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Now, I imagine, as you pull yourself out of that role, you'll still keep playing a role in that process, but not the role that drives it forward every single day. You're thinking about, as you said, how do you market, how do you find advantages, how do you gain new customers, how do you, attract the right kind of peopl... |
**Michael Grinich:** Well, thanks. That's really a characteristic I think of me and the team, honestly... Because the product that we're building, it would still work without all the effort we put into our design, or thinking about the quality of the craft around what we do. I think it's hard for us to build stuff or w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... |
**Michael Grinich:** Which is funny for me, because I love skiing, and like riding motorcycles, and surfing. \[unintelligible 00:42:16.17\] all this kind of silly extreme sports stuff, but I think that startups - it's kind of the most extreme, because you're always kind of at the edge, and it's always changing a little... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Michael Grinich:** And you cook it, and you put it on the plates and come bring it out, as if you were like at a dinner party at your house, or something. And then over time, you get more people coming in and you're like "Gosh, now I need someone that's going to be at the front door, because the second person came in... |
And this is not just the founder thing; this is actually joining early-stage startups. You might join as an engineer, but it turns out you have to think like a PM, or actually open up Figma and start doing some design work. Or God forbid, go talk to customers, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Michael Grinich:** \[43:58\] Certainly, at WorkOS, we have people do like everything under the sun. People have really flexible jobs... And I think that's -- for some people, they don't like that. For other people, they can't imagine working any other way. It's kind of the most rewarding, and also kind of like the en... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In terms of your sales cycles, is some of your product self-serve? Or is a lot of it long cycles, where it does take a sales process, many meetings, many agreements? How does it work for you all. |
**Michael Grinich:** So WorkOS is designed so that anybody can just go sign up, get an API key, integrate, go do it all on your own, without having to talk to anyone. So if you wanted to go add SSL to your app today, you can literally sign up and you'd be off to the races. And it's really fast to integrate, too; so you... |
We find that a lot of developers do have questions. And when they do have questions, they can be a variety of different topics, and they want to talk to somebody technical. And so the first step that we introduced is something called our Developers Success team. Developers Success engineering. And these are really tech... |
So these are the first group of people that folks usually talk to. They say, "Hey, I have a question about your API in this way." Or "My app is built using this framework. Do you have an Elixir SDK? Let's talk about that." That sort of ends up being pre-sales for a lot of companies, in a way. And then you put in the cr... |
For relatively small companies, say, I don't know, under 30 or 40 employees, usually they just do that; they just get started. They might have questions around pricing, or kind of want to talk about security, but it's not really a big sales process. They're just plugging it in. |
It's a bit different for bigger organizations. If you're a company with let's say like 2,000 employees, there's going to be many other stakeholders from a security perspective, the financial side, or on what the business contract is going to be... Maybe they're going to budget a lot more for it, or they want to see if ... |
So the way that those bigger companies buy software is just a lot more complicated. And you might need to talk to the head of engineering, and head of product, and maybe the head of security, and then engineers that build the stuff, and then the support people have questions... So there's just many other people that ne... |
So who are the people that go do those conversations? Who are the people that talk to that company, and they say, "Hey, here's the 12 people that are sort of weighing in on this decision, and they all play a different part. They're kind of playing different instruments in the orchestra." How do we map those out and mak... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks for clarifying. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, you've heard of them. If you derive the role of a salesperson, for first principles, this is what it is; their job is to help communicate not just the value of the product, but actually help the customer succeed in it, in a way. It's not just to extract the most money possible, it's not just ... |
\[48:08\] We actually almost go back and resell the companies. Like, do the sales process again. Like "Hey, I know you guys are already paying for this, but let's make sure that you know what the value is that you're getting out of it." Because the decision-maker actually went to this other company now, and "We think w... |
I think in some ways with SaaS products, when you're paying for it month over month, and it's like a service, sales never ends, because their business is evolving and changing, and so is WorkOS. We last summer shipped - end of summer, early fall - we shipped a brand new product around audit logging. And it's this reall... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nike. |
**Michael Grinich:** Nike, yeah. There you go. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One of their famous customers is Nike. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, yeah. And it almost becomes a partnership in that way. It's like, you do the things you're really good at, we'll do the things we're good at. We keep working together. And actually, the coolest part for me about sales is when, in that conversation, you're kind of "What else can we do together... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Michael Grinich:** So I actually think sales in that dimension is pretty cool. It's very different. And it's not just like paperwork, and golf games, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. Steak dinners, and stuff... |
**Michael Grinich:** ...steak knives, or whatever, gifts and stuff like that. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** As you were describing, I'm thinking like "Gosh, this is getting me excited", because I don't know if you know this, Michael, but I love sales. It's one of my favorite things, honestly. I do sales for us... And our sales is simply a lot of the ways you described it, which is "How can we help you spe... |
I find that -- I think it was a couple years back, I just sort of stumbled on this reasoning, essentially... I don't want to say I coined the phrase; I haven't heard it anywhere else, but "Facts tell, and stories sell." So we can just easily be fact tellers for brands in the dev space. Very easily. That's kind of borin... |
**Michael Grinich:** There's this thing that came to my mind... I remember I was talking with someone once about kind of brand, and storytelling around sales; like, actually kind of what you're selling. And we were talking about like - you go to Home Depot, and you're like "I need a drill. A drill with a drill bit", yo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Michael Grinich:** You're buying the hole in the wall. That's what you want. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The possibility of a hole. |
**Michael Grinich:** The possibility of a hole, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Michael Grinich:** You don't need a drill, you need a hole in the wall. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe the wrong size, Michael. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah... \[laughs\] Well, that's an exercise left to the reader. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Michael Grinich:** But that idea of like it's the impact that you're driving; it's not actually the thing that you're buying to get there. For example, if you look at like car companies, you look at the ads for it, it's not necessarily about what are the specific features of the car... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:19\] "We have two headlights, four wheels..." |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, exactly. You watch like a commercial for Ford, it's not that, at the F150. It's like "You're going to use this to like tow a boat. You're going to use this to throw mountain bikes in the back. You're going to use this to go skiing, or like build a house" or whatever. It's a tool that's used f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Michael Grinich:** I think that's one of the hardest things for sales, is actually that storytelling, and connecting it back to the impact that it has for companies. And if you can do that -- I honestly think for most entrepreneurs, they don't even think sales is like this, because they've met with so many bad salesp... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. They bought too many cars. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, exactly. But if you can kind of actually reframe it around the impact that you're having for that customer, like "What would their alternatives be? How valuable is it to them to have payments solved for them (in the case of Stripe)? What else could you have those engineers go build, and start... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it does. It's like "Well, just give me the thing so I can take care of it, because we need to get going here." Like, you've both got your own inertia into the goal. You know, this is so foreign thought; not a lot of people talk like you do, Michael, about sales. So how did you -- I mean, you s... |
**Michael Grinich:** Well, I don't know if I'm that successful at it, I would argue... I mean, I'm still learning a tremendous amount. I think that's why this job is kind of fun. For probably a lot of people listening to this, other founders have a kind of attraction to it... Like, the highs are really high, the lows a... |
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