E526 | Fanny Talagrand, Stripe: Path to Market: Adapting Sales Strategies for Startups and Enterprise

0:03There is something common across the profile of sales leader that you need. You need someone who's going to think for words for you in terms of not just I'm able to drive revenue metrics, but also I'm able to think for what our sales trends for the next three years, four years, five years, and how to influence product to become that way. Welcome to Path to Market, the podcast where we unravel the art and science of go-to-market strategies for startups and scale ups. Brought to you by Natasha Lytton from Seedcamp, the day one partner for Europe's most exceptional entrepreneurs, and Micah Smirthwaite, seasoned investor and sales leader.

0:34This series dives deep into the challenges, opportunities, and insights that define a company's journey to market success. Together, Natasha and Michael will share their own learnings, uncover practical advice from seasoned go-to-market leaders, and discover the myths surrounding what it really takes to master go-to-market. So whether you're a founder, operator, or investor, this series will empower you with actionable insights to navigate your path to market success. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Stripe. Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses.

1:03Millions of companies from the world's largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, the company aims to increase the GDP of the internet. Hi everyone, today we are joined by Fannie Talagrand, head of EMEA sales for startups and SMB at Stripe. That payments company you may well have heard of, a global powerhouse helping millions of businesses scale their operations seamlessly. With a background spanning product strategy and customer engagement Fannie brings a unique lens to the table having worked with startups and enterprises like to unlock growth and tackle go-to-market challenges head-on.

1:42And then prior to joining Stripe Fannie spent a decade at Google Cloud so she has an amazing wealth of experience to share with us all from two hugely successful tech companies. Fannie welcome we're so delighted to have you here with us today. No, thank you for having me. I'm always delighted to chat about all things founders, go-to-market motions, and scaling businesses. So it's a pleasure. Before we dive in, we'd just love for you to share a little bit more about your role and your experiences across those two juggernaut companies. Yeah, super happy. So my career started a little bit by accident.

2:17And I always like to tell the story of, you know, I went to business school and I was convinced I was going to work in strategic consultancy, enjoy McKinsey, Bain, etc. Those big consultancy firms. And actually, I did my Erasmus in Dublin. And at the time, I had graduated and the tech sector was really booming in Ireland. There was a lot of tech companies implanting in Ireland. And I thought I'd love to get into a sales experience, do this per year, get my English to a good professional level. And then I'll join a consultancy firm. and turned out I absolutely loved the tech sector. It was not in cloud computing at the time, so it was software.

2:51And I actually really enjoyed talking to users, figuring out what was the solution that we could propose to them to help grow their business. And one thing after the other, I actually moved into, so I started a company called BMC Software and then a few years down the line, I joined Google Cloud in 2011. And at the time, Google Cloud was this big bet for Google, but we're a very very small team and so I saw that unit like completely scaled over my 10 years and I was an accounting executive and then I started being a sales manager and then at the end of this experience I was responsible for the go-to-market motion for good cloud platform for startup and SMBs across the ME region and I had spent 10 years in cloud computing at this point in time and I thought the fintech industry was incredibly interesting and so I had always said actually when I was in Google I would only leave Google to go work at Stripe because I thought that company was incredibly impressive from their founders to how they completely revolutionized the industry that they were in.

3:49And so I had the opportunity to join Stripe three years and a half ago. Again, various roles, various regions and business units. And now I have the pleasure of running the startup and SME team, Gunnar Marques for EMEA. And yeah, it's incredible. I love telling startups and founders about what they're up to and how Stripe fits into that journey. and so I feel like I have experiences in scaling businesses that's the part of the business I enjoy the most and I think like as soon as it gets a bit like steady state I look for my next opportunity and there is no shortage of this at Stripe at the moment which is really exciting.

4:23That's amazing. I mean what a joy to have two such loved companies to be a part of and like both Google Cloud and Stripe provide the critical pieces of infrastructure for startups and startups are building their businesses on top of these products. What are some of the similarities and then also some of the differences about selling to startups specifically at both Google Cloud and at Stripe? Yeah, I would say probably what's common across Google Cloud is Stripe and startups in particular is, I think, you know, what's important to a startup is, obviously how the product is working today and functionality, et cetera.

4:59But I think it's the journey that we're able to take people on and for a startup to think today, Stripe is the right choice for me or Google Cloud. And in 10 years, it will still be Google, Trident, Stripe. And what's common about those two companies is really the vision of being the best products for what they're doing and the best solutions. And so what's common is really understanding what's a startup ambition. And maybe they don't know. And I think being able to say to them, hey, if you change your business model a million times, we'll still be there because we've built a platform. That's not just like in the case of Stripe, a car payment provider, but really thinking about all the fund flows that you may want to support and how you monetize.

5:35So I would say really thinking about startup founder journey. And I think in both cases, you need to show what that journey looks like with a technology partner. I think the piece that's maybe a little bit different is maybe when startups feel like they need to look at that piece of the infrastructure. And I think Google Cloud probably earlier in the journey, because a lot of the breaks are product foundations. When you think about Google Cloud and how you're going to build your product. And I think on maybe the financial infrastructure, what's interesting is that startups tend to come to us a little bit later.

6:03So they've gone a little bit further into how they build their product. Then they say, okay, now we want to see how we're going to monetize it. And actually, it is important to engage as early as possible because the way you're building your fund flows and your monetization is actually like very, very intricately linked to your product. And so I would say there's probably this conception that it is something that we'll see later. But I actually think there's a lot of value on engaging early to make sure the architecture that you're building, the product that you're building is also like from day one, ready to monetize globally.

6:31And I think we're hearing from VCs and from founders as well, that there's a lot more onus on how you're going to monetize. What's the addressable market share that you're going after? How is it going to move into your plans? I think there's a lot more focus on that from VCs. And so I would say like really important to see this piece as an early engagement and foundational structure to your company as well. Yeah, we can definitely attest to that. Lots of focus on monetization around the new generation right now. No bad thing. And then Google has one of the most admired engineering organizations and also arguably Stripe have done an incredible job on that sort of things and really building such a developer friendly product.

7:09What were some of the key learnings you took from working with engineering teams at Google? Yeah, I think both for Google and Stripe, the bar is incredibly high for engineering talent. And so I would say definitely something I take away is they are very capable engineers, but I think being able to have this vision of what we want the solution to look like in five, 10 years, I think is a bar view engineering as well. And are you able to bring people that are visionaries and are just not thinking about the problems that you're solving today, but the problems you'll be solving in five years time and further down, I think is really important.

7:40The other thing I would say is how companies are built around engineering. I think it's very clear that both of those companies are product focused. And I think you see it in the way the company works in terms of how planning, annual planning is done, really focusing around product, addressable market. And I think also the feedback loops are structures and how the decisions are made as well with product being a very integral part of the feedback that we're receiving from users, but also the decisions that we're making in terms of where are we going to focus as a company. It's very, very deep with products.

8:12And I think I've been in companies where those teams are operating a little bit more independently. And actually, they kind of have equal importance in a company. It would be like the revenue versus the product. But I think with engineering-led companies, the focus is definitely on what are users telling us about the product? Are we building the best product that's out there? And are we building the best product for what's going to come in the next five to 10 years? And it shows by the investments that you make in your engineering population as well. in terms of having the best people, but also having the capacity to deliver on your ambition.

8:41And it's a very philosophical, I think, way to run the business. And that's, I think, served those companies very well from both trajectories. Yeah, certainly the user feedback that engineering has to take into account to make a product that delights users, makes selling the product so much easier. And I think as well, to add on it, and it's more anecdotal, but if you think about our product leaders across the business, they are meeting users all the time. And that's something that they've prioritized very highly in terms of how much of my time is internal focus, how much of my time is external focus.

9:16And so while it's anecdotal, I think it also really shows the eagerness for product to connect with our users and really understand what our people are saying. And that's also where you get your best ideas in terms of where the product needs to go next. And there's a question we always ask our users when we meet them, and especially when we're product folks in the room is, what's the next thing that you would love to try to build for you? What are the things that you still find hard to do or that you feel like you develop a time should not be allocated to? And you get like absolutely great insights from those companies and it makes you think, well, maybe that's the next thing we should be building and evaluating that.

9:49So I think it's also an investment of time to connect with your user base and making sure that feedback gets reviewed, prioritized and into our overall planning. I think that's a great key insight that's useful not only for large organizations, but also small companies. Some founders think once I hire a salesperson and a sales team, my job is done working with the customer. And what you're sharing, it's clearly not the case. Having your finger on the pulse of the voice of the customer is key to product development. Yeah, super important. So PLG is a term that I really dislike. As somebody who's been in sales roles, this term product-led growth is the idea that, hey, the product sells itself.

10:31And there are lots of great product-led growth companies, Stripe, Twilio, Atlassian, companies where the product is easy to use, developers get their hands on it, and they don't need to talk to a salesperson for a free trial or demo the way some legacy enterprise companies work. But all of those companies have sales teams. The product doesn't just sell themselves. So why do these companies even have sales teams? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think the premise of this is beautiful, right? Because what you're thinking about is my product is going to bring so much value to people that use it that somehow my sales team are those users.

11:08And they're going to chat to their friends and the developer communities and say, this is absolutely amazing and we need to use it. And that's very much Stripe's DNA. If you think about it, when John and Patrick first created Stripe, they used to go around with their computer and saying, try it, sign up. And they would watch people sign up and use the product and hear what they were thinking. And I think the assumption is, you know, the product will be so good that it will propagate itself. And I think it did for Stripe very much at the beginning. It was a while before there was a sales team at Stripe.

11:37But if you think about this curve adoption and you have the innovators and that moves, you cross the chasm. I don't know if you're familiar with that adoption curve. I think most people are, right? And I think it only takes you so far that the innovators will hear from it and will use the product and you'll get to a certain size. And if you think about the next phase of the adoption, people sometimes need a bit more support to actually really understand what the solution is bringing them, what it's bringing to their business as well, because you will maybe start getting into zones where it's not as easy to implement because you are a bigger company or you have more integrations that you need support on.

12:12and it becomes like less straightforward. So I absolutely agree with the first part, which I think is foundational to any great company, is let's create a product and solution that is inherently beautiful and that people will use and talk about it and say you should use this. But if you want to scale and you want to go further, now is the question to think through, you know, what's the support that you need to bring to the rest of your motion to make sure you go beyond those innovations and go probably towards populations that need a bit more education, that need a bit more support. And that would benefit actually from either, and again, executive salespeople, but also some solution architects.

12:51So once you get into this mid-market enterprise part of the business, it's not just sales that you need. It's actually people that are technical enough and understand the infrastructure that you're looking at and what you want to build. So I would say that complexity, I think, changes. I agree with the premise, but I think at a point in time, it doesn't scale. as much as probably if you want to and thinking about market share. That's definitely when you need to think about the next cohort of users. I like that framework of crossing the chasm and that these early adopters are inherently tinkerers.

13:22They'll figure out the product themselves. But you said once you get to this larger majority, there may need to be some education or even technical resales resources. So given that framework, when you're managing your team, what are some of the key metrics that a sales team that's selling to startups or SMBs, that they should be measuring against and optimizing for beyond just revenue since education and evangelizing is so important. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because when people think about sales, they think about revenue, but revenue is an output metric, it's not an input metric. And so if you think about it, your revenue is increasing, that's great, but what is making your revenue increase or it's decreasing in the case that you really don't want to and what's driving that.

14:09So what is important when you think about your sales funnel and how you measure the health of this is what are the steps in between that bring you to the revenue? And so what are the input metrics that will determine your revenue? And if you think about a fairly scaled motion when you think about startups and SMBs, so a lot of them in size, they may be roughly the average size in terms of the volume they want to bring to strive and the type of phonics they're going to use is thinking about that funnel of are you creating and I'm starting from the very beginning are you creating interest are you creating projects are you creating those conversations then how many customers are you evaluating this with how many are we going to win how many are not necessarily going to choose us and then from the people that choose us how well they're going to deploy your solutions and so you have this like every step of the way of if you think for an evaluation as a customer or a user would do every stage needs to be mapped on metrics and so you have a sense of well if I I want to get to a Y in revenue.

15:03It means those, what the metrics need to look like in all of the funnel. And it is a funnel. So you need all those metrics to work very currently together. It's like, for instance, if you're having a lot of conversation with people, but you're actually not managing to transfer them into actual project, then either you change that metric and thinking about, okay, from those first conversation, what are we missing to actually move customers along the funnel? Or you need to have a lot more conversations. And so that funnel is very interlinked together. and you can have a lot of different combinations to send you to the same revenue number.

15:34But that's only when you do that that you understand at which stage actually do we need to do better or we're not able to capture the right information or show the right value. So you can think about obviously optimizing every step of that funnel so you can increase your revenue further on the line. I like that revenue is a lagging indicator. It is a lagging indicator. Plus, if you have a startup that's a consumption model, that's even more lagging. Whereas if you have a SaaS structure and people sign contracts with you and they pay from day one. Again, that's lagging, but it's a little bit closer.

16:05And consumption can also vary. You can have people that really want to go on Google Cloud, for instance, and they say, hey, we're going to do all those things. And then at the end of the day, if they don't consume your product, then you probably realize that three, six months down the line. So it's important you have this mapping of each stage of the funnel metrics. So given that education, as you said, with a variable cost and consumption model requires more projects, more education on the customer side. Help us understand the difference between selling to SMBs and startups versus selling to large enterprise and specifically maybe in your management style for deal review.

16:44So if you're in a super enterprise named account team, maybe you have 10 accounts that you're working for a whole year. And so a deal review might be an hour, two hours, just talking about one single customer and all the stakeholders. how do you conduct deal reviews for salespeople who might have 100 plus accounts that they're managing? Yeah, it's very different. And in fairness, they're two very different motions. I would say startups and SMB, you're going to talk to a lot of startups, but I would say the good news is you're going to be chatting to a founder really quickly. You're able to talk with CTO founders.

17:17And I would say through that evaluation, have a really good sense of, is my solution the right fit for them? Is it not? You know, what are the next steps we put in place? And usually also startups are pretty quick to decide. they don't really have time. They're not going to sit on an evaluation for six months. They want to move fast and they want to be agile. And so I would say in that case, a deal review is very much on what's the founder vision, how we align to this, what's the value that we bring to this startup, how is it going to scale for their journey, et cetera. If you think for an enterprise deal and like a very large deal, a salesperson would have much fewer pool of accounts, right?

17:49To your point, like probably not more than 10 accounts. But inside one account sits 20 accounts, right? Because the power map of the account and the stakeholder map is very different. So you would have, I would say, multiple companies within one company. And you need to be able to position on who are the decision makers, but also who are they influenced with, how you do build the value proposition, all of those different businesses. And so what changes the depth of what you need to do within that account? The structure is much more complicated. And you need to spend more time on the mapping of the account and different teams that are within that account and the influencing.

18:25like who's influencing the decision and who's participating and you really need to build consensus in the account. Whereas in startups, you have the founder, the CTO, they will make the decision. But in the case of a much more matrix organization, I would say the complexity is different. So in a deal review, I would say, what's the landscape of the account? How have we mapped it? What's the different perception of the business units? You'd go into a lot more of that depth. So I would say it's like you're almost running 10 sales cycles at the same time for one opportunity, if that makes sense. But at the end of the day, it is about building value for users.

18:57And it's about if you were the CEO of that company or if you were the decision maker and you were looking at this information, like with Bing service, is it the right choice for your company? And so I think that doesn't change on the value selling and being able to go from a problem or a challenge that a user is facing versus being able to say, this is what we can help you do. And also, I think sometimes being honest on maybe we're not the right choice at this point in time. for you as a company and that's fine as well so I'm very centered around value value and business value for user especially like in the times that we are now where funding is very much indexed on profitability but it's the same for large companies and thinking about what's the ROI of using those solutions I think is across the board.

19:40How do companies think about what the right go-to-market motion is going to be like is it possible to do both product-led growth and enterprise sales at the same time? And have you seen that work? Have you seen it not? Yeah, I think you can, absolutely. And if you think about large tech companies, that's what they've done. And they've been able to cater to both of those users. I think if you want to be successful, you do need to see those businesses different within your company and thinking about who are the users we can capture with product-led growth and who are the users that we're not going to be able to capture.

20:14And it's back to the journey that I was chatting about on, And, you know, if you think about a certain type of users, that's going to be like, what's the user journey you're designing for them? I think is what's really important. And when you start looking at a user that's like fundamentally very different, I think it's unrealistic to say they're going to go through the same user journey and we're going to see great success. So when you think about your ideal customer profile, and maybe you have a few, what's the journey that you want for each of them? And what should it look like to them? And does it match with how they usually evaluate those kind of solutions?

20:44How would you compare to competition? So I think very deep user journey work is important when you want to do things that are fundamentally different. And at the end of the day, if your product is not great, you won't sell it to enterprise either. So Alpha and Omega is obviously you need to have a great product. But I think when you think about user journeys and how people evaluate solutions, being able to differentiate and think about the different motions that you need to have and what do they need to be supported. If you think through maybe more an enterprise motion, you'll probably have a lot more resources on implementation, solution architecture, because an enterprise has very deep integrations with internal processes that they may have built.

21:22It may be of a size as well that makes those implementations fairly challenging and you need to make sure you support them in the right way. Whereas if you have a startup that's just been crazy, they will be absolutely fine using your product and they will have a beautiful user journey. But that wouldn't be true of an enterprise. And they would have actually very fragmented user journey if you don't change the way you build this for them. Naturally, it's hard at the beginning of the journey to get both of those motions working together seamlessly, right? So if we're giving advice to an earlier stage founder, somebody who's looking to scale up, when is the right time to start thinking about layering on that enterprise motion?

21:58motion like how do you what are the signs that determine there's a readiness from the startup start tackling that yeah i think it's hard honestly because every startup is different in the way they're building and they're growing but i would say probably enterprise is a lot of upfront investments and i would say like probably like multi-year return so from the base that you're starting on i think from a financial standpoint you need to be able to say we're going to bet on enterprise and we're going to make a lot of investment up front and actually it's going to take time to see those investments pay off.

22:29And I think if you're on that trajectory, you can definitely do that. But I think it's definitely a trickier financial position to say, hey, let's invest in entrepreneurs because it does take time. And those sales cycles are like much longer, deployment much longer. Whereas I think if you start in a segment like startups, SMBs, things just go faster. People make decisions faster. They implement things faster. And so if you're looking for this, I think it's important. The other thing as well, the benefit, I think, of starting with startups and SMBs is you're going to get a lot of feedback really quickly.

22:58And actually, when you think about enterprises, I deeply think that what they're looking for in terms of products is what startups are looking for. Like they want to learn from startups. Their probably main concern is, are we moving the ship fast enough? Because obviously, as you get, you become to be a much bigger company, much bigger ship, and it takes time to move. And your competition might be smaller companies, much more agile. They're able to respond to trends and customer feedback much faster. And so I think at the end of the day, you want to use what startups use as an enterprise because you want to get that agility from the market.