Hi, my name is Christian.

In 2018, after three years of running Snaps, we had to make a difficult pivot in terms of who we were selling our product to. We found that, for our conversational AI product, our buyer in the enterprise was not in marketing as often, but increasingly in Customer Experience and Customer Service. The AI market was starting to develop, and adopting of automated conversational technologies was expanding from the early adopters in marketing, to the early adopters in the contact center and in CX teams.

At the time, I knew very little about customer service buyers: what they wanted, how they made decisions, and who was in their consideration set for a solution like ours. Our entire company, and everyone in it, was built around marketers, but the market was changing. This was a brewing problem.

When you reach a juncture in your startup journey where you’re not scaling, you can either change what you’re selling (new features, new products), or sell what you’ve built to someone new. We had invested all of our R&D into building a best-in-class conversational AI platform. We had a great product, it worked beautifully for most CX use cases, and it was differentiated from what was in the market. Starting over on product was really not an option. Usually, updating your go-to-market is far easier than building new product, provided you can confirm it will work for someone else. That’s what we did.

The challenge became about learning everything about the customer service and CX functions. How did we solve the customer discovery process?

Meetings. So many meetings.

Our focus became generating first calls with our new buyer. Our growth team worked to iterate on our initial messaging, built new lists and started the process of getting us on the phone with as many people as we could.

Through this process, we learned, got feedback and iterated. Eventually, discovery turned into pipeline, and pipeline turned into sales. The process from pivoting buyers to closing sales at the enterprise probably took us a year to do in a repeatable way.

The thing that I was reminded of in this process, is the value of first meetings, and the mistake that most people make when trying to hit any type of deal-oriented goal, be it a job, a fundraise, a new hire, a sale, an M& A transaction. Really anything.

Most people will start out with a goal (get a new job, close a sale, hire an amazing candidate). First thing they’ll do is get a basket of meetings. Then they work their way through those meetings, and get a few to advance. This is when then make the fatal error. They shift their focus to diving deep into the opportunities that have advanced, and they stop generating new meetings.

Ensuring that you are going to hit your goal largely depends not on the outcome of something that’s in your pipeline, but on having a rolling amount of new opportunities coming into the top of the funnel.

The reason most people stop generating new meetings once they think they have enough is because it’s hard. We have this tendency to think “I need to focus my time on what’s already advanced”. It’s a version of the sunk cost fallacy. Not only do you have to go get new meetings, but you also have to repeat the work of getting those meetings to advance to where your current opportunities are, which is also a ton of work. Why do all of that if you have perfectly good opportunities that are already mature?

You need to do that because, more often than not, you are overestimating your chances of any given opportunity closing. What often happens is that first batch of opportunities dry up, and you have to restart your pipeline. This is a deadly position. This is where fundraises, sales goals, strategic hires and other important goals die. It takes too long to restart, and so it just ends the process. The best case is that it drags the process out.

Whenever you’re running any pipeline oriented process, you can’t stop feeding the top of your pipeline until you’ve achieved the goal. Allocate dedicated time to this, even if you think you’ve got the goal in the bag. You’ll be grateful.