Our recent Work-Bench Enterprise Masterclass led by David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud, delved into the "5 Effective Leadership Tactics of Highly Successful Founders.”
With 20 years of experience, including 12+ years at the helm of BetterCloud, David has been through some of the high highs, but also the lows lows of startup life. Last year, he wrote a 60+ page, public document archiving the top lessons he’s learned over this time.
See below for our recap of the Masterclass. For a deeper dive into his personal stories, examples, and anecdotes (we promise you’ll want to hear them!), listen to the full recording here.
In David’s experience, many early-stage startups try to target a variety of companies and buyers thanks to the misconception that selling to any and everyone will lead to more sales opportunities, and therefore more sales. From a GTM perspective, you want your team working to master a repeatable motion. When you start to expand outside your ICP, there is less room for repeatability, and it can dramatically derail progress and obscure results.
To avoid this, try to be as narrow and specific as possible when defining your ICP. The more attributes you can use to describe and define the ICP the better - industry, location, employees size, revenue, language, other products they need to use to make your product relevant, etc.
Example: BetterCloud initially targeted IT professionals, such as Directors and VPs of IT, with great success. When they expanded to include security personas, such as CISOs, they encountered problems. Their messaging, competitor analysis, pricing models, ROI calculations, and more all resonated with IT professionals, but not with CISOs. It actually slowed their growth as they used up resources to reinvent their approach across a new set of customers.
This sounds obvious, yet it’s easy to lose sight of your customers' day-to-day challenges. When you’re heads down building a company, layers of people and communication naturally stack up between the founder and the customer, leading to a game of telephone.
It’s important to dedicate time to putting yourself in the customers’ shoes. To do this, founders – not sales or customer success teams – should be engaged directly with customers. While this doesn't mean founders should be running full-fledged founder-led sales processes, it’s important for the head honcho to know the inside scoop. David recommends asking customers, 1) What are your top priorities, unrelated to my product? 2) Where are areas where my company can help? 3) For input on future product investments. From there, present these insights to your team to inform roadmap design and feature prioritization.
Example: When David realized he was prioritizing BetterCloud’s product roadmap based on third and fourth hand information, he decided to do 100 1:1 customer meetings in 100 days (to note: this was during COVID, so virtual meetings made this a lot more efficient). By the time he finished this sprint, he had a clear understanding of what the majority of customers needed, why, and how BetterCloud could help.
These 1:1 conversations can be eye-opening. David learned that most top performers want to be recognized as top performers. They are clear on what motivates (and demotivates) them, who other top performers are, what projects can move the needle, and what can kill the business. They are also force multipliers. Not just because of the work they do, but because of the work they inspire others to do.
Example: During David’s 1:1s, he learned many of his top performers had simple and inexpensive asks to help them maximize their success (and happiness) at the company, such as an extra monitor, a standing desk, quiet space in the office, etc.
Often, each department, geography, or manager will have their own set of goals, leading to competing priorities. Given overloading with KPIs can scatter focus, when there is a mission-critical goal or milestone to hit or a massive roadblocks to clear, the only way to do that is to have everyone rowing in the same direction. You have to identify that North Star, number, or goal and explain to the company why it’s so critical. Explain how each group can lend a hand in the success of that goal, and what will occur by reaching that goal.
Example: When launching BetterCloud on the Google Apps Marketplace, David’s goal was to reach one million users. He tacked a progress thermometer sticker on the wall at the office and marked off how many new users were added to the platform daily. One example of how the marketing team focused on this goal was becoming the top app in the marketplace, which significantly boosted their installs and therefore their users.
Think of this user manual as a “how to work with me” guide – it outlines what you like, what you don’t like, how you work best. David suggests that the CEO / founder write their own manual first, then allocate time at an all-hands, departmental or team meeting and mandate this exercise across the entire company.
First, ask them to answer these questions, which focus on them:
Then, ask them to answer this next set, which focuses more on how they interact with others:
This exercise, while short and simple, is tremendously powerful in improving team dynamics, collaboration, and efficiency.
Example from David’s own User Manual:
David ended with a great reminder: Don’t be fooled by how perfect other companies look. Everyone has imposter syndrome and the media often amplifies this struggle by presenting others as effortlessly thriving. It’s not worth the cycles to compare yourself to others. Know that everyone else is having challenges… just deal with yours.
If you’re an early-stage enterprise founder or operator — connect with us directly to chat about anything GTM or check out our events page to stay in the loop on all things happening in the Work-Bench community.
