Foundations Course – Lecture 7 – Growth Engines

Yonatan Stern: First of all, welcome to lecture number seven. I can’t believe we are already in lecture number seven. As you recall, I promised you 13 lectures, so we’re crossing the middle of it. The usual introduction — myself, Libby, Ayala, and obviously Ruthie, who is not here. Ruthie, give me your picture — next time we’ll add you here. What is SmartUp Academy? I always repeat this. Our purpose is to teach the profession of building a company. What I believe is that we can teach entrepreneurs how to build a company. There are principles, very much like in any engineering profession, that you can teach. Many of the problems you face or are going to face have been encountered before, and there are solutions for them.

So what we try to do here is expose all of these issues in advance and teach you how to deal with them. This is called the Foundation Course. The first thing we want to do is tell you what we consider to be a successful company, and we put three principles for that. First and foremost, it should be profitable. Second, it should be fast-growing. Third, it should have a modest investment. A company that raised $50 million and was sold for $30 million is not a huge success, even though the exit was $30 million. What we’re trying to show here is how to build a company with a relatively modest investment. Ellie, there’s a chair right here. What is a modest investment? Anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars up to 3, 4, 5 million dollars — what today in today’s parlance is called pre-seed, which is kind of ridiculous. We also have workshops to deal with specific subjects.

The most important thing is — I can teach whatever I want, I can give lectures, I can send materials. But the moment you face the problem, you forget everything I said and you’re going to do whatever your gut tells you to do. That’s life. So the only way I believe you learn is by practicing. For that, I put up the picture that reminds everybody: you’re not going to go to a doctor who just finished medical school after six years, even if he’s at the top of the dean’s list and has never seen a patient. You’d stay away until he’s spent three, four, five years in a hospital. And really, you’d want to talk to the head of the department — someone with 20 years of experience. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

Since we are at the midpoint, I thought I’d give a very quick recap of the previous lectures. I’ll do it quickly and, if we have time at the end, I took two or three slides from each lecture to touch on what we covered in the last six lectures.

The first lecture was about the venture capital model and comparing it to the SmartUp model. I think this is the core of what people believe a startup should look like — and a lot of that comes from what VCs need in order to return their investment. We talked about how money flows in a venture capital firm, why they must have an exit within a relatively short period of time — about seven years, maybe with a small extension — and how working with us means targeting something very different, which is profitability. We’re talking about the infinite game, no exit. We want people to build their company for as long as they want, without any outside constraints.

The fourth lecture was about what a business model is. We built a spreadsheet — essentially, a business model is a spreadsheet that looks at revenues and expenses, and the difference between the two is hopefully profit. At the beginning it’s probably a loss. We also tied the three principles — be profitable, grow fast, small investment — to three measurements on the business model: the number of months to profitability, the investment required, and the number of months to repay the investment. So if you raise $2 million — when do you generate enough profits to pay back that $2 million? I know it sounds like heresy for tech startups. But in reality, in every other normal business, when people give you money, they want to see it back. If you invest in real estate, the first question you ask is: when can I get my money back? It’s only the venture capital, high-tech bubble that lives in a very different universe.

[Audience question about “retaining”]

What do you mean by retaining? Generate enough profit to cover the expense — whether you actually return it or not is a second question. Profits just accumulate. Let’s move on — I’ll talk to you later, because right now I’m just repeating what I covered a few lectures ago.

Obviously, if the top line is revenues, then the question of pricing models is critical. We talked about how you can charge very different prices to different market segments — you just need to be smart about how you differentiate them. It depends on your positioning: do you want to go upstream? Do you want to go after businesses or individuals? Our recommendation, since you want to be profitable, is that it’s much easier to be profitable charging $100,000 than charging $100. But obviously, everything about your approach has to change if you’re charging $100,000. We talked about that as well.

The last lecture was about jobs to be done. We talked about the four dimensions by which you can analyze and measure what the job to be done is. Functional — what is the specific job the customer wants to do? Contextual — in what context, when, and where do they want to do it? Emotional — many times there is an emotion involved, like when people buy dresses, watches, or a car as a status symbol; they want to feel good about it. And Social. That’s a very quick summary of what we’ve discussed until now.

Today I want to talk about a completely different concept, which is the growth engine. What is a growth engine? It’s a process — let’s start with that. It’s a process that the company does, or plans to do, many times and repeatedly. It’s not a one-time process. It’s something you do as part of the company’s ongoing operation, and it can exist in any part of the company — branding, marketing, manufacturing, sales, accounting, customer support. You name it, there’s a process somewhere. What I want to talk about is what a growth engine looks like in each of those areas.

A growth engine is a scalable process. What do I mean by scalable? You can double the output with a very small increase in input — and the input is effort, money, or whatever resource you’re using. A linear process is one where if you want to double the output, you double the input. This is not that. I avoided calling it exponential, but it’s clearly something where often you make an initial investment, you build some infrastructure, and then you can get a much higher output because of that infrastructure. We’ll see many examples throughout this presentation.

Growth engines are really critical to accomplishing the three targets we want when building your company. If you don’t think about the concept of a growth engine, chances are you will never accomplish them. So it’s a mindset more than anything else. You have a job, it’s repeatable, it’s happening all the time — spend the time to think about how you can do it more efficiently. More efficiently means scalably. “I need to do this ten times bigger, but I don’t want to increase the expense ten times.”

Now I want to talk about what people often think of as growth engines — I call them growth opportunities, but they’re not really growth engines. I hope that by going through this list, you’ll start seeing the distinction I’m making.

A strategic partner — you have a startup and suddenly you get a phone call from a big company saying, “We heard about what you do, we’re really interested, we want to talk, we want to do something together.” Is that a growth engine? The answer is no. It’s a one-time event, it’s not scalable, and in most cases with a strategic partner it’s like the fly telling the horse, “Look at how much work we did together.” Strategic partners are usually a mismatch for a small company, so don’t waste your time on them.

A very large customer — again, tremendously tempting to pour all your effort in. The problem with a very large customer is that, unless you’re already a much bigger company, it’s not scalable, and they know they’re a very large customer. They basically own you — they drag you around, they consume your resources completely. Don’t call those growth engines.

An important distributor — you’re doing something, you get a phone call from India, someone tells you, “I’m the biggest distributor of XYZ things in India, I heard great things about you.” Stay away from that. It’s not an opportunity — he’s calling you because he’s in distress. I’m just saying this because I’ve seen it time and again: companies come in excited about a phone call like that, and it’s really not something to be excited about. That’s not a growth engine.

A critical trade show — I don’t know how many of you run a company, but in most companies there’s an annual or twice-yearly major trade show for your specific industry. Your VP of Marketing tells you, “We have to be there — if we’re not, it sends a statement that we’re a total failure.” The booth costs $100,000, sending the people costs another $50,000, and so on — a quarter of a million dollars. But it’s really important to be there.
There is an annual or twice-a-year huge trade show for the specific things that you are doing. And your VP of Marketing tells you we have to be there, because if we are not, it’s a statement that we are a total failure. We have to be there. And the booth costs $100,000, sending the people another $50,000, and so on — a quarter of a million dollars. But it’s really important for us to be there.

The answer is there’s a better use of a quarter of a million dollars. You can go there as a visitor, spend $500, and walk the hall. But why? Because it’s not scalable. Even if it was successful, you can’t do another one the following month. You just can’t. So it’s irrelevant. Kind of. I’m really digging into it just to give you a sense of what is scalable and what is a growth engine — something you can turn on again and again — versus things that are one-time or just noise, even though they look so important.

Marketing. Okay, so you hire a VP of Marketing and they pull out their plan, which is the same plan they used in their last company, and the one before that, and the one before that. It’s the same plan. We’re going to post blogs on the Internet, we are going to write articles, we’re going to issue press releases, and most importantly, when a new VP arrives, they change the logo. I have about 10 different logos of ZoomInfo because every VP of Marketing that came in changed the logo. I didn’t let them, but there was like a sun with a lot of rays and each VP of Marketing pulled one of those. So we started with 11 and I think we ended with seven — just so they feel like they did something.

Why is it not a growth engine? It’s not a growth engine because the other side doesn’t look at it. You can write as many press releases as you want — nobody reads them. It’s that simple. If you want your blogs to be interesting, it’s really difficult to do. And after you do two or three of them, unless you are a phenomenal writer, most companies produce two or three good ones and then they stop. It’s just hard to do good, interesting, and innovative writing every week or every month. Same goes for articles. So they are not a growth engine because it’s very hard to sustain. Not the end of the world, but it’s very hard. Very few companies succeed, and it’s difficult to invent content that people will actually read. Obviously, the next big feature — if we just had that feature, the whole world will buy it. No, they never heard about you. So forget about it.

Company attention must be focused on identifying and building growth engines. I said it before this slide and I’m saying it again. You really have to be obsessed with thinking: how can we do it better? And if it’s an important activity, you have to be haunted by the question — how can we do it better? Because that’s the only way you’re going to grow fast and become successful and profitable.

So let’s look a little bit at what other companies did. We’ve already talked about many of these things, but you’ll see them again. We talked about SEO — companies that build a very large presence with very large datasets of information on the Internet and attract a lot of people. So how do they do it? This time, instead of talking about the technology of the SEO long tail, I’m going to talk about the growth engine embedded in it. It’s just a different view, a different angle on the same activity.

So LinkedIn — what did they do? They basically built an empty platform. Who puts in the content that is worth so much? You, and you, and you, and you. Their success was in convincing all of you that it’s important and valuable for you to put your input, your data, your information into it, whether you are a company or a person. But remember, their growth today — this is a growth engine — has very little to do with their investment, because it’s the impact they had on people: they come in on their own and put the information in. By the way, because of that, they lost the lawsuit. There was a company that scraped them, they sued them, and the company said: but you don’t own the data. It belongs to the people. The only reason they put it there is for others to read it. I’m one of those others, and I’m reading it. And they won — which is why ZoomInfo had all the data from LinkedIn. LinkedIn sent us a cease-and-desist letter, and while we were debating with them, the courts solved the problem and said: no, you don’t own the data.

TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor started by seeding the Internet — or their site — with a list of locations and hotels. They just put the hotel, basic information, address, a few pictures, and then people — they didn’t even expect it — people started writing a lot of input about the hotels, about the locations, and it started attracting more people. And then they figured out how to make money out of it. Again, I knew the founder. They built the foundation, but the data came from users.

Yelp, same thing. You can even find on Yelp, if you look carefully, a company called Elyon Technologies up on River Street in Cambridge. That’s the name under which ZoomInfo was created in the year 2000. They have a very old database entry where that information is still there — nobody enriched it, for whatever reason, I don’t know why.

Facebook, very similar, except it wasn’t just that the platform was empty — you also have the network effect. Nobody will put information there unless there are readers. So people invite other people to connect with them, to see what they’re doing, and so forth. That’s a typical, classical network effect. Again, I’m not saying it was easy to do — don’t misunderstand me. I’m just trying to show you what a growth engine is and how it feeds on itself.

Zillow is somewhat interesting, which is why I included it here. It’s basically one page per address in the U.S. — every address in the U.S. appears there. They began with just a mapping application, but then they started automatically enriching it by connecting it to other databases. For example, every house in the U.S. that is sold or bought is reported, so they can pull that public-domain data, enter it, and start doing analysis — in this neighborhood, in this city, the average price per square foot is such and such. They made all of these connections, and from that point on, the information is updated automatically all the time. That’s the growth engine of it.

And obviously Amazon — no need to talk about that.

What I want to do now is go over something I described, I think in the second or third lecture, which is one of the companies in SmartUp called Ofster. Those of you who were here have heard this. But what I’m going to do is look at it again, this time from the perspective of a growth engine — how did we do it with very little resources, and how did it grow afterward?

So it’s a tool for DevOps engineers. I trust that nobody here has ever heard of Elasticsearch or Elasticsearch clusters. Doesn’t really matter. The prospects were DevOps engineers who worked with Elasticsearch and were looking for a way to create a brand. So that was the question we were facing.

The way we did it — for those of you who weren’t at that lecture — we started by looking at the problem, not the solution, because we didn’t have a solution at the time. We knew there was a problem in maintaining Elasticsearch clusters. So we asked ourselves: if a DevOps engineer encounters a problem, what do they do? I asked it several times, and then suddenly Ziv, who was the founder, said: well, there are error messages that Elasticsearch produces and puts in a log. So I look at the log and I see the error messages, and I know what’s wrong. And I said: oh, interesting. How many error messages are there?

Let me first show you some examples. “Could not lock.” “Index writer is locked.” “Delaying allocation for unassigned shards.” Basically mumbo jumbo — none of us understand what it means. But what we did was take all of this and build one page per error message, and we published them. And lo and behold — because this is Google — we put the first line you see, “could not lock” or whatever it is, and we came up first. The reason is there was no competition. Who on earth is going to put information on Elasticsearch error logs? Nobody in the world except Ofster. So when someone copied an error message from their log and pasted it into Google, we came up first. That was an easy win.

How did we do that? I asked Ziv: tell me, how many error messages exist? He said, I don’t know. I said, can you find out? He said, yeah, piece of cake, give me a few minutes. He wrote a script — because Elasticsearch is open source — don’t ask me what was in the script. And he found that there are about 700 different error messages.

So I asked him: okay, let’s take a few error messages. Tell me what they mean. He looked at them and said: honest to God, I have no idea. So here we are, developing a product, we don’t know what it is, trying to build a brand, we have a direction and we have no clue what these error messages mean.

So what we did was the following — and I’m explaining it in detail because I want to show you how you build a growth engine with very little investment. We took those 700 and asked: what can we say about them? We can copy where the error message is printed and show three lines of code above and three lines of code below. We can also show you what part of the code it’s in — whether it’s in the indexing, the search, or whatever. And we added whatever additional context we could find on the Internet, mainly on Stack Overflow. And we published all of it.

Here’s what happened. We published the 700 pages and discovered that about 60 pages generated the most traffic. That meant those were the error messages people cared about most. So what we did — which is not rocket science — was go to experts and ask them what these messages really mean. Most people didn’t know offhand, but they did the research, and we enriched those 60 pages. So think about the amount of work we invested, which was very little — and we ended up with the best real content on the web on this topic. That’s what I call the search-engine growth engine.

Here are the results — you can see the traffic growing over time. The reason it ends in 2022 is that a year later we sold the company.

So traffic is great, but we needed customers. So we did another growth engine trick. The trick is: you develop a free product and give it to people. The only thing you ask is that when they use it or download it, they enter their name and email address. So you convert all of that anonymous traffic into real people. And this was it — “Welcome to Ofster Free Checkup.” You just take two files from your Elasticsearch cluster, upload them, it analyzes them, and you need to create an account. We made an investment to develop the Checkup tool — maybe a month or two of engineer time. But from then on, it worked forever.

Growth engines. Remember — you want a small amount of effort that can scale up.
Checkup. And you can just take two files from the Elasticsearch cluster and put them in there. It analyzes them, and you need to create an account. We made an investment to develop Checkup — that was, I don’t know, a month, two months of an engineer’s time. But from then on, it worked forever. Growth engines — remember, you want a small amount of effort that can scale up.

This is very different than dealing with a strategic partner or a big customer who sucks up all your resources. We did that. Kind of on the side, you start to get the feeling of what a growth engine is. Very low customer acquisition cost — we spend very little money in order to get this. And these are the numbers. You can see it growing. The red is the new ones, and the blue is the total number.

But we wanted to continue — this was the first content we developed, what I showed you. But there was a hunger in the market for a lot of explanations and how-tos on Elasticsearch. It turns out that Elasticsearch was pretty bad at writing content about the how-to — how do I do this, how do I do that with my system?

And I’ll explain in a moment why only good engineers can produce good content. But what do good engineers do? They write code. So the VP of Marketing says, “I need you to write at least one how-to article a week.” And the engineer says, “Sure, no problem.” And then a month later they come back and say, “So where is it?” He says, “Oh, I was busy. There were these issues.” Nothing happens. That’s why there was not good content on the web about how-tos. And here’s how we did it.

So what we did is we encountered the same problem internally. We weren’t that smart — we tried to use our engineers to write good content and we encountered the same problem. So the marketing group was very smart and they said, “I have a solution.”

The solution was: let’s use our very sophisticated, talented technical people just to tell us what they want written — not the writing itself, just what is interesting, what how-tos are interesting. So they sat down and put together a curated list of — let’s call it — titles, subjects. “Tell me how to do this, how to do that, write me an article about that.” We had a curated list, and then we published it. On Upwork, or wherever — I don’t remember exactly, we published in several places. We asked people who understood Elasticsearch if they wanted to bid, and we were going to pay $300 per article. We got several good bids and people did it.

Then we took what they wrote and sent it to the same people who curated the list, and we asked: is that what you expected? Is it good enough or not? We narrowed down the writers to about — I think there were five or six at the time the company was sold — who were writing really good content. So what each one of them would do is go on the list, pick a subject, put their name next to it, and write it. There was a person on the marketing team — who happened to be my daughter — that managed it and made sure they did write it. They gave her the deadline and she kept on them to get it done.

We edited the articles once the technical people said it was good enough. My daughter then looked at it and corrected the English. And we consistently published several articles a week. Consistently. Why? Because we outsourced the work, but in a way that we had full control over the outcome at a fraction of the investment. This is why I went into the details. Remember, it’s a growth engine — you want something that is sustainable, that can continue to work. People came in and out of the group of writers. Some went on vacation, some did two or three articles and stopped. But we were always hiring people per article. We had a process for figuring out whether they were good writers or not. We produced a list of subjects and it continued to produce — all of that kept going.

As I said, the company was acquired. It was acquired for what I’ll call AutoOps — that was the main product, which was extremely important for Elastic — but also for the content and the brand that we had created. They integrated the AutoOps tool into their platform. But more importantly, at least for me, is that they took the marketing team to recreate the same process. Literally — they took the marketing team, used the same writers, outside writers, same process, exactly the same process. We heard later on that they had tried for years to produce this content unsuccessfully. It drove them crazy. The reason they bought us was that their customers had started turning to us much more than they turned to Elastic. And the tech support engineers — when people would call and say, “How do I do this?” — would say, “Oh, go to them, they’ll tell you.” That really angered Elastic.

So again, growth engine — because the amount of effort we put in was very small compared to the output.

Let me give you another example: CardScan. You can see the picture — it’s a scanner. I’m now talking about the mid-90s, 1995, 1996. If you wanted to connect any hardware — this one specifically, any hardware — to your computer, they had a desktop box. You opened it, there was a bus. A bus is basically a slot where you put boards. You had a controller board, you put it in, and that’s how it connected. I showed the demo to my board of directors and Chris, one of them, said, “Jonathan, there’s no way anybody is going to do that.” And I said, “You’re absolutely right, but that’s the only product I have.”

So later on with this product, we already had a parallel port — something I’m not sure anyone here remembers. Anyway, installing CardScan was tough. People called tech support. The number of tech support people grew very fast, and it was totally linear with the number of units we sold. That was scary — because remember, growth engines: you have to grow the output without growing the input. And here we were doing one-to-one.

So I called all the tech support people together and we sat down and said, “We need to figure out a growth engine here. We have to figure out a way to do this.” We started looking at what was taking the time. Why are we wasting time? What’s going on here?

Obviously the first thing you want to do is identify the problems and solve them, so that when people try to install, it installs cleanly without issues. So we created a weekly meeting. The tech support engineers sat down with the engineering team and said, “Here are the top 10 issues we saw this week.” Later on we did it once a month, and we basically solved those problems so they wouldn’t become a tech support call.

But I think the real insight was the following. You call a bank or any company today and you expect to hear: “You are number 13 in the queue. If you want, we can call you back — leave your number and wait three hours.” Nobody answers the phone. Right? Nobody answers the phone.

So we looked at that and said, “This is a phenomenal opportunity to change people’s opinion about CardScan. What happens if we actually answer the phone?” We set a target to answer within 30 seconds. 30 seconds. And we measured it.

The idea was this: the phone rings, and the first-line person — whoever was assigned first-line duty that day — picks up the phone. That’s their job. And what you try to do is triage, like in a hospital. You pick up the phone and figure out: is it something simple you can solve? If it’s not simple, you tell the person, “Let me transfer you to a more advanced technician — right now.” People feel great: “I called, I got an answer. They think it’s a serious problem. They’re moving me to the expert. Wonderful.” And they were willing to wait after that, because someone had already answered the phone.

We ended up solving a good number of issues on the first call. Then what happened on the second call, the expert call — many times on a PC you’d make a change, and then you’d need to reboot. Remember rebooting? A reboot took about four to five minutes. In the old days — before we made these changes — you’d just start talking about baseball, the weather, small talk. So we told them: “Reboot the system. It should work. If it doesn’t, call us again.” The customer would say, “No, no, no — I have you on the phone, sir.” We’d say, “How long did it take before we answered the phone?” They’d say, “Well, that was a real surprise — you answered right away.” We’d say, “We will answer again. Don’t worry, it’ll work. And if not, call us again.” And people hung up. If there was still a problem, they called again — not a big issue.

We grew and grew. We ended up doing about 100,000 units a year with four engineers. That’s it. We never added another engineer. What I’m trying to say here — when I talk about a growth engine, think about it in every part of the company, whatever you do, and ask yourself: how do I grow the output without growing the input? That is the question that will make you grow fast and make money. And I’ve shown you a lot of areas in a company where that can become very interesting.

Okay, I want to compare Apple and Samsung. First of all, who here is using a Samsung phone? Raise your hand. Good. How did you decide which Samsung phone you wanted to buy? How did you decide, and how long did it take you to say, “This is the model I want?” News articles — what else? Advertisements, comparisons — right. How did you decide where to buy? You compared prices. And did you make any decision about when to buy? Like on Black Friday? Amazon — okay.

There’s a reason I’m asking all these questions. You’ll see it in a moment.

So let’s compare them by numbers. Samsung wins on units — they sold 271 million. By the way, I got all of this information from ChatGPT. I tried to trace where they got the data, but there’s no guarantee the numbers are exact. If you want to verify, go to Edge, use Copilot, and they give you the source for every piece of information — that’s important.

So Samsung sold 271 million units and Apple only 238. The market share percentages don’t add up if you try to reconcile the two numbers, because the top figures are for the full year while the market share is for Q3 — but that’s fine for our purposes. On revenue, Samsung wins again at about $246 billion. Remember, these are all conglomerates. Apple says that about half of their $394 billion in revenue came from the iPhone — so about $200 billion. That’s what I used.

So who wins? Samsung. But now look at the share of industry profits — it looks nothing like what we just saw. 15% goes to Samsung, and 75% of the entire industry’s profits go to Apple. Gross margin per phone: Samsung under 20%, Apple over 55%. And the impact is in the last line: Samsung is worth about $400 billion. Apple is worth eight times more — $3.2 trillion.

Any idea why those numbers don’t match? Branding. But the branding should translate here — meaning you’d expect it to drive more unit sales. Here is what you find on the Apple website: iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15, and — surprise — iPhone 14. And if you look, I copied below it: iPhone 13.
And the impact is in the last line. Samsung is worth about 400 billion. Apple is worth eight times more — $3.2 trillion. Any idea why these numbers don’t generate these numbers? Branding. But the branding should come here — it should mean you sell more phones. Here is what you go and find on the Apple website: iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15, and surprise, iPhone 14. And if you look, I copied below — iPhone 13.

So Apple’s idea on how to put different price points in their lineup is not to introduce several models at different prices. It’s to basically introduce a new one and then relegate the previous year’s model to the next level of pricing, and two years ago to the third level of pricing. They accomplish several things. Number one, their entire engineering and production team is focused on a single phone. Single phone. Think about how many people they save by not worrying about multiple models. I only produced one phone this year. The lifetime of the older phones is now three years. So they have that all figured out. They don’t have to deal with obsolete models because they keep selling them. So now you start to understand where their gross margin comes from. But the real issue here is the following.

This is the same comparison, but this time I look at the number of models. The reason I ask you about it is they have Galaxy S, Galaxy Note, Galaxy A, Galaxy M, Galaxy Z — fold and flip and all sorts of others. I tried to figure out once which one I was going to buy and honestly I couldn’t figure it out. Now the reason I asked you a question is the following, and we’re going to get to it later on. I call these inhibitors of friction. When a company wants to grow, it has to make the purchase process as simple as possible. And you will see many examples later. You want people to not have to think. When I say go and buy an iPhone, I don’t need to tell you which one to buy.

There’s only one to buy — iPhone 15. You don’t need to compare, you don’t need to read articles, you don’t need to do anything. One phone. Your entire thinking is: am I going to buy an iPhone or am I going to buy a Samsung? That’s about it. When you say you want to go buy a Samsung, you ask people, which one do you recommend? How does this work? And you wasted four weeks that Samsung didn’t see your money. Just think about it.

Pricing. Apple is adamant that you buy the phone for the same exact price in every single outlet and store. Now, this is technically illegal — let me explain. By American antitrust rules, you can decide at what price you sell it to the store, the distributor, or whatever, but you cannot control the price they sell it to the end user, because regulators want to encourage competition. So Apple doesn’t tell you at what price you should sell it, but if you sell it below the price they told you, then suddenly they run out of inventory for you — which is totally legal. I mean, “I ran out of inventory.” So very quickly the market realized that if they want to work with Apple, they have to sell at Apple’s price. Now, I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. I think the guy is one of the biggest geniuses in business and engineering. So I copied that at CardScan. We made sure that CardScan had the same price everywhere you went.

There were no promotions, nothing — every day of the year. You didn’t have to wait till Christmas or New Year or whatever. Again, every one of these things is friction that delays the purchase, which means it delays the money to Apple or to CardScan.

So I want to show you this. Delivery companies — they give drivers a choice: vault courier, partner. You’re not an employee by any chance. You can earn money by delivering orders to local customers, controlling your own schedule, working when and where you want. They are deliberately staying away from adding people as employees because that gives them tremendous flexibility. No fixed employment costs, pay per delivery, no benefits, no insurance, no vacations, no anything. That’s why they do it. It’s a growth engine. They can grow significantly just by putting out an ad for anyone who wants to join. Really simple. They can also shrink easily — they just don’t have things to deliver, so the person doesn’t come. That’s it. Which means they have tremendous flexibility to grow and shrink by demand, which makes it much cheaper.

Think about the iPhone and Samsung and all of that — I’m trying to give you examples so you start to understand what an engine means, what power it gives you. Now, there’s another company that didn’t stay behind: Amazon. They have a Delivery Service Partner program. The basics: being an owner-operator. Again, not Amazon’s money — you do it yourself. Your own Amazon delivery business, working as an independent contractor. They made it very clear: we are not your employer. We’re not going to give you any money. You do it on your own. Same idea. You can see this in many industries where they farm out the work. Today you see it a lot — Airbnb, same thing. All of these platforms do the same things.

When I was in Boston recently, we needed somebody to help carry and schlep 12 suitcases from the third floor down. And my daughter said, why don’t you use TaskRabbit? I said, what is that? She said, oh, you can ask for whatever you want and people will do it. All you want is somebody to come in and schlep 12 suitcases three flights of stairs — that’s it. So we did it, and somebody showed up. He’s doing his master’s in physics. Best person I ever met.

So, CardScan again. We began by producing the scanners, but our CFO was a really astute manager. What he wanted to do was become almost like a vault — when somebody buys CardScan, we fulfill the order, but we don’t want to own any inventory. We don’t want to invest anything. So with a lot of hard work, he found a company that produced all the hardware — not just the scanner. And he convinced the scanner manufacturer to manufacture it in Taiwan, ship it overseas to California on their own dime, and from California drop-ship it to the customer whenever requested, without us putting in a penny. When we got an order, we sent the order to these people. The order shipped. When we saw the shipping confirmation, we paid the money.

So from a cash flow perspective, we could grow and shrink as easily as possible. Same idea. How did he do that? Don’t ask me. I don’t know. I asked him several times and he said, “I know — I’m pretty convincing, I guess.” But that’s what he did.

Then I brought in a new CEO and he did something that really shocked me. What we used to do — I’m now talking about the end of the 1990s, maybe 2001, 2002 — when we sold, let’s say, to CompUSA or Office Depot or Office Max or any of those stores, they would tell us, “We need three scanners in each store.” Times 200 stores — send me 600 units. We sent them 600 units, gave them an invoice for 600 units, and got paid. Then we kept shipping whenever they told us a store was missing two, or this store was missing one. And when we switched to the next generation, which happened once a year, we had to take back 600 scanners or whatever it was, and give them the money back on those units — which made our financials look terrible. It was a horrible thing to deal with.

The new CEO tried to convince them to put it on consignment, which means when we ship you 600 scanners, we don’t send an invoice. You only pay us for units that are sold to end users. And I said to him, that’s stupid — we want the money. And he said, you’re right, but because it is so volatile, it’s very hard to manage the company rationally because all of these big spikes drive you crazy. I argued with him, and he was absolutely right.

The funny thing is that the stores were not ready to do it. They couldn’t do it. It took them two years before they changed their accounting systems to allow us to put things on consignment — which is kind of funny. So they were eager to pay us money upfront and then claw it back, rather than just doing it cleanly. But it made a huge difference later on, because it allowed us to really understand our business based on actual sales to end users.

Example from another angle. And then we will start digging into what is and what isn’t a growth engine and how they work. At ZoomInfo, we collected about 99.3% of invoices, which is a very high standard — for those of you who are not familiar with collections. And the interesting thing is that the whole thing was done by a single person. Her name is Donna Angelucci, my dear friend. Even when the company was approaching $100 million, she was the only person in collections.

She had a lot of connections, but many of our customers were not local. So what was the process? The process was fairly simple. Whenever we issued an invoice — due about 30 days out — two weeks in advance she sent a reminder. Then she called and said, “I hope it’s already in your system. You are going to pay it, yes or no?” And she basically made sure that nobody didn’t know they owed us money. She also figured out that small customers were a big pain, so she said we’re not selling to any small customer unless they give a credit card upfront and we charge it.

Also, if a customer didn’t pay, she immediately escalated to the salespeople. Salespeople hate talking to customers who don’t pay because they’ve already gotten the commission — they don’t care, and they don’t want to alienate anyone. She told them, “If he doesn’t pay, I’m turning off his account.” And she did it several times. Salespeople quickly learned not to mess around with her. So she built a system that worked without a lot of effort — and she was also the gossip hub of the company, so she had time to hear all the gossip and relay it to me. All of that while accomplishing all of this.

So the reason I gave all of these anecdotes is just to show you the various areas where this concept applies. How do you build a growth engine? You’re sitting here saying, Jonathan has been talking for about an hour, but how the hell do I actually do this? And the answer is simple. First of all, you ask yourself: I’m doing this — what would the benefit be if I could scale it up? If the answer isn’t significant, don’t worry about it. If you can see a lot of benefit in scaling something up, that’s a good area to start thinking about.

The second question is even more critical: what stops you from scaling? I call those inhibitors. Sometimes I call them friction. The difference is not huge, but what are the inhibitors?

So anything in red is a question. What is the most common inhibitor you can think of? Those of you who’ve heard me say this before, please don’t answer — I want the people who’ve never heard my answer. What do you think is the most common inhibitor? People. You know the famous saying: if it wasn’t for the employees and the customers, business would be so easy. So — people. That’s the bane of business and of life, basically. What’s the problem with people? Remember, you want to build a growth engine, so that means you want to grow, you want to add more people. That means you need to find people. And it’s very hard to find the right people — always. I am a little older than many of you. I’ve hired many people. I’ve fired more people than I hired.
So, people — that’s the bane of business and of life, basically. So what’s the problem with people? Remember, you want to build a growth engine, so that means you want to grow, you want to add more people. That means you need to find people. And it’s very hard to find the right people. Always. I am a little bit older than many of you. I hired many people. I fired more people than I hired.

And I still never, ever was able to figure out how to choose the right people. I even learned something more serious. Those of the people that I met and told me “I’m a genius at hiring people, I know exactly how to hire people” — when I asked them to do it for me, they were a total failure. So I feel a little bit better that I’m not the only idiot in town. Anybody who tries to tell me that they know how to hire people, I take them with not a grain of salt, but a big pile of salt. Second, it’s very hard to recruit. You have to talk to them. It’s expensive, it’s inefficient, and the results are questionable. Me and my brother have a joke.

He also had a fairly big company, and we said, usually it’s the third person you hire that turns out to be a good hire. So can we somehow skip directly to the third person? We haven’t yet figured it out. So here are my statistics. At least 10% of the recruits are a joy. A joy means you tell them what to do, they do it. You don’t pay attention to them. The work is just done. They’re nice, they smile, they are smart as hell, and they get results. 10% — one out of ten. That’s kind of my experience. 10% are also easy — they are the disaster. You know, you tell them what to do, they come after a week and ask you, “Did you really mean that?” No, I said this. Okay, fire them. The problem is the 80% in the middle.

Remember, they are not joy — because joy was the 10%. And they are not a disaster. And I’m not talking about the people in this room. You are all in this category, so present people excluded — I’m not talking about you. The fact that you are here already makes you a joy, but that’s the reality. And anybody who thinks differently should leave the room. So let me give you a few laws about it. So I like this one — it’s really funny. It’s a guy called Derek J. de Solla Price, the British sociologist and historian. He started looking at articles in the science literature, because they started collecting references. You know, they now grade people in academia by how many people refer to their articles — all of that great stuff. It’s all in databases now.

It’s very easy to do research on it. So he did research on it. He took a few areas of research and found something really bizarre. Let’s say there were a thousand articles written on a subject in a given area of research, and there were a hundred writers — 100 scientists working on it. Then 50% of the articles — about 500 articles — were written by the square root, just to make it more scientific, of the number of writers, which is 10. So out of a thousand articles, 500 were written by 10 people, and the other 90 people wrote the remaining 500. In other words, a small percentage of individuals in any organization are responsible for most of the total output and results. They took the same law and checked it across fields, and from my personal experience, it is true.

You look at every company, even the huge ones, and you look at the number of people that really made a big influence on the company — not just by their opinion. Even the receptionist made a huge difference. Parkinson’s Law. That’s an English writer who did some research on the British Navy and figured out the following rules. In every organization, people promote themselves by hiring a team to do their job. Why? Because if they want to promote themselves and they have a boss, they can’t get rid of the boss — it’s illegal. But they can expand their scope by hiring people. So the job that was done by one person, five years later there is a department of 10 people with three layers of managers doing that job. Why? For obvious reasons.

And the second law — which I call the “last hard-boiled egg for Shabbat” — is that work will expand to fill the time planned for its completion. The reason I call it that is because of my mother’s story. She made all the Shabbat preparations on Thursday. The only thing she needed to do on Friday was boil eggs for Shabbat. But because that was the only thing she needed to do, it took the whole Friday. And now I’ll give you my laws. So my first law is that managers spend most of their valuable time on employees they end up firing. Think about it — I have a gazillion examples. Why? Because you’re not sure whether they are in the 10% that are a disaster or the low end of the 80%. So you spend so much time on them instead of spending time with your best people, helping them and working with them. That’s reality. Anybody who manages people knows that’s true. If you look at what you spend your week on, you will realize how many hours you spent with a person you really detest and want to fire.

Second law: every three people somehow cause a fourth person to be hired. Let me explain. You have a really good engineer. He’s working, doing a tremendous amount of work, and you’re excited about it. You tell him, “How can we make you produce more?” And he says, “My cousin is really a genius — we should hire him as well.” You say okay, so you hire his cousin, and the two of them work like a couple. It flies, it’s phenomenal — one plus one equals two and a half. It’s great. Now you’re enthused. “You have another uncle?” “No, but I have my neighbor who is really good.” Okay, they bring the neighbor. Now you have three people. Wait a minute — three people need a manager, they need a team lead. Now you have two choices: take one of the good engineers and make him a team lead — and lose a good engineer — or bring a team lead from the outside. Most companies end up bringing a team lead from the outside. Now, what does a team lead do? He talks to the other team leads, because he’s not going to spend his time with the engineers. Every three people bring a fourth person. And the rest of it is iterations. So I think you understand why this keeps happening.

So if you think about the impact on profitability — 70 to 80% of any technology company’s cost is around people. Salaries, rent, overhead, travel, you name it. You look at the end of the budget — that’s the biggest cost by far. And these are rigid expenses. You cannot tell an employee, “You know what, I don’t really need you next week, so don’t come in and don’t get paid in September — I might need you for a few days.” It doesn’t work that way. The moment you hire a person, on the 30th of the month the paycheck goes out whether you like it or not. And if you want to get rid of that person, it costs you. There’s severance pay, all of that. So even if you decide to let the person go, it’s still expensive to do. This is the worst expense you can have in terms of rigidity — it’s totally inflexible. Oh, and by the way, salaries always go up. I tried to make them go down. Didn’t go very well. I don’t know why.

So rule number one when you want to build a growth engine: replace work done by people with software and processes that require fewer people. In most cases you cannot reduce the number of people, but you can increase the output without adding people. So just to be realistic — you want to grow, you want to make money, and you want it to be scalable. Don’t hire people. I’ll repeat it in case you didn’t hear: don’t hire people. It will kill your growth engine, because only the third one might work. Remember that. And again, not the present people in this room — all of you are just a dream.

So how does this translate into numbers? I like to do numbers. There is a measure called sales per employee, which is a very important metric and indicator. I found this chart — unfortunately it’s from 2017. Surprisingly, I didn’t find anything newer, even though the numbers are out there, because every public company has to publish the number of employees and the revenues. But I haven’t seen anything like that for more recent years. Not surprisingly, to the right is Apple — we talked about it — Facebook, Alphabet, which is Google. And you start seeing that the tech companies that have figured out growth engines are out there. As you can see, sales per employee in those good companies are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and up, where average salaries in those companies is maybe $150,000. So the rest is profits, which is why they are worth so much money.

So if you ask yourself how well you’re doing, calculate your sales per employee — take your revenues divided by the number of people you have. If you are below $200,000, you can improve dramatically. That’s usually where most companies at the early stages are, around $150,000–$200,000, which is not great.

Okay, so now we understand that there are inhibitors — and inhibitors are all the things that stand in the way of scaling up the process. And friction refers to all the things that just slow down the process. They don’t inhibit, they just make it longer. Like what I described about the Samsung phones — you need to read articles, talk to friends. It just slows down the process. It’s friction. When you want to build a growth engine, think very carefully about what stops you and what delays you at every step of the way.

So what are the enablers? They fall into two very broad categories. First: continuous removal of inhibitors and friction. When I say continuous — and I’m underlining that — it means you keep thinking about it, because the inhibitor you removed yesterday reveals the next one. It’s always like that. You have to constantly think about how you can make it faster, better, cheaper. And it’s usually about removing problems. There are an endless number of problems. Every time I try to get to the bottom of it, I find another turtle underneath. It’s turtles all the way down. And for those of you who don’t get the joke, I’ll explain it at the end. And obviously what all of you thought — new ideas on how to do things efficiently. I’m not dismissing that, but in most cases, just removing hurdles, frictions, and inhibitors makes a big difference. And don’t hire people. Figure out how to remove all of this without hiring people.

Okay, I’m going into a slightly different subject now, and I want to share with you a real dilemma. When I talk about a growth engine, all of you think about sales, right? Obviously. But when you go to sales, there is a dilemma. You can build a sales organization, but there is a problem — the number of people grows linearly with sales growth, which is absolutely against everything I just said. And I did it. Why you can do it, I’ll explain. But this is a decision you really have to think about. Sales organizations are the only exception where, unfortunately, you keep growing headcount. If you want to grow in another way, the option is to develop e-commerce. All of you say, “Oh, why don’t we do e-commerce?” But it’s good only for small transactions. Nobody is going to put in a credit card for $50,000 or $20,000. So you have a problem. You either do one or the other, or a combination. And actually we have many examples of combinations. And the combination works like this.
You keep growing it. If you want to grow, another option is to develop e-commerce, right? All of you say, “Oh, why don’t we do e-commerce?” But it’s good only for small transactions. Nobody’s going to put in a credit card for $50,000 or $20,000. So you have a problem. You either do this or that, or a combination. And actually we have many examples of combinations. And the combination goes like this.

You have a free product, then you move to e-commerce, and then you move to the corporate sale. You can find it all on the web. You don’t have to worry about my text — we will translate it into Hebrew and even write it in Arabic. Okay, so HubSpot — you can start free, I think two seats or something like that, I don’t remember. Then if you want to really use it, you pay something. And then as you keep growing, you get a phone call from a salesperson. He says, “Oh, I see you guys are using it. Let me give you our best offer,” blah blah. Okay, look at the list. Zoom Video — same thing, right? You can as a user use it for free, after 40 minutes it stops. Zoho, Salesforce, Slack, LinkedIn, Google Workspace. Look at almost all these companies.

They have figured this out. Unfortunately at ZoomInfo, I didn’t figure it out. I went the other way around. And this is really critical — listen to what I’m saying now. I started with corporate sales. I built the sales organization, and the reason I did it was simple — I just brought in a salesman. I didn’t know who I was going to sell to, I hadn’t figured it out. It was the year 2001, I just hired a person. Actually the first one I fired. The second one worked, so I didn’t have to wait for number three. That was big luck, because the second one I brought in from recruiting to become a salesperson. And sales grew fantastically. We sold licenses for about $1,000 a month, and we brought in more salespeople and we grew.

And then we said, “This is ridiculous, we need to develop an e-commerce option.” The only difference between the corporate product and the e-commerce one was the size, or the amount of data you get. And there we encountered the problem. When we introduced it, the salespeople went on a riot — literally on a riot. They said, “Look, I was working on a $10,000 deal. The customer went on our website, he saw that he can start working with it for $99. So he told me, ‘I’m still interested in the $10,000 deal, but let me first use the low-end one for two or three months, see that I really like it, and then we’ll talk.'” And the salespeople said, “You hold me responsible for the quota, and you’re pulling the rug out from under me.” I tried six times to introduce e-commerce and failed.

They still don’t have real e-commerce at ZoomInfo. Why? Because I did it wrong. And think about this — if you take anything out of this lecture today, this is the deepest lesson I can share with you. Think about how this works: start with free, then e-commerce, then corporate sales. I’m not sure it really works in every organization — I don’t know. But as a thought process, what you basically want to do is this: individuals — even if they are corporate individuals, they work for a company — but when they use it individually, they can just put in a credit card, pay $99 a month or whatever, or maybe even have a free version.

But when you start seeing traction in the organization, then you have a sales organization that calls and says, “Hey, I see you have 10 people paying individually. We can give you a better deal, and it has all these other features,” and so on. Just force yourself to think — can you do that? It’s not always possible, but I didn’t even think about it. It was the year 2000, I didn’t think about it, and I paid a huge price, honestly. I later learned how to do it, but I was already on my way out — it didn’t interest me anymore. Okay, any questions on that one? Yes.

Audience Member: What did you do if you need the whole organization to work with the system? That means once you start, the benefit is only at the organization level, not just for one person.

I don’t know how to solve your specific problem. I’m just saying I failed, and it was tremendously painful and stupid. The company was successful, I made a lot of money — all the good things. But that’s not the point. The point is I felt like I tried six times to do it and I failed each and every time. And I knew the right thing was to do this, and I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried, the salespeople went rioting — literally rioting. They were standing in front of my office and saying, “We’re not going to meet our quota because you just ruined the quota. You just added friction and an inhibitor to my system.” I could have fired all of them, but that would have been really stupid. I don’t know.

I’m just saying — try to think this way if you can. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t have solutions for everybody. I’m just sharing mistakes with you, which is the most valuable thing I can do. Okay. All right.

So we talked about the sales organization — it’s people. And I think you kind of understand my opinion about adding people: it’s linear with the number of salespeople. What can you do? The reality is that most organizations hire salespeople, and I don’t think they’re stupid. But what can we do? So I introduced a very simple measure — it’s a common measure, I didn’t invent it — called cost of sales. What is cost of sales? It’s the total cost of the sales organization, including all the managers, the commissions, the rent, whatever you want to include. Everything that has to do with the sales organization — including the Salesforce license charge, everything — and you divide by the revenue generated. The cost of sales is usually between 15% to 25% of revenues. If you’re at 15%, you’re doing a really good job. If you’re at 25%, you need to improve. We were hovering around 19% most of the time. And again, it’s fairly rigid. Why is it rigid? Because you hire a person, you give them a quota, and the cost of the person relative to the quota is basically fixed. Okay — without marketing. Without marketing, again, you can do whatever you want; you just have to understand what you’re measuring.

So how do you reduce the cost of sales? What you need first and foremost — without this, don’t even bother hiring people — is a stable and reliable source of leads, and a clear training path to reach quota within a few months. What I’m teaching you now is actually all thanks to a guy called Peter Wayman. He’s a physicist, MIT graduate, an engineer, a little autistic, and a VP of sales genius. He built the sales organization at ZoomInfo on scientific and engineering grounds. And he taught me a lot, which is what I’m sharing with you now.

Think about the last point. When you build an organization that is going to grow — and if you want to grow, it’s going to grow — you have to build it around middle-of-the-road people. You can’t expect to bring in the best salespeople time and again. It just won’t happen. Don’t bring in C players, but you should build the organization to perform well on B players — reasonable salespeople. A salesperson who is willing to work reasonable hours and listens to you. That’s about it. Nothing genius. He’s not going to cold call, he’s not going to discover opportunities on his own — forget it. What you want him to do is give him a lead and have him convert that lead to a sale. That’s all you want. But for that, you need a stable source of leads, you need to show them how to do it, and you need to train them. We brought a new person from day one to reaching quota in about four months, and the quota was around $800,000. So they reached an $800,000 annual run rate in about four months, because everything was standardized.

And you want them to be successful — you want the company to be something they’re proud of. What Peter instituted was that pretty much everybody was above quota. I asked him, “That’s stupid — you put the quota below what they do, so everybody is above the bar because you just lowered the bar, right?” He said, “Yeah, I know, I do it on purpose.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because they’re excited. Everybody feels like a winner.” And he built the compensation so that the cost was right. But philosophically, he wanted B players to feel great about succeeding. That’s what he wanted, and he built it.

So that’s what you do if you have no choice. The second thing I want to talk about is friction on the way to a sale. And what I’m going to tell you now is similar to what I told you about headcount — it’s kind of counter to what most people think. In B2B, most salespeople say, “I need the ability to negotiate. I know the customer, I talk to the customer. If I just gave him a 10% discount, he would have bought right now.” You’re laughing again. The people who managed salespeople know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve yet to see a salesman who doesn’t say, “The fact that you don’t let me negotiate is stupid. It’s against everything I’ve done in my life. I’m a successful salesman, I’m above quota — why can’t I discount the product?”

And the reason is: think about a supermarket where you walk up to the line and start negotiating about every piece of bread. I don’t want to stand in that line. Efficiency — when the price is fixed, it’s far more efficient. When you do discounts, here’s what happens: the guy on the other side says, “Wait a minute, he just gave me 10% to get me to move. I’m in no rush — if I wait another week, I’ll get 20%.” Exactly right. “I’ll wait until end of quarter, don’t worry.” So what they do is say, “I really appreciate the 10% discount. I need to talk to my CFO because, as far as I remember, we don’t have the budget for it.” Then he comes back and says, “My CFO wanted to thank you, but he wants 50% off because we don’t have the budget, and if you really want to close this quarter, we need to do it within the budget we have.” Blah blah blah. It lengthens the negotiations.

So my salespeople said — and by the way, I failed here too. What I’m telling you is my wishful thinking; I failed. My salespeople discounted. We brought it down to a rational level because Peter Wayman was reasonable — he allowed them about a 10% discount. But what I told my salespeople was: “If the guy insists on a discount, ‘No problem, sir. Absolutely no problem. But in our company, the only person with the authority to authorize a discount is the CEO. Here’s the CEO’s phone number — I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you.'” I never got a single phone call. Maybe they didn’t say it, I don’t know, but I never got a single phone call. You don’t say no — you just put friction on the way to a discount. That’s what you do. Nobody wants to call the CEO of a big company.

The second problem with discounts is the renewal. The next year when you renew, the customer says, “Wait a minute — last year you gave me a 20% discount, and this year you want to take it away? We discussed this in the agreement.” “Yeah, I know we discussed it, but if you want me to renew, I need the discount, right?”
to a discount. That’s what you do. Okay? Nobody wants to talk to a CEO of a big company. It won’t work. Second problem with the discount is the next year when you renew the product. “Wait a minute. Last year you gave me 20% discount and this year you want to take it away. But we talked about it in the agreement.” “Yeah, I know we talked about it, but if you want me to renew, I need the discount,” right?

And worst of all, when customers talk to one another and they find one paid less than the other, it gets to be really, really ugly. You don’t want to be there. Promotions. Okay guys, for Christmas we do a promotion. People expect promotions to be year-round. That’s the reality. So they delay their purchase. That’s what happens. Why is the Christmas season responsible for 30% of annual sales? Because they just waited. That’s all. It’s really simple. It’s not that they generated more money on Christmas Eve — they just waited. “You get this price if you buy before the end of the month,” right? You wanted to see that. What we found out is small customers negotiate and waste more time than big customers. Why? Because they don’t have money. It’s really simple. They really don’t have money. So they negotiate like crazy and it’s not worth the effort.

Especially, as Libby knows, if they are from a certain subcontinent to our east. And another friction that there is nothing you can do about except be ready for, is that big customers have processes you can’t avoid — security, SOC 2, data security, legal compliance, you name it. You just have to go through that. So the only way to deal with it — which we did with Zoom — is we basically prepared for it. We had a stack of documents ready, so when the customer said “we want this, this, and this,” we just pulled it out of the computer and sent it. And sometimes we had all kinds of variants because some customers wanted it differently. Okay, what else? Pricing scheme. Remember what I said about Apple? I’ll go back to Apple.

As I said, Steve Jobs is one of the people I really admire. When he introduced the iPod, he also introduced iTunes, right? Made it really simple to buy a song. And lo and behold, regardless of how good the song was, it was 99 cents. It doesn’t matter what song you wanted — it was 99 cents. You didn’t have to think about anything. It’s 99 cents. Reduces friction. Product options. Sometimes you look at a product and you have no clue what’s included, what’s not, what’s the deal. Okay, this is a big thing. Every time you need to think about what you’re doing, we lose you. So multiple decisions are much worse than one decision. I’ll give many examples. Nowadays all of us are aware of automatic renewals, right?

So you purchase anything with renewals, they tell you it’s going to automatically renew unless you notify them 30 days in advance. Why do they do it? So you don’t have to think. You can still cancel, but you don’t have to think about renewal. Amazon Prime — that’s an ingenious thing. They did free two-day shipping on all products, right? Started at $79. Today it’s $139. The interesting thing is it increased sales dramatically. And not so much because you paid for the freight, but because you didn’t have to think. It’s kind of like — I just pay for the product I bought. I don’t worry about shipping. I paid for it in advance, but it’s their problem. And that increased sales significantly. I tried to find the numbers, I couldn’t. But I remember reading it.

200 million subscribers at about $140 each — just that alone is about $30 billion annually. Just those subscriptions. Just so you understand the power of these things. Microsoft Office — again, they went through a gazillion iterations and structures until they figured out: I’m going to bundle these four pieces of software. In most homes they don’t use all of them — they use one or the other — but they made it simple. $99 a year for the whole family on many computers. You don’t have to think about it. I have it on my laptop, I have it on my PC at home, I have it on my PC here. My wife has it. It’s just simple, simple. Not thinking. Keep it that way. Phone app stores, right?

The first thing you do there is put in your credit card and forget it’s there. From then on you just click and something happens in the background and you just don’t feel the money going out. It’s two levels away. A credit card is already not real money — it’s just a piece of plastic and a few numbers. And this isn’t even a credit card transaction, it’s just… I just clicked, nothing happened consciously, right? Friction. Friction, friction. And of course, all-inclusive vacations. Cruises, Club Med, all of those. Again, I don’t need to think. I go with the kids. We eat breakfast, we drink, we eat ice cream. I don’t need to think. Remove friction. These are just examples. I’m not saying this is what you need to do — I’m just trying to explain what is included in the growth engine.

Every friction, every hindrance reduces the efficiency of the system. Okay, I think we’re getting close to the end of our time. I just want to talk about two more things. What is the difference between selling and marketing? Okay, so let’s start — marketing is the process to generate leads and sales. Direct. I want to generate leads. I want to generate sales. Branding is the growth agent behind it. It just makes it easier to accomplish. Think of it as the foundation, and on top of it I build the marketing. But what are the inhibitors when doing common marketing? We all do marketing, right? As I said, you bring in a VP of Marketing, they change your logo and then they start thinking. So we do email campaigns. What’s the problem with email campaigns? Nobody reads them. I want to see — how many of you read 100% of your emails? No volunteers. I’m shocked. Okay, advertising. Advertising is an interesting example. I won’t have time to cover it this time. It’s expensive and usually the results — Google and other platforms make sure that you pay about what it’s worth. So it’s not a big bonanza. High customer acquisition cost. CAC is customer acquisition cost. Trade shows — we talked about those being expensive and not scalable. And content — it’s hard to create new and interesting content. So how do you handle all of these inhibitors and frictions? Webinars — hard to produce. Okay, all that stuff. So I want to share a few ideas. Each company can execute them in their own way.

The two obvious ones I talk about all the time are long-tail SEO and free products. But it’s not always easy to come up with these ideas. So I want to offer another approach that I think can be adopted by many companies. Ideas for easily creating engaging content: thought leadership. What is thought leadership? It’s basically research. And the first point is the most important one. There is a magic to numbers. If I tell you that 40% of stores don’t have a planogram — that’s really interesting, right? The fact that I have no clue what percentage really do or don’t have a planogram is irrelevant. You write “40% don’t have a planogram,” and that’s the number. It’s kind of bizarre.

And you can then even create a pie chart — you say “companies with up to 10 stores, 30% don’t have one,” and “from 10 to 50 stores…” — they go bananas over it. Nobody asks where the hell you got the numbers from. Just don’t tell them. And people love it. That’s called factoids. I’d call it “lie-oids” — sorry, from “lie” — but it doesn’t matter. It’s not a fact, but people love pie charts, they love graphs, they love numbers presented nicely and graphically. And don’t ask them to multiply or divide or anything. Just show it to me. So if you start collecting data from your market, you can start producing content that is very interesting because it’s easy to digest. I don’t have to read an article. I don’t have to read 500 words.

I can glance at the pie chart, read the few lines below it, and I am so excited. So what do you do? You start calling potential customers and you interview them. Now you say, “Why would they talk to me?” Chances are nine out of ten will not talk to you. But if enough — say ten people — talk to you, you have enough data to start with. Just fudge the numbers. Don’t say “10% said this” when it was literally ten people. Say “9% said this, 11% said that” — just so it looks like you have a bigger sample. People always love talking. Once you get the first data and you have the factoid, you send it to all your potential customers. Because now you have something to tell them that is easy to digest, interesting, and cool.

And you put another survey in it and say, “Our next question is this — click here to answer.” Now you’ll get 20 responses. You create another nice pie chart, another factoid, and you talk to them again. Gradually you start talking to a lot of people and you start building a more meaningful database. It starts to become genuinely valuable for you. So this is really interesting. And the interesting thing is — a lot of companies don’t do this. You have salespeople, you have BDRs, they talk to customers, but they never really collect data systematically. But if you tell them, “Here’s a form I want you to fill out when you talk to potential customers,” they will do it while they’re trying to sell. Because anyway, the first thing you need to do in sales is understand your customer. Just prepare the questions, tabulate the answers, and you get tremendously valuable data that you can publish, cross-reference, and do things with. Very interesting.

Let’s move on. The next thing is also about showing up as a thought leader. What you want to do is have the luminaries of the industry talk about you. The reality is there’s no chance they’re going to talk about you because they’ve never heard of you. They don’t know who you are and you’re just bothering them. But that’s not what you tell them. What you tell them is, “I’m organizing a roundtable of the luminaries of the industry and I already have Joe and Linda and Joseph and all of these people. We also want you because you really have significant insight as the CXO of this company.” And you get people — you’ll be surprised. And you say, “I’m going to send you the questions we want to discuss in the roundtable.” You put them in a roundtable over Zoom. So it’s very inexpensive, very easy to do. 30 minutes. You record it, obviously, and you promise them you’re going to send them the full 30-minute recording as well as short clips of themselves that they can post wherever they want. So you’re actually producing content for them. And remember — people are vain. They really want to have videos of themselves saying smart things and being seen in that context. So they will participate.

Now what you do is organize it so that you have the logo of your company on one side of the screen, the logo of the speaker on the other side, and a big title — “He is the CXO of such and such conglomerate.” And without saying anything, most people who see it assume they’re customers. Why? Because why else would they be on your roundtable, right? You didn’t think otherwise until two minutes ago. So you’re sending subtle messages that you are the thought leader in this industry. Add to that all the charts and graphs you produce, and you suddenly become a known entity that people talk about and think about. And the last point — because we need to finish — is that there is a group of people who would really love to talk to you.
Table, right? You didn’t believe it until two minutes ago. So you send subtle messages that you are the thought leader in this industry. Add to that all the charts and graphs that you produce, and you suddenly become a known entity that people talk about and think about. And the last point, because we need to finish — there is a group of people that would really love to talk to you.

Now, most of you are too young, but there comes an age. Usually it’s around 67. And until yesterday you were sitting in a nice room and people would come to you and say, “Jonathan, what do I do here? I need your permission. I need your signature. We want you to speak.” You’re busy. The following day, you celebrate. You go to the golf club and you say, “Thank God I don’t have to work anymore.” The following month, you wake up in the morning and you have no idea what you’re going to do today. You’re sick and tired of playing golf. Your wife gets on your nerves, and nobody really calls you — nobody. You are a nobody.

And you are very open to people saying, “We really want to talk to you about the industry,” because after 30 years of being the CXO in your field, you really understand the industry. And you write their title with a small “ex,” as mentioned on the side. And they are the best people to engage. They love to be engaged because they were bold and nobody cares about them anymore. So what I’m trying to convey to you here — as a growth engine, we’re talking about growth engine and marketing — stay away from everything everybody else is doing, because it’s not going to work. Try to be creative in how you create content in a way that is scalable. You can do a roundtable once a month, easily. You don’t have to think about the content. There are four other people who are going to talk.

You ask them — you have to come up with three questions, okay? — and they will talk. Believe me, you will have to stop them. And once you’ve done three of them, they will call you and say, “Where is the next roundtable? You forgot to invite me — all my friends are already there. What about me?” So you just have to start the engine, which is very different from writing blogs where you are on your own. So I’m trying to give you ideas on how to think about branding and marketing in ways that are growth engines — scalable. Hope I succeeded. Thank you.

תם בונים ארגון שהולך לצמוח — ואם אתם רוצים לצמוח, הוא ילך לצמוח — אתם חייבים לבנות אותו סביב אנשים ברמה הבינונית. אתם לא יכולים לצפות להביא את אנשי המכירות הטובים ביותר שוב ושוב. זה פשוט לא יקרה. אל תביאו שחקני C, אבל אתם צריכים לבנות את הארגון כדי לעבוד טוב עם שחקני B — אנשי מכירות סבירים. איש מכירות שמוכן לעבוד שעות סבירות ומקשיב לכם. זהו. אין שום גאונות. הוא לא הולך לבצע cold call, הוא לא הולך לגלות הזדמנויות בכוחות עצמו — שכחו מזה. מה שאתם רוצים שהוא יעשה הוא לתת לו lead ולגרום לו להמיר את ה-lead הזה למכירה. זה כל מה שאתם רוצים. אבל לשם כך, אתם צריכים מקור יציב של leads, אתם צריכים להראות להם איך לעשות את זה, ואתם צריכים להכשיר אותם. הבאנו אדם חדש מהיום הראשון להגיע לקצאה בכ-ארבעה חודשים, והקצאה הייתה בסביבות $800,000. אז הם הגיעו לקצב שנתי של $800,000 בכ-ארבעה חודשים, כי הכל היה מסוגנן.

ואתם רוצים שהם יצליחו — אתם רוצים שהחברה תהיה משהו שהם גאים בו. מה ש-Peter הנהיג היה שכמעט כולם היו מעל הקצאה. שאלתי אותו: “זה טיפשי — אתה שם את הקצאה מתחת למה שהם עושים, כך שכולם מעל הרף כי פשוט הורדת את הרף, נכון?” הוא אמר: “כן, אני יודע, אני עושה את זה בכוונה.” אמרתי: “למה?” הוא אמר: “כי הם נלהבים. כולם מרגישים כמו מנצח.” והוא בנה את התגמול כך שהעלות הייתה נכונה. אבל פילוסופית, הוא רצה שלשחקני B יהיה תחושה נהדרת של הצלחה. זה מה שהוא רצה, והוא בנה את זה.

אז זה מה שאתם עושים אם אין לכם ברירה. הדבר השני שאני רוצה לדבר עליו הוא חיכוך בדרך למכירה. ומה שאני הולך לספר לכם עכשיו דומה למה שסיפרתי לכם על headcount — זה קצת מנוגד למה שרוב האנשים חושבים. ב-B2B, רוב אנשי המכירות אומרים: “אני צריך את היכולת לנהל משא ומתן. אני מכיר את הלקוח, אני מדבר עם הלקוח. אם פשוט נתתי לו הנחה של 10%, הוא היה קונה עכשיו.” אתם צוחקים שוב. האנשים שניהלו אנשי מכירות יודעים בדיוק על מה אני מדבר. עוד לא ראיתי איש מכירות שלא אומר: “העובדה שאתה לא מאפשר לי לנהל משא ומתן היא טיפשית. זה נגד כל מה שעשיתי בחיי. אני איש מכירות מצליח, אני מעל הקצאה — למה אני לא יכול להוריד את מחיר המוצר?”

והסיבה היא: תחשבו על סופרמרקט שבו אתם הולכים לקו ומתחילים לנהל משא ומתן על כל כיכר לחם. אני לא רוצה לעמוד בתור הזה. יעילות — כשהמחיר קבוע, זה הרבה יותר יעיל. כשאתם עושים הנחות, הנה מה שקורה: הבחור בצד השני אומר: “רגע, הוא רק נתן לי 10% כדי לגרום לי לזוז. אין לי שום מהירות — אם אחכה עוד שבוע, אקבל 20%.” בדיוק נכון. “אחכה עד סוף הרבעון, אל תדאגו.” אז מה שהם עושים הוא לומר: “אני ממש מעריך את ההנחה של 10%. אני צריך לדבר עם ה-CFO שלי כי, כפי שאני זוכר, אין לנו תקציב לזה.” ואז הוא חוזר ואומר: “ה-CFO שלי רצה להודות לכם, אבל הוא רוצה 50% הנחה כי אין לנו תקציב, ואם אתם באמת רוצים לסגור את הרבעון הזה, אנחנו צריכים לעשות זאת בתוך התקציב שיש לנו.” וכן הלאה וכן הלאה. זה מאריך את המשא ומתן.

אז אנשי המכירות שלי אמרו — ואגב, גם כאן נכשלתי. מה שאני אומר לכם הוא מחשבה ערגנית; נכשלתי. אנשי המכירות שלי עשו הנחות. הורדנו את זה לרמה רציונלית כי Peter Wayman היה סביר — הוא אפשר להם כ-10% הנחה. אבל מה שאמרתי לאנשי המכירות שלי היה: “אם הבחור מתעקש על הנחה, ‘אין בעיה, אדוני. בהחלט אין בעיה. אבל בחברה שלנו, האדם היחיד עם הסמכות לאשר הנחה הוא המנכ”ל. הנה מספר הטלפון של המנכ”ל — אני בטוח שישמח לדבר איתך.'” מעולם לא קיבלתי שיחת טלפון אחת. אולי הם לא אמרו את זה, אני לא יודע, אבל מעולם לא קיבלתי שיחת טלפון אחת. אתם לא אומרים לא — אתם פשוט שמים חיכוך בדרך להנחה. זה מה שאתם עושים. אף אחד לא רוצה להתקשר למנכ”ל של חברה גדולה.

הבעיה השנייה עם הנחות היא החידוש. בשנה הבאה כשאתם מחדשים, הלקוח אומר: “רגע — בשנה שעברה נתתם לי 20% הנחה ובשנה הזו אתם רוצים לקחת את זה חזרה? דיברנו על זה בהסכם.” “כן, אני יודע שדיברנו על זה, אבל אם אתה רוצה שאחדש, אני צריך את ההנחה, נכון?”
לחיכוך. זה מה שאתם עושים. אוקי? אף אחד לא רוצה לדבר עם מנכ”ל של חברה גדולה. זה לא יעבוד. הבעיה השנייה עם ההנחה היא בשנה הבאה כשאתם מחדשים את המוצר. “רגע. בשנה שעברה נתתם לי 20% הנחה ובשנה הזו אתם רוצים לקחת את זה חזרה. אבל דיברנו על זה בהסכם.” “כן, אני יודע שדיברנו על זה, אבל אם אתה רוצה שאחדש, אני צריך את ההנחה, נכון?”

והגרוע מכל, כשלקוחות מדברים זה עם זה ומגלים שאחד שילם פחות מהשני, זה הופך להיות ממש, ממש מכוער. אתם לא רוצים להיות שם. מבצעים. אוקי חברים, לחג המולד אנחנו עושים מבצע. אנשים מצפים למבצעים כל השנה. זו המציאות. אז הם מעכבים את הרכישה שלהם. זה מה שקורה. למה עונת חג המולד אחראית ל-30% מהמכירות השנתיות? כי הם פשוט חיכו. זהו. זה ממש פשוט. זה לא שהם ייצרו יותר כסף בערב חג המולד — הם פשוט חיכו. “אתה מקבל את המחיר הזה אם אתה קונה לפני סוף החודש,” נכון? רציתם לראות את זה. מה שמצאנו הוא שלקוחות קטנים מנהלים משא ומתן ומבזבזים יותר זמן מלקוחות גדולים. למה? כי אין להם כסף. זה ממש פשוט. אין להם כסף באמת. אז הם מנהלים משא ומתן כמו משוגעים וזה לא שווה את המאמץ.

במיוחד, כפי שליבי יודעת, אם הם מאותו תת-יבשת ממזרח לנו. וחיכוך נוסף שאין לכם מה לעשות איתו חוץ מלהיות מוכנים לו, הוא שללקוחות גדולים יש תהליכים שאי אפשר להימנע מהם — אבטחה, SOC 2, אבטחת מידע, ציות משפטי, כל מה שתגידו. אתם פשוט צריכים לעבור את זה. אז הדרך היחידה להתמודד עם זה — מה שעשינו עם Zoom — היא שבעצם הכנו לזה. היה לנו ערימה של מסמכים מוכנה, כך שכשהלקוח אמר “אנחנו רוצים את זה, זה, וזה,” פשוט שלפנו את זה מהמחשב ושלחנו. ולפעמים היו לנו כל מיני גרסאות כי חלק מהלקוחות רצו את זה אחרת. אוקי, מה עוד? תכנית תמחור. זכרו מה אמרתי על Apple? אחזור ל-Apple.

כפי שאמרתי, Steve Jobs הוא אחד האנשים שאני ממש מעריץ. כשהציג את ה-iPod, הוא גם הציג את iTunes, נכון? הפך את זה לממש פשוט לקנות שיר. ומה שקרה, בלי קשר לכמה טוב השיר היה, זה היה 99 סנט. לא משנה איזה שיר רצית — זה היה 99 סנט. לא היית צריך לחשוב על שום דבר. זה 99 סנט. מפחית חיכוך. אפשרויות מוצר. לפעמים אתם מסתכלים על מוצר ואין לכם שמץ מושג מה כלול, מה לא, מה הסיפור. אוקי, זה עניין גדול. בכל פעם שאתם צריכים לחשוב על מה שאתם עושים, אנחנו מאבדים אתכם. אז מספר החלטות הרבה יותר גרוע מהחלטה אחת. אתן הרבה דוגמאות. בימינו כולנו מודעים לחידושים אוטומטיים, נכון?

אז אתם קונים כל דבר עם חידושים, הם אומרים לכם שזה הולך להתחדש אוטומטית אלא אם תודיעו להם 30 יום מראש. למה הם עושים את זה? כדי שלא תצטרכו לחשוב. אתם עדיין יכולים לבטל, אבל אתם לא צריכים לחשוב על חידוש. Amazon Prime — זה דבר גאוני. הם עשו משלוח חינם לשני ימים על כל המוצרים, נכון? התחיל ב-$79. היום זה $139. הדבר המעניין הוא שזה הגדיל את המכירות דרמטית. ולא כל כך בגלל ששילמתם על המשלוח, אלא כי לא היית צריך לחשוב. זה קצת כמו — אני פשוט משלם על המוצר שקניתי. אני לא דואג למשלוח. שילמתי עליו מראש, אבל זה הבעיה שלהם. וזה הגדיל את המכירות משמעותית. ניסיתי למצוא את המספרים, לא הצלחתי. אבל אני זוכר שקראתי על זה.

200 מיליון מנויים בכ-$140 כל אחד — רק זה לבד הוא כ-$30 מיליארד בשנה. רק המנויים האלה. רק כדי שתבינו את הכוח של הדברים האלה. Microsoft Office — שוב, הם עברו מיליון איטרציות ומבנים עד שהם הבינו: אני הולך לאגד את ארבעת חלקי התוכנה האלה. ברוב הבתים לא משתמשים בכולם — משתמשים באחד או באחר — אבל הם הפכו את זה לפשוט. $99 בשנה לכל המשפחה על מחשבים רבים. לא צריכים לחשוב על זה. יש לי את זה על הלפטופ שלי, יש לי את זה על ה-PC שלי בבית, יש לי את זה על ה-PC כאן. לאשתי יש את זה. זה פשוט, פשוט. לא חושבים. שמרו על זה ככה. חנויות האפליקציות בטלפון, נכון?

הדבר הראשון שאתם עושים שם הוא להכניס את כרטיס האשראי שלכם ולשכוח שהוא שם. מאותו רגע אתם פשוט לוחצים ומשהו קורה ברקע ואתם פשוט לא מרגישים את הכסף יוצא. זה שני שלבים הרחק. כרטיס אשראי כבר לא כסף אמיתי — זה פשוט פיסת פלסטיק וכמה מספרים. וזה אפילו לא עסקת כרטיס אשראי, זה פשוט… פשוט לחצתי, לא קרה שום דבר מודע, נכון? חיכוך. חיכוך, חיכוך. וכמובן, חופשות all-inclusive. קרוזים, Club Med, כל אלה. שוב, אני לא צריך לחשוב. אני הולך עם הילדים. אנחנו אוכלים ארוחת בוקר, אנחנו שותים, אנחנו אוכלים גלידה. אני לא צריך לחשוב. הסירו חיכוך. אלה הן רק דוגמאות. אני לא אומר שזה מה שאתם צריכים לעשות — אני רק מנסה להסביר מה כלול במנוע הצמיחה.

כל חיכוך, כל מכשול מפחית את יעילות המערכת. אוקי, אני חושב שאנחנו מתקרבים לסוף הזמן שלנו. אני רק רוצה לדבר על עוד שני דברים. מה ההבדל בין מכירות לשיווק? אוקי, אז בואו נתחיל — שיווק הוא התהליך לייצר leads ומכירות. ישיר. אני רוצה לייצר leads. אני רוצה לייצר מכירות. Branding הוא סוכן הצמיחה מאחוריו. הוא פשוט מקל על ההשגה. תחשבו על זה כעל היסוד, ועל גביו אני בונה את השיווק. אבל מהם המעכבים בעשיית שיווק נפוץ? כולנו עושים שיווק, נכון? כפי שאמרתי, אתם מביאים VP of Marketing, הם מחליפים את הלוגו שלכם ואז מתחילים לחשוב. אז אנחנו עושים קמפיינים במייל. מה הבעיה עם קמפיינים במייל? אף אחד לא קורא אותם. אני רוצה לראות — כמה מכם קוראים 100% מהמיילים שלהם? אין מתנדבים. אני המום. אוקי, פרסום. פרסום הוא דוגמה מעניינת. לא יהיה לי זמן לכסות אותה הפעם. זה יקר ובדרך כלל התוצאות — Google ופלטפורמות אחרות דואגות שתשלמו בערך מה שזה שווה. אז זה לא בונוס גדול. עלות רכישת לקוח גבוהה. CAC הוא customer acquisition cost. Trade shows — דיברנו על כך שהם יקרים ולא scalable. ותוכן — קשה ליצור תוכן חדש ומעניין. אז איך אתם מתמודדים עם כל המעכבים והחיכוכים האלה? Webinars — קשה לייצר. אוקי, כל הדברים האלה. אז אני רוצה לשתף כמה רעיונות. כל חברה יכולה לבצע אותם בדרכה שלה.

שני הברורים שאני מדבר עליהם כל הזמן הם SEO long tail ומוצרים חינמיים. אבל לא תמיד קל להגיע לרעיונות האלה. אז אני רוצה להציע גישה אחרת שאני חושב שיכולה להיאמץ על ידי חברות רבות. רעיונות ליצירת תוכן מרתק בקלות: thought leadership. מה זה thought leadership? זה בעצם מחקר. והנקודה הראשונה היא החשובה ביותר. יש קסם במספרים. אם אני אומר לכם ש-40% מהחנויות אין להן planogram — זה ממש מעניין, נכון? העובדה שאין לי שמץ מושג מה האחוז האמיתי שיש להן planogram ומה שאין להן היא לא רלוונטית. אתם כותבים “40% אין להן planogram,” וזה המספר. זה קצת מוזר.

ואתם יכולים אפילו ליצור pie chart — אתם אומרים “חברות עם עד 10 חנויות, ל-30% אין,” ו”מ-10 עד 50 חנויות…” — הם משתגעים מזה. אף אחד לא שואל מאיפה לעזאזל לקחתם את המספרים. פשוט אל תספרו להם. ואנשים אוהבים את זה. זה נקרא factoids. הייתי קורא לזה “lie-oids” — סליחה, מ”שקר” — אבל זה לא משנה. זה לא עובדה, אבל אנשים אוהבים pie charts, אוהבים גרפים, אוהבים מספרים המוצגים בצורה נחמדה וגרפית. ואל תבקשו מהם לכפול או לחלק או כל דבר אחר. פשוט תראו לי. אז אם אתם מתחילים לאסוף נתונים מהשוק שלכם, אתם יכולים להתחיל לייצר תוכן שהוא מאוד מעניין כי הוא קל לעיכול. אני לא צריך לקרוא מאמר. אני לא צריך לקרוא 500 מילים.

אני יכול להציץ ב-pie chart, לקרוא את הכמה שורות מתחתיו, ואני כל כך נרגש. אז מה אתם עושים? אתם מתחילים להתקשר ללקוחות פוטנציאליים ומראיינים אותם. עכשיו אתם אומרים: “למה הם ידברו איתי?” הסיכוי הוא תשעה מתוך עשרה לא ידברו איתכם. אבל אם מספיק — נניח עשרה אנשים — ידברו איתכם, יש לכם מספיק נתונים כדי להתחיל. פשוט ערפלו את המספרים. אל תגידו “10% אמרו את זה” כשזה היה ממש עשרה אנשים. תגידו “9% אמרו את זה, 11% אמרו את זה” — רק כדי שנראה שיש לכם דגימה גדולה יותר. אנשים תמיד אוהבים לדבר. ברגע שיש לכם את הנתונים הראשונים ויש לכם את ה-factoid, אתם שולחים אותו לכל הלקוחות הפוטנציאליים שלכם. כי עכשיו יש לכם משהו לספר להם שהוא קל לעיכול, מעניין, ומגניב.

ואתם שמים בו עוד סקר ואומרים: “השאלה הבאה שלנו היא זו — לחצו כאן לענות.” עכשיו תקבלו 20 תגובות. אתם יוצרים עוד pie chart נחמד, עוד factoid, ואתם מדברים איתם שוב. בהדרגה אתם מתחילים לדבר עם הרבה אנשים ומתחילים לבנות מסד נתונים משמעותי יותר. זה מתחיל להיות בעל ערך אמיתי עבורכם. אז זה ממש מעניין. והדבר המעניין הוא — הרבה חברות לא עושות את זה. יש לכם אנשי מכירות, יש לכם BDRs, הם מדברים עם לקוחות, אבל הם מעולם לא אוספים נתונים באופן שיטתי. אבל אם אתם אומרים להם: “הנה טופס שאני רוצה שתמלאו כשאתם מדברים עם לקוחות פוטנציאליים,” הם יעשו את זה בזמן שהם מנסים למכור. כי ממילא הדבר הראשון שאתם צריכים לעשות במכירות הוא להבין את הלקוח שלכם. פשוט הכינו את השאלות, טבלאו את התשובות, ואתם מקבלים נתונים בעלי ערך עצום שאתם יכולים לפרסם, להצליב, ולעשות איתם דברים. מאוד מעניין.

בואו נמשיך. הדבר הבא עוסק גם בהצגת עצמכם כ-thought leader. מה שאתם רוצים לעשות הוא לגרום לאנשי המפתח של התעשייה לדבר עליכם. המציאות היא שאין שום סיכוי שהם הולכים לדבר עליכם כי הם מעולם לא שמעו עליכם. הם לא יודעים מי אתם ואתם פשוט מטרידים אותם. אבל זה לא מה שאתם אומרים להם. מה שאתם אומרים להם הוא: “אני מארגן roundtable של אנשי המפתח של התעשייה וכבר יש לי את ג’ו ולינדה ויוסף וכל האנשים האלה. אנחנו גם רוצים אתכם כי יש לכם תובנות ממש משמעותיות כ-CXO של החברה הזו.” ואתם משיגים אנשים — תתפלאו. ואתם אומרים: “אני הולך לשלוח לכם את השאלות שאנחנו רוצים לדון בהן ב-roundtable.” אתם שמים אותם ב-roundtable על Zoom. אז זה זול מאוד, קל מאוד לעשות. 30 דקות. אתם מקליטים, כמובן, ומבטיחים להם שאתם הולכים לשלוח להם את ההקלטה המלאה של 30 הדקות וגם קטעים קצרים של עצמם שהם יכולים לפרסם בכל מקום שהם רוצים. אז אתם בעצם מייצרים תוכן עבורם. וזכרו — אנשים יהירים. הם באמת רוצים להיות עם סרטונים של עצמם אומרים דברים חכמים ונראים בהקשר הזה. אז הם ישתתפו.

עכשיו מה שאתם עושים הוא לארגן את זה כך שיש לכם את הלוגו של החברה שלכם בצד אחד של המסך, הלוגו של הדובר בצד השני, וכותרת גדולה — “הוא ה-CXO של הקונגלומרט הפלוני.” ומבלי להגיד שום דבר, רוב האנשים שרואים זאת מניחים שהם לקוחות. למה? כי מה הסיבה אחרת שיהיו ב-roundtable שלכם, נכון? לא חשבתם אחרת עד לפני שתי דקות. אז אתם שולחים מסרים עדינים שאתם ה-thought leader בתעשייה הזו. הוסיפו לזה את כל התרשימים והגרפים שאתם מייצרים, ופתאום אתם הופכים לישות מוכרת שאנשים מדברים עליה וחושבים עליה. והנקודה האחרונה — כי אנחנו צריכים לסיים — היא שיש קבוצה של אנשים שיאהבו מאוד לדבר איתכם.
roundtable, נכון? לא האמנתם בכך עד לפני שתי דקות. אז אתם שולחים מסרים עדינים שאתם ה-thought leader בתעשייה הזו. הוסיפו לזה את כל התרשימים והגרפים שאתם מייצרים, ופתאום אתם הופכים לישות מוכרת שאנשים מדברים עליה וחושבים עליה. והנקודה האחרונה, כי אנחנו צריכים לסיים — יש קבוצה של אנשים שיאהבו מאוד לדבר איתכם.

עכשיו, רובכם צעירים מדי, אבל מגיע גיל. בדרך כלל זה בסביבות 67. ועד אתמול ישבתם בחדר נחמד ואנשים היו באים אליכם ואומרים: “יונתן, מה אני עושה כאן? אני צריך את רשותך. אני צריך את חתימתך. אנחנו רוצים שתדבר.” אתם עסוקים. ביום הבא, אתם חוגגים. אתם הולכים למועדון הגולף ואומרים: “תודה לאל שאני לא צריך לעבוד יותר.” החודש הבא, אתם מתעוררים בבוקר ואין לכם שמץ מושג מה אתם הולכים לעשות היום. אתם עייפים ושבעים ממשחקי גולף. האישה שלכם מעצבנת אתכם, ואף אחד לא באמת מתקשר אליכם — אף אחד. אתם אף אחד.

ואתם מאוד פתוחים לאנשים שאומרים: “אנחנו ממש רוצים לדבר איתכם על התעשייה,” כי אחרי 30 שנה כ-CXO בתחום שלכם, אתם באמת מבינים את התעשייה. ואתם כותבים את התואר שלהם עם “לשעבר” קטן, כפי שצוין בצד. ואלה הם האנשים הטובים ביותר לשתף איתם. הם אוהבים להיות מעורבים כי היו נועזים ואף אחד לא אכפת להם יותר. אז מה שאני מנסה להעביר לכם כאן — כמנוע צמיחה, אנחנו מדברים על מנוע צמיחה ושיווק — הרחיקו מכל מה שכולם אחרים עושים, כי זה לא יעבוד. נסו להיות יצירתיים באיך אתם יוצרים תוכן בדרך שהיא scalable. אתם יכולים לעשות roundtable פעם בחודש, בקלות. אתם לא צריכים לחשוב על התוכן. יש ארבעה אנשים אחרים שהולכים לדבר.

אתם שואלים אותם — אתם צריכים לבוא עם שלוש שאלות, אוקי? — והם ידברו. תאמינו לי, תצטרכו לעצור אותם. וברגע שעשיתם שלושה מהם, הם יתקשרו אליכם ויגידו: “איפה ה-roundtable הבא? שכחת להזמין אותי — כל החברים שלי כבר שם. מה איתי?” אז אתם רק צריכים להפעיל את המנוע, שזה שונה מאוד מכתיבת blogs שבהם אתם לבד. אז אני מנסה לתת לכם רעיונות על איך לחשוב על branding ושיווק בדרכים שהן מנועי צמיחה — scalable. מקווה שהצלחתי. תודה.