with really understanding what your differentiation is all about. And I guess what I see in the market is that sales are really understanding the problem, the product, but they have no clue what the differentiation is about. Yeah, we have the new AI feature which is new now, but now like five, five weeks from now, it's maybe not that new anymore.
Speaker 2: 32:30
Can you like briefly walk me through your value viability volume framework and how can all of these that you just talked about tie to that?
Speaker 1: 32:44
Yeah, yeah. So this is what you're talking about. My book the Remarkable Effect. So I wrote this book indeed, because I'm fascinated with companies that we start talking about and keep talking about. I mean it's at the end when that happens, you're positioned in the right way and the right customers start talking about you because you offer them something that is remarkable. So what I figured out after, yeah, reflecting on this for quite a long time, that companies we start talking about, and keep talking about companies that actually win the bulk of the business, they are scoring very high on 10 trades. Now, the 10 traits are described in my book. It's trade number one to 10. And. But I also then started to categorize them in, in what I call value. Well, what I call levers. The first one, like you said, is the value lever. The value lever is more foundational to your business. It's trait number one, acknowledge that you cannot please everyone, which is fine technically, is very sharp segmentation. The second thing is once you start doing that, it becomes easier to offer something that's valuable and desirable. These two things really go together. Because if something is valuable, doesn't mean that it's desirable. And that is about really looking at the problem again. What is the problem that you're solving? How valuable is that problem to solve and how critical is it to solve? A little bit of lesson again, if something is highly valuable to solve but not critical, it becomes a nice to have. So if the market is bad, it's the first thing that goes off the table. So you want something to buy. Even if the market is bad, the value and criticality stay high. And then the third, the third lag is. This is my triangle in my book on page number 24, what is your ability to exceed expectations solving that particular problem? And that is where remarkability comes from. So that's trait number two. And then the last trait in that value lever, if you aim to be different, not better. Every month, open up any website for a software company, SaaS Company. The bulk of them are really in the game of better. We're faster, we're cheaper, we're more accurate. But it's always like this thing that is you have to judge, you cannot judge that what is better, what is faster than what. But if you're different, that is something that people can actually see. They can compare that. Like, hey, hey, is this difference and that difference, because that means also that your competitor is different. Which one is the better difference for me, which one helps me better? So that's value foundation. The moment you get that right, a lot of the other things become way easier. And that is where a lot of companies actually are leaving a lot of money on the table and are actually trying to solve symptoms in their business that they wouldn't have to solve if the value foundation was correct. Then you go to what I call the viability lever, which is a combination of four traits. Master the art of curiosity, keep asking questions. That becomes so much easier when you are zooming in on a particular niche in the market. Because now you start to see everything that is, that's going on there rather than the high level stuff. The. The number five is trade number five, they offer something valuable. Sorry, that is number two. They. They create new value possibilities instead of creating existing capabilities that are marginally better because of their design. New, new, new, new value possibilities. It's novel, it's. And you can only find those when you go deep enough in terms of how you zoom in. Then follows number six. They turn customers into fans or they, they create customers and not just. They create fans and not just customers. The fandom is a very important thing. So many companies, when you ask them, okay, what do you do when you are working on a new new customer and they ask for, they want to speak to someone else and then you already see them sweating because they have to send them to the same five that they always send them to because there's only five people that are actually prepared enough to speak to one of your prospects again. But guess what? Even if I look back at unit four, the team in the Netherlands and Belgium that was getting to the 80% win rate, they could just give a prospect the list of customers. Pick one, here's the number. Call them. All of them are referenceable. It's a completely different ballgame simply because you sell to the right type of people that actually value what makes you different in the right way. Then number seven is coming and that's. They focus on the essence. And that is a broader topic. But focusing on the essence is about resourcefulness. You know, knowing where to say no and where to say yes. In marketing, in sales, in support and implementation, in R and D, that is guardrails. And then you move to the volume lever. Actually the viability lever and volume lever actually go sort of side by side. And it is about. Yeah, they create momentum. They master the art of creating momentum. But guess what? If you get all these early, earliest things to a high level, momentum will start to kind of help itself. They sell the idea, not the product. Which is also about this idea of point of view that you talked about earlier on. We think about this this way. You take position, you sell an idea, you sell a transformation like where companies are going and you don't sell. We have 50 new features. Do you want to see them? And then the last one, and this is a very important one, which is also only possible if you do the others in a better way, they surprise and hit the right nerve. So that's in a NutShell, what the 10 trades are about, what the three levers are all about. Why do you need all these three levers? The first, the viability, the volume, the value lever is foundational. Once you get that value in place, the foundation in place, then you can start building more sustainable business, which is about the viability part. It's about not only focusing on the short term, but also have enough resources in place to focus on what you have to, where you have to be in two years time or three years time so that the things that don't really give money today. And then the last one, the volume one, that's about making sure that the momentum is created and this is not about the linear growth, but actually that it starts to kind of compound together. And you can already imagine when you close the gap on each of these traits, that volume will become easier and easier and easier. Doing more with the same people One of the metrics that I've become a big fan of these days is what I, what they call ARR per employee. Sometimes when I ask people, okay, what is your AR per employee? People think, okay, it's my sales targets. Everybody has a sales target of this. No, no, no, no, no, it's not your sales target. If you look at all the people in your company and you divide your revenue by them, what is left? And if it's like a hundred, a hundred thousand per person or 150,000 per person, it's not the right level because you're, you got a lot of inefficiencies in the business these days. Of course, with, with all the AIs in place, there's a lot to do there. But doing things more efficient operationally doesn't mean that you are more efficient in your go to market motion. Because it still can be a very high cost of cost of customer acquisition. There can be a very high, high loss rate. There can be very in, in insufficient or inefficient implementation cycles. So even, you know, if you sell to the wrong customer, no matter how many AI tools you have in place, it's still an inefficient implementation process because you, you're sort of trying to do like make the product do something that these people don't want. But when you talk, when you sell to the right customer, the ones that become fans, it's built for them. So it, it just, it's a very smooth implementation time. So all of these things just Compound. That's a nutshell. The book. Yeah.
Speaker 2: 41:14
I mean, this was. Tom, this was a really great 40 minute masterclass on how to build remarkable companies. Tommy, one question that I have for you before we wrap up is according to you, how do you win? Added the game called life. What is that meaning for you?
Speaker 1: 41:36
This is, that's a very interesting question to me. It's always, I mean, the value that you create for other people, whether that is private in your, in your family life, but also business wise, a lot of companies start with, okay, I, I'm starting a company right now and in three years time we're going to have a big exit. Well, that is for me the wrong approach. You know, the question at the end for me is also like, okay, how do you gonna do that? You know, where is it exit coming from? And that starts with if, if you do it the other way around, if you measure your success by the value or the impact you help others make like your customers, that it will come your way privately and business wise. That's, that's how I would describe it. It's. For me, it's also the journey, not the end point.
Speaker 2: 42:26
Don, that's great. Thank you very much for being on the show. I had a lot of fun speaking with you, man. Really insightful.
Speaker 1: 42:35
Thank you. It was a pleasure.