This project was about finding our ICP, but since then we’ve done a bunch of follow-ups around, “Based on this ICP, what do we believe about the market and our strategy?” So there are new strawman opportunities that emerge, that we then try to validate. For instance, we know we tend to serve SMBs, so we’re not going full enterprise with our strategy. Having a point of view about our ICP opens up new opportunities we can pursue.

“Strawman” is another term for a hypothesis. Essentially, we started with a hypothesis about how we thought about the market and our customers, and then we set it up and essentially filled it with straw. Then we actually did the research to validate whether the market was the shape we thought it was. With more research, it becomes more of a “steel man” than a straw man — it’s validated and backed up by evidence.

We had a hypothesis about our ICP for years. Anecdotally, it felt like everybody was using Grain for user research and capturing user insights, so we focused on this “voice of the customer” value prop. We found ourselves in between being a research tool, a meetings tool, and a sales tool. But what we found is that if we actually looked at our most successful users in 2023, almost none of them were starting in product; they started in sales, and then once we landed sales teams, we were expanding outward into different functions.

We learned recently that for the Sales use case, a lot of people are actually using grain to give coaching and feedback. We don’t have a separate functionality for providing these types of comments; they were hijacking the highlighting tool as a way of doing this, but it wasn’t an ideal user experience. It was an aha moment for us to say, “We didn’t have a need for this when we were focused on the voice of the customer, but we need to build something for this use case.”

Mike Adams

We started with a hypothesis about the market and our customers, then did qualitative research to validate it.

 50 is an approximation for a team with 5-10 sales reps + 2-3 CS members + 1 founder + 3-5 product people — ~10-20 seats at about $2500. It ranges. [Redacted] is a 50 person company that’s $4.8K ARR, for example

 Upper bound is ~250 people, which is about 20-40 sales reps. Usually, around this size, they are looking to hire 3rd layer of sales management (VP), and this is where Grain breaks down because 

we don’t provide any value on managing managers and team efficiency

 for the different sales teams. Right now, the ARR for these is $15-20K ARR.

If someone started using Grain in Sales and grew to this upper bound, what happens (e.g., do they rip out Grain)?

Once we finish the sales MMRs, what percent of the “outgrowing Grain” are we going to fix? What is the next upper bound that people start ripping us out?

*** Can we make people stop ripping us out through AI differentiators? → Need to state my assumptions here

What happens if they didn’t start out by using Grain (i.e., can we acquire this size ICP with Sales or is it always other departments)?

If we have sales MMRs, what % of ICPs that are already using Gong will rip Gong out for us?

They listen to customers for decisions and change

If a non-sales leader or founder adopts Grain at an ICP, do we see different outcomes?

Does the fact that everyone at a company can use Grain as a single tool matter? Said differently, beyond price, do people actually decide to use Grain over Gong because of spread?

What do we really think about consulting / client services companies?

Do KOLs / ways to reach ICP change based on company size?

Observations of things that seem to not be ICP

He sells to non-tech old fashioned customers

 some concerns about sensitive information, though may not he be deciding factor)

immediately - can give you more context from my time here at [redacted] or from prior experiences, but overall a frontline sales leader should spend >50% of the time coaching. We can go more in-depth when we talk, maybe I am not hitting your context correctly

immediately, and regardless of size - if it’s not in salesforce it never happened 🙂 that’s a pretty universally held standard

Coaching / info about deals became a priority pretty early. First 3 reps or so. But we invested more in recurring team trainings when we got to about 5 AE’s. Before that it was more on an individual basis. I feel today that I’m too busy to do 1-1 coaching (i.e. listening to calls on Gong, sitting in a room coaching on an individual basis, etc.). Now we just all get in a room once a week and listen to a rep’s call for an hour and coach together on what went well, what they could have done differently, etc.

Our team is NOT great at logging notes in Hubspot. I’ve made a weekly AE Pipeline Review sheet that everyone updates once a week on Mondays that lists their top 2-3 deals for the week and month and next steps for each. They share a base case revenue goal number and a stretch for the month so I have some context around total team pipeline, but I’m not diving into Hubspot for every deal to read notes and context for each. Probably should, just don’t feel that I have the time.

ICP “Strawman” at Grain

ICP Strawman

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