
Eric Ries on How to Make Gatekeepers a Source of Power and Speed - sirspacey
http://firstround.com/review/lean-startups-eric-ries-on-how-to-make-gatekeepers-a-source-of-power-and-speed/
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sirspacey
Gatekeepers sit at the root cause of many significant problems in our
institutions and companies (including startups).

Eric shows how to redefine the context around their work to make the entire
organization more adaptive.

This is the most significant thing he's ever written.

If you sell to enterprise customers, this is a playbook on how to win deals
faster and reduce the cost of Customer Success.

If you care about changing society's public institutions for the better, this
is where your bright ideas will live or die.

~~~
SaxonDruce
The article seems to be mostly about:

"My startup has grown and now has gatekeepers, how do I use them effectively?"

You mention that this is a playbook on making enterprise sales. I think that's
slightly different, ie:

"My startup is selling to an enterprise that has gatekeepers, how do I work
with them?"

Within your own organisation you have a relationship with the gatekeepers, but
as an external startup / salesperson you don't. Do you have any extra tips or
thoughts on that?

Does it mean you must simultaneously sell to both the gatekeepers and non-
gatekeepers?

Or sell to the non-gatekeepers and show them how to cross-sell to the
gatekeepers? Can they do that bottom-up or across their business, or does that
need to come top-down within their business?

Thanks.

~~~
sirspacey
Teaching non-gatekeepers how to approach them is often a critical component -
especially in highly-regulated markets like education, healthcare, finance.

While Eric's lense is on a startup, the strategies he recommends are great
suggestions for customer executives.

For example, if you hear "we've got a budget cap or we have to put out a bid."
A fairly standard policy for most organizations with some government funding.

What you might not know is that all of these policies have a "sole-sourcing"
exception. If your champion will submit a statement on why you are the only
vendor capable of fulfilling their specific requirements, the bid clause is
waived.

I learned that by taking the initiative to contact the CFOs of organizations I
was pursuing and letting them know I wanted to better understand the
requirements/regulations their business units needed to follow.

I was also able to help a few internal champions summon the courage to ask
their contacts within procurement by sharing "this is what we've seen at other
orgs we've worked with, perhaps your policy is similar?"

In the end, helping champions reduce their fear of an internal regulatory
smack down is often the key to creating permission for innovation. To some
degree, most "back office" functions see themselves as a service unit, even if
their business units don't.

Happy to answer any other questions on this!

~~~
SaxonDruce
Great, thanks for that.

We're making enterprise sales to mining companies, and while we see interest
from the front-line users, they can sometimes struggle to get wider support
within their company. In particular finance to get the budget to run a small
experimental project without clear ROI, and IT to get access to internal data
sources on a trial basis. And these non-gatekeepers are getting that response
for their own internal initiatives as well, not just what we are trying to
sell.

So sounds like we should make a two-pronged approach:

1) Do some customer dev type work with the gatekeepers, to find out what they
want to see

2) Share what we learn from 1) with the non-gatekeepers, to help them get
support internally

Thanks again!

