[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Accord (YC W20) - Repeatable sales and on...
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Launch HN: Accord (YC W20) - Repeatable sales and onboarding for
B2B startups
Hello HN! I'm Ross, and alongside my brother / co-founder Ryan,
we're building Accord (https://inaccord.com) with the goal of
making B2B sales suck less for buyers and sellers. Yep, sales...
sometimes a dirty word in the startup community, but read on--it's
not what you think! I helped Stripe's sales org go from a couple
of us trying to find potential users, to scaling a 450-person
global revenue machine. That rollercoaster of a learning curve
turned all my ideas about sales on their head. At first I assumed
that success in sales was based on someone's ability to be a smooth
talker, applying ad-hoc tricks, improvising each deal. Thousands of
conversations and hundreds of deals at Stripe taught me the
opposite: the key to personal success in winning deals, as well as
the success of the entire sales org, is in building repeatable
processes and iterating on them each day. What works best is not a
cowboy operation with people winging it--it's orderly, iterative,
and actually more reminiscent of building great products. Jumping
ahead a bit: the idea behind Accord is to take all those lessons
and build them into a platform that sellers and buyers can
immediately use, so you don't have to learn the hard way like we
did. A well-oiled B2B sales machine is surprisingly well-suited for
software, so we built that software. We let you easily create a
repeatable, collaborative sales process (even if you don't have a
background in sales), and that is really what helps you hit your
revenue goals. Ok, so back to the wild world of startup sales and
why I decided to leave Stripe after 4 amazing years. Well, similar
to a lot of you, I truly felt the bar for B2B sales today sucked
and wanted to use the tough lessons learned to level-up the
experience, making sales more collaborative, transparent, and
genuinely helpful. Every startup needs to sell, but very few do a
decent job at it, and I think this is because many founders feel
like they need to be born with amazing interpersonal skills. In
reality, sales is more of a science than an art, and is much more
accessible than founders think. For example: Customers don't want
to talk to sales reps. One of our wildest learnings is that 95% of
the buying process is NOT spent with a seller. You get only 5% of
the entire process to engage, so you'd better get it right. How? By
partnering with customers to actually solve their problems. Not
only that, but the average B2B sale involves 14+ people, and that's
only on the buyer's side! You can imagine the inefficiency and
crossed signals here. Even if you have the above all figured out,
you need a system to reinforce this collaborative, buyer-first
approach. You need to structure your sales the way you can
structure engineering (Github), design (Figma), product (Jira). No
matter what you try, you're never going to see a real
transformation in sales until you bring the buyer into the process.
Accord provides a radically collaborative workspace that makes you
look like seasoned sellers. We give you collaborative, customer-
facing workspaces to drive alignment throughout the process;
templated sales & onboarding playbooks; a Resource Hub for managing
key deal documents, images, etc.; Engagement Insights (see how
prospects are interacting with your process); Contextual
Conversations-- commenting system contextually attached to
particular key parts in the sales process; integration with Slack &
Salesforce plus integrations through Zapier - like Hubspot; and
Smart Notifications(keep stakeholders informed by sending the right
message or reminder at the right time). If you're curious to try
it out we offer free trials (https://inaccord.com/free-
trial/hacker-news) and free sales consulting sessions from our
founding team (Seed/Series A startups + Stripe, Shopify, Google
Cloud). We'd love to hear if this resonates with your experience
as either a seller or buyer of tech!
Author : rossrich
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-11-18 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
| shane_b wrote:
| This is really awesome.
|
| We've come to the same conclusion in my business, buyers want to
| buy not be sold to. This means they need information to make a
| decision on their own. With many people involved in that
| decision.
|
| For us, that's half of the battle. The other half is social proof
| and case studies. Many businesses want to see proof that others
| like them found value. Oddly, this is usually something like G2
| reviews.
|
| Unfortunately social proof is a catch 22 but someone will "take a
| chance" and I bet a workspace like this would go a long ways in
| building trust. I'm excited to see how this goes.
| rossrich wrote:
| Thanks Shane! So funny you mention G2 and social proof since
| that's also been one of the biggest learnings I've had selling
| Accord so far... didn't need that while I was at Stripe (the
| brand was just so powerful already). When you're a younger
| startup ppl want that 3rd party validation from others and
| investing in a few case studies & G2 went a loooong way in
| terms of accelerating deals & building trust.
| dataminded wrote:
| Nice! I love this. Is B2C on your roadmap? The training +
| onboarding challenges are very similar.
| rossrich wrote:
| Interesting you mention B2C since I honestly wasn't imagining
| that being a use case when we started this. But have had a
| handful of startups reach out about using it for that reason
| despite the heavy B2B messaging so could be onto something
| there. What's the status quo for this on the B2C side??
| dataminded wrote:
| We homebrew on-boarding and documentation. The challenges of
| getting call-center employees up to speed, running the
| correct playbook and compliant with all of the relevant
| regulatory requirements is important.
| rossrich wrote:
| Did you build something on apps like Notion or GDocs for
| that? That makes a lot of sense especially with the
| onboarding of new customer-facing roles. We originally
| thought about solving the higher-touch sales / onboarding
| but totally makes sense that a similar solution could help
| solve for the B2B use case.
| waynepan wrote:
| Hi HN! I'm CTO and the third co-founder of Accord. Having never
| been professionally in sales, I had to reset my expectations of
| how to be successful in sales today.
|
| The first realization that customers don't want to talk to you,
| but that was just the beginning of my journey. Approaching sales
| as "how can I help my customer solve THEIR problem together"
| instead of "how can I sell the customer MY solution" was the
| second level.
|
| The final realization is that these sales reps already exist in
| every successful startup. How can we build software to give
| everybody (not just sales reps!) this super power has been the
| most reward challenge of my career.
|
| We're just getting started... but also in true HN fashion, we're
| also hiring! wayne at inaccord dot com.
| zenincognito wrote:
| I am a little bugged by how you tricked me into signing up, asked
| my details including a phone number but then made me book in a
| time with your team. This is deception in my opinion. You asked
| me whether I wanted a free trial, which I did. I signed up but
| now I have to speak to someone to get it ? Why not say that
| upfront then ?
| timdorr wrote:
| Is there any place on your site to see what this actually looks
| and functions? I see a lot of descriptions of the problems and
| generalities on what you're doing to solve them, but little of
| the actual specifics. I'm getting the sense this is sort of a
| collaborative Asana-like product, but primarily for task tracking
| across projects created from templates.
|
| Something like a demo video would go a long way for me, a non-
| salesperson, to understand what kind of product this is. How am I
| going to interact with it? What exactly is it capable of?
| ender201 wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch Ross & Ryan! As an engineer and
| occasional entrepreneur I admittedly struggle with "selling" and
| have always viewed it as an ad hoc effort. The structured,
| repeatable process you describe appeals to me quite a bit.
|
| I'm curious what insights you've had so far into the customer's
| willingness to sign into the product and engage with the process?
| rossrich wrote:
| honestly this is the first big one product related question we
| needed to answer if the idea behind Accord was actually going
| to work in the real world.
|
| We initially thought the workspace acceptance and engagement
| rate would be closer to 30-40% and we'd have to iterate from
| there to move it up. However, the feedback from our customers'
| customers was incredibly positive to start and saw a 90%+ rate
| from the beginning. The positive qualitative feedback from end
| customer's has been around how helpful it is for them to
| understand what the entire journey looks like when starting a
| sales process, and feels much more collaborative than just
| being "sold to" by another rep.
| RyanRich wrote:
| The main lessons we've observed are - 1: buyers want to be
| shown what success looks like with your solution - i.e., the
| buyer journey (what do I actually have to do to solve my
| problem) and 2: the easier you make it for a buyer to walk down
| this path and solve their problem the more likely they are to
| partner with you.
|
| We've seen teams that take a buyer-first approach have the most
| success. It takes a lot of work to iterate and refine your
| sales process to make it more buyer friendly. It parallels the
| iteration needed to build a smooth onboarding flow.
| rossrich wrote:
| Jinx :)
| ta20211118 wrote:
| > I'm Ross, and alongside my brother / co-founder Ryan, we're
| building Accord
|
| Maybe the messaging around the founding team could be made a bit
| clearer. This sentence strongly suggests that there are two
| founders, while it seems that there is a third one, commenting on
| this very forum.
| waynepan wrote:
| Hi, your friendly third co-founder here! Good point around the
| way that the post was written. Ross and Ryan went through YC
| W20 for Accord. I joined shortly after and the impetus for
| founding is based on their learnings and what is shared in this
| post.
| notyourday wrote:
| > By partnering with customers to actually solve their problems
|
| I'm so tired of hearing this word from a vendor.
|
| We are not partners. If I'm paying you money, then I'm a
| customer. You are a vendor. Partners is "this is going to cost us
| $X. I pay half. You pay half"
| RyanRich wrote:
| You're going to love our tagline then :) Moving B2B sales from
| vendorship Partnership.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there will always be transactional
| purchases, but in the B2B SaaS space we're operating in buyers
| are looking for partners to teach and guide them.
|
| The businesses that we sell to (and that our users sell to) are
| trying to solve a problem rather than purchase a product. It's
| hard to help someone solve a hairy problem in a meaningful way
| if you look at the sale as transactional. Also since this is
| SaaS the buyer can leave. You need to continue to provide value
| over an extended period of time.
| notyourday wrote:
| I see this as a sign that we are getting ready to collapse as
| it reminds me of the way the borderline finance scams are
| being sold to elderly -
|
| - "we are not here to sell you financial products -- that's
| evil and it just enriches the brokers, we are here to educate
| you on stuff that we happen so have a partners that sell. And
| if you know of other products that could be sold to people
| like you, tell them about our program."
| rossrich wrote:
| That's a very fair point. And I don't like hearing it either
| from reps or companies that don't truly value my business or
| treat me as I'd treat others.
|
| On the other side, I do believe in a world where you can still
| charge someone $$ and the relationship is built in a way where
| 1+1 = > 3.
|
| I've personally told potential buyers that we're not a fit for
| them even though I know I could close the deal. I've had others
| do the same thing for me and point me to a competitor.
|
| That's what we mean by partnership vs vendorship. It's about
| being a partner regardless of the outcome and focusing on
| adding value over just closing another deal. I'm not saying
| this is the world we live in today but one I'm passionate about
| driving towards.
| notyourday wrote:
| > On the other side, I do believe in a world where you can
| still charge someone $$ and the relationship is built in a
| way where 1+1 = > 3.
|
| I totally agree with this, but none the less this is nor a
| partnership. I'm not upset that I'm being treated as a
| customer. I'm upset when I am being told that I'm being
| treated as a partner, except that you are making out like a
| bandit on what you are selling me.
| rossrich wrote:
| So it's more about the framing and language than it is the
| actual relationship itself?
|
| I think my perspective differs slightly in that I don't see
| anyone "making out like a bandit" and the exchange is
| (ideally) mutually beneficial. Another angle is that
| vendors can be so crucial to your business that it also
| feels more like a partnership. At least that's how I felt
| at Stripe working with customers (who called me/us their
| partner if we did things right)
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(page generated 2021-11-18 23:00 UTC)