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Mastering Startup Communication: Public Speaking Tips for Founders with Chris Sterbenc · Speak In Flow

• 0:02
  Melinda Lee: Welcome. Dear listeners, to the speak and flow podcast where we dive into unique experiences to help you and your team achieve maximum potential and flow. Today is an amazing day, because I have a phenomenal leader with so much experience. Chris servants.
• 0:22
  Melinda Lee: He is the chief revenue officer for 23 years at scale up accelerator and also over 35 years of sales leadership in startups.
• 0:33
  Melinda Lee: Hi, Chris!
• 0:35
  Chris Sterbenc: Hey! There! How are you?
• 0:36
  Melinda Lee: I'm so glad you're here I am ready to dive in. We're going to go into so just wonderful topics about communications and startups. And before we get into that, can you share with the audience more about what you're excited about in terms of your business and scale up accelerator.
• 0:54
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, thank you. So I've been a bit of a startup junkie, as as you probably figured out, 35 years in the business and I started a consultancy to help seed in a round companies back in 2,002, and that's the scale up accelerator
• 1:10
  Chris Sterbenc: and when I'm not in a full time head of sales role at a startup. I've been focused on developing my consultancy. And I work with like I mentioned multiple other startups. And so I just recently left a company called Learn to win, which is a a software training platform
• 1:27
  Chris Sterbenc: and led them from 0 to 9 million in 3 years, and they just took a big 30 million dollar funding round in June. And they're really doubling down on going into the Us. Defense market, which is one of the 3 spaces. We hired some folks to kind of take that, but don and run with it and go into that market, and I left there at the end of Q. 3
• 1:47
  Chris Sterbenc: great team. Great people was fun to watch them develop over the last 3 years. But moving on to the next thing, which is again scale up accelerator. So
• 1:57
  Chris Sterbenc: I've currently got 4 clients that I'm working with today on a fractional Cro basis go to market consulting training, co-selling, teaching them presentation skills, whatever pieces they need to grow their business. And the thing that's really fun that I'm looking forward to over the next several months
• 2:17
  Chris Sterbenc: is there's this phenomenon of startup accelerators that has really started to come into existence over the last 5 to 10 years. They weren't around in the current form when I got started in this.
• 2:29
  Chris Sterbenc: But these accelerators are really interesting because they are designed to take you know, 1st time founders with an idea and turn it into a viable business and then grow, and they do that by offering funding
• 2:41
  Chris Sterbenc: access to mentors as well as this community of other startup resources that can help make them successful.
• 2:49
  Chris Sterbenc: And most importantly, they give them access to corporate partners that are large corporations that actually want to work with startups, which is one of the biggest barriers to startups as a little micro company and frequently big companies like, how do I know you'll be in business next week? How can I trust you? Right? But these big companies have innovation teams that actively are looking for these cool new technologies and ideas. They join by paying into these startup accelerators.
• 3:15
  Chris Sterbenc: And they basically make their matchmaking is what they're doing between startups with ideas and big corporations. And so at learn to win, we participated with 4 different ones. One of them is a global operation called plug and play, and they're probably the single biggest
• 3:32
  Chris Sterbenc: startup accelerator platform in the world today. They're based here in the Bay Area Silicon Valley. But they now have over 30 locations around the world.
• 3:41
  Chris Sterbenc: and they're having their biannual summit in 2 weeks. So we'll have over 600 startups in Sunnyvale for a 3 day summit broken out over 15 different vertical industries, and all 4 of my clients are plug and play portfolio companies, so I'll be there with them to sit in on some of the sales calls and see them do their presentations, and also just talk to lots and lots of other startups, so very excited about that.
• 4:05
  Melinda Lee: That's exciting, that is exciting, especially with so many technologies and change changes in the world. And wow! It sounds risky, too. At the same time.
• 4:17
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Melinda Lee: Curious with your experience and being in so many different startups, what have you found? With communication in terms of
• 4:28
  Melinda Lee: when maybe maybe areas of challenges that they've had with communication.
• 4:35
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, there's probably 2 biggest the 2 biggest themes around communication and startups. One is
• 4:41
  Chris Sterbenc: the messaging of the company to their potential prospects, and that's something that you know every startups got to ultimately figure out is, what is their sweet spot? What is their perfect target prospect? Look like? What is the messaging that will get their attention and get them to engage?
• 4:58
  Chris Sterbenc: And that's an area of process that you'll go to. You'll test messaging and tweak and tune it, and that thing, and then the other one is more the individual leadership. Frequently in tech startups. In particular, your founders are engineers.
• 5:13
  Chris Sterbenc: and they are frequently ultra bright, but they're not necessarily great interpersonal communicators. And so, as a thought leader and evangelist of this concept that they're building their solution, for they need to learn gradually how to get better at that. Public speaking is a big piece of that. You get an opportunity to be a thought leader at one of these summits or conferences.
• 5:35
  Chris Sterbenc: You need to be an excellent presenter and not have your your lack of presentation skills. Be a distractor from your message right? And so there's the personal level communication skills. And then there is the communication
• 5:47
  Chris Sterbenc: of the right messaging from the Startup to their prospect community.
• 5:52
  Melinda Lee: Totally get that. Yeah, because you can have the right messaging. But if you don't have that confidence as a leader to be able to communicate that effectively is gonna go flat. And on the opposite I might have so much confidence. But if the messaging is not correct, it's still not gonna work. I'm curious. Can you give an example of what happened? Maybe maybe you worked with this company or start a startup or not like what happened when you don't get the messaging and the public speaking right?
• 6:21
  Melinda Lee: What's the impact.
• 6:22
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah. So the the 2 most important areas for a founder of a startup to to be good at this and where they fail at it. It could kill the business. Number one is fundraising like. So you have this concept, and you've built out maybe a minimum viable product. Or it might even just be a slide deck that describes what you want to build. And now you're going to go approach angel investors, or venture capital firms or PE firms and try to raise money.
• 6:47
  Chris Sterbenc: If you can't nail that pitch, you are not going to get money, and so the business may either a never get off the ground or B run out of money when it's still in its infancy. Right? So that's the 1st audience and the 1st particular
• 7:01
  Chris Sterbenc: communication skill that a founder needs to nail right? They've got to be able to.
• 7:07
  Chris Sterbenc: Not only, you know, articulate. The here's the problem. Here's the solution that I'm gonna build for it. But you also need to be credible that I'm I'm a business leader. I can build a business around this comfortably and successfully. If you fund the project right.
• 7:21
  Melinda Lee: Yeah.
• 7:21
  Chris Sterbenc: That's really what you're doing when you're doing. Fundraising is convincing a venture capitalist or an angel, that by giving you money you're going to give them a multiple return back. Take that little bit of money and use it to grow your business right? That's the big one, and then the other one again, is the communication of the startup to their target market right? So now that they've received the funding and they got to go, they built the thing.
• 7:44
  Chris Sterbenc: Now you're gonna approach a prospect, and you have to talk to them in a way where the what you're saying resonates with them. They go. Yep, I have that problem. And then you're describing. Here's how I'm gonna fix that problem for you. And they go. Yeah, I could see how that would work and help me, and they have to believe you. You have to be credible. Right? So you have to. You have to know their world. You have to know their problem, to speak in their kind of vernacular, you know, for that industry or role.
• 8:10
  Melinda Lee: Oh, and then what about their team?
• 8:13
  Chris Sterbenc: And then the team. So that's just the very beginning. That's.
• 8:16
  Melinda Lee: Yeah.
• 8:16
  Chris Sterbenc: Right? Yeah.
• 8:18
  Chris Sterbenc: So it's interesting is the the specific area that I'm focused on with my coaching is around.
• 8:24
  Chris Sterbenc: The transition from a founder led sales Startup, where the the person that built the thing is doing the evangelizing, and did the 1st couple of sales, and that conversion to what we call a scale up or revenue growth company right? And so that ultimately, as the business grows, the the CEO cannot do everything right, and the nature of the startups in the beginning is everybody kind of does everything as you grow, you can actually hire in people and start to specialize in different areas.
• 8:52
  Chris Sterbenc: And so as the CEO needs to kind of back out of being in every sales call, doing every deal that you need to bring in either a sales leader or a salesperson.
• 9:01
  Chris Sterbenc: And there's there's a number of conversations about
• 9:04
  Chris Sterbenc: which way to go. Do you bring in a sales rep and have them, you know, from maybe the industry you're selling into, or do you bring in a sales leader that can build out? The whole team starts as a player coach and then gradually builds underneath them. Or do you bring in? Maybe a junior sales development rep, and all their job is to do is to set meetings so that you can go talk right, and those are 3 different approaches to it. And so when do you hire your 1st rep?
• 9:29
  Chris Sterbenc: Which flavor do you hire? And a lot of it has to do again with the CEO's bandwidth in terms of time, resources, and experience. Right which one will be most successful for them will vary right? And so at that point the team starts to expand off, and similar things in other roles right? The CEO at that point may
• 9:49
  Chris Sterbenc: have more of a chief technology officer sort of scope, and have brought and bring in sales and marketing and other folks on the accounting side. And that kind of thing around them. So developing the team you wanna do it in a way that complements the skills that you do have and fills the gaps that you don't have right.
• 10:07
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, yeah, that's so. Key, right? Yeah. Cause, sometimes we want to just be with the people that agree with us align with us. And
• 10:14
  Melinda Lee: so there's not complication or friction. But, like you said, it's also important to get the different perspective different expertise to fill in.
• 10:22
  Melinda Lee: And not be afraid of that. Yeah.
• 10:25
  Melinda Lee: And so it's not yeah. When you don't have the communication skills, it's just you're not going to get the funding. It won't be able to be difficult to scale and
• 10:34
  Melinda Lee: and to get yeah, get market share to have people buy your product or your app or your technology. And so what happens when they do have the right communication skills.
• 10:46
  Chris Sterbenc: So it's interesting that you and I chatted about this a little bit earlier, which is that it's 1 of my favorite things, is developing people's skill sets and watching them grow, and in in conjunction now with making their startup successful and growing that business. And so it's it's kind of fun as I do weekly coaching sessions with these folks, and we'll have discussions about a specific deal that they're in the middle of.
• 11:07
  Chris Sterbenc: You know. We were. We were cruising along, and everything was going great. And then they ghosted me last week, like, what do you think I should do? And we'll talk about different techniques that they could use to re-engage that person. And it's really fun because we have these conversations like, Oh, I never thought about that, or I was waiting for them to call me back, or how often is too often to reach out.
• 11:26
  Melinda Lee: Right.
• 11:26
  Chris Sterbenc: The different ways you could reach out. And so we we actually strategize on an individual scenario
• 11:33
  Chris Sterbenc: the best ways to approach it, and what we call it. I call it homework because it's super fun. We'll go through the deals and we'll assign homework out, and a week later they'll come back and go. That's amazing. It worked, you know. Not only is the deal moving forward over here, but I got to the technical buyer also, and so they're moving in parallel, and everything's going faster. And I didn't even know I was able to reach out to that guy and stuff like that. So it's kind of fun, because it's they're not only seeing instant results, which is gratifying for both of us.
• 12:02
  Chris Sterbenc: but they learned a new technique now, and they can start to apply it as they move forward in other environments, right.
• 12:09
  Melinda Lee: Many times like you mentioned. We don't want to bother people. We think we're intrusive or yeah. And so you're encouraging them. You mentioned different avenues, different methods to to engage. It doesn't just have to be a phone call or text. It could be email, it could be social. It could be, but also giving them value when you reach out versus. Hey? How you doing.
• 12:33
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, it's not like, Hey, where's the deal?
• 12:34
  Melinda Lee: Is it? Yeah, kind of.
• 12:36
  Chris Sterbenc: Here, you sign. Where's the deal?
• 12:37
  Melinda Lee: Before she's on the phone with me, and I know she wants to pitch me something she's like, how are you doing? I'm like good.
• 12:43
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah. He was awesome.
• 12:45
  Melinda Lee: What do you?
• 12:47
  Melinda Lee: So I was waiting for the right moment for her, because she said something like, Can I help you with Xyz? I see that this is happening with your company. Let me help you. That would be.
• 12:57
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, can you bring them little nuggets of value like, Hey, I read this article. It made me think of you guys. I think there's some things here that might you find, find interesting or helpful.
• 13:05
  Melinda Lee: Right.
• 13:06
  Chris Sterbenc: Now you're bringing them a little bit of value. And again, you know, no one loves it when their phone's blowing up, and it's the same same call like, Okay, that's the 13th time they've called me in 3 days. That's obnoxious, right? Plus no one ever answers your phone anymore unless they know who you are but the but, you know, touching somebody once a week, and then bringing them those little pieces of value like that. No one's offended by that, and if it's the right nugget at the right moment on it, and they'll want to talk to you about it right.
• 13:31
  Melinda Lee: That is so. Key. That is so, key. And I think that's a catalog. And when you do that more often, you could catalog all those key nuggets, and then you have a whole library of them.
• 13:41
  Chris Sterbenc: Exactly.
• 13:42
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, and what about pitching, transitioning over to pitching? What are some of your ideas?
• 13:48
  Melinda Lee: That you can provide or offer with pitching to.
• 13:52
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, pitching. So actually, so, the pitching is actually one of my favorite things. And as a as a head of sales running a team like the actual selling is such a small percentage of your time that I treasure it. It's the funnest part of my job right? A lot of the rest. Stuff is administrative and meetings and internal stuff. And it's just not that exciting right? It's actual selling, especially public speaking is super fun, right?
• 14:14
  Chris Sterbenc: And so with each person. It's it's it. It depends on their skill set. What? What do you got to? Kind of assess where they're at? But it, you know, some of the really fundamental stuff is like a good deck. People make some horrible Powerpoints, you know. It's
• 14:30
  Chris Sterbenc: I'll give you a great example. So. I am a mentor for a cohort of startups at the Santa Cruz works, which is a local tech accelerator, and all their startups are focused on eco friendly green sustainability kind of things. And so this current cohort there are 7 startups, and we actually had their demo day, which was last night where they've been months preparing, and they got the pitch right.
• 14:53
  Chris Sterbenc: So we've been working with them on practice sessions leading up to this, and like the difference between like their very 1st decks 3 months ago, and what they pitched last night is like night and day.
• 15:04
  Chris Sterbenc: you know. One of them got up in the very 1st time they had black slides with white words and no pictures, and every slide was a whole paragraph that we call it the wall of words like, Oh, they just broke like 11 rules on every slide, right so. And ironically, this company called Trees Wax. They want to be in the winter. Last night. They make surfboard wax organically, because the major brands are all petroleum based, and they're not friendly. And so there's a lot of.
• 15:30
  Melinda Lee: Oh, okay.
• 15:31
  Chris Sterbenc: Lot of islands and surf spots like Honduras, and all those things are. It's illegal now to use those waxes.
• 15:36
  Melinda Lee: Yeah.
• 15:37
  Chris Sterbenc: They're non biodegradable. So these guys have created a tree based organic surf wax. That's eco friendly, right? And think about, can you think about any sport or business that would have better visual imagery you could use in your deck than surfing.
• 15:53
  Melinda Lee: Right right.
• 15:54
  Chris Sterbenc: These are the guys that had a wall of words. Their deck was black slides with white words and no pictures. So the the deck that we saw last night was tremendous. It had epic pictures of surfers and reefs, and and each slide had no more than like 4 bullets with short points on it, and they nailed it. It was a lovely deck, and they wound up winning the competition last night. So but that's as an example. So it starts with the deck right.
• 16:18
  Melinda Lee: Right.
• 16:18
  Chris Sterbenc: Some basic visual formatting stuff. And then it's about what is the messaging of the deck? And part of that is, who's your audience? So you could have a you have a pitch deck for investors. You're trying to raise money. So then you're talking about total addressable market, and how we're going to scale, etc, etc. But then you have your sales deck, which is really pitching your prospect. You have this problem. Get them to nod. Okay, this is how we're going to fix the problem. This is how it works.
• 16:43
  Chris Sterbenc: This is why my company is best positioned to do this successfully for you right. And then there's thought leadership decks where you're just you're you're doing public speaking.
• 16:53
  Chris Sterbenc: And you're you're basically trying to build credibility and awareness about your business. But you're not actually selling your product there. Right? So and like, frequently today, like, it's all about AI, right? Everything's AI, AI. How can you know, how does AI impact a particular industry and different ways to think about it? And of course you're weaving in. You know those applications that actually promote your solution. But it's not direct selling right? So there's 3 very different pitch decks right.
• 17:21
  Melinda Lee: Right.
• 17:22
  Chris Sterbenc: So you have to think about that like, what does that structure look like?
• 17:25
  Chris Sterbenc: And then they have to be very comfortable on stage presenting, or on zoom, or whatever right.
• 17:30
  Melinda Lee: Right. How do you help them with
• 17:32
  Melinda Lee: not memorizing or feeling more comfortable, presenting it with the content.
• 17:39
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, 2 things.
• 17:40
  Melinda Lee: Balance of right.
• 17:41
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 17:42
  Melinda Lee: Okay, what do you? How do you? Yeah.
• 17:43
  Chris Sterbenc: Well, then, the number one thing is, is repetitions. It's just getting your reps in. It's like any any sport or activity. It's if you spend the hours and do the cycles, you'll get better at it. And so you know, I tell them you practice at home alone like do your slide deck out loud, though you got to do it out loud and yourself right, because frequently it's like a it's a 5 min slot and take 12 min to deliver it. That's a fail. I'll cut you off.
• 18:08
  Melinda Lee: Right, right? And they say it inside, internally, thinking that they're practicing.
• 18:13
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, and I'm like, Nope, say it out loud. Use your hands, have a clock there and practice, and you'll find out what parts like, just don't flow right off the tongue, and you'll gradually build a rhythm around your slide deck right?
• 18:26
  Chris Sterbenc: And then again, some basic fundamental pointers like don't read the stuff on your slide.
• 18:30
  Melinda Lee: Right like.
• 18:32
  Chris Sterbenc: Have a slide and have minimal words on your slide, because when you go to a slide everyone looks over your shoulder and reads a slide.
• 18:38
  Chris Sterbenc: So if it's a whole bunch of stuff, they won't even hear the 1st 20 seconds of whatever you're saying. But have a short slide, maybe with an image and 3 or 4 quick bullets.
• 18:46
  Chris Sterbenc: Go to the slide, leave it up for a second with a pause, and then tell the story around it. Don't read the bullets on the slide things like that, right? And so. And I make them pitch me like, Okay, I'm your prospect. Do you deliver the deck.
• 19:01
  Chris Sterbenc: and I'll take notes, and at the end we'll come back and we'll record it
• 19:04
  Chris Sterbenc: so they can see what they did and didn't actually do, and then we'll go back through and go. Remember that part we talked about this thing. Yes, skipped it entirely, or you know, you were reading the slide over here and like this, slide's got too many words. Let's skinny it down right? So really, fundamental presentation skill stuff right.
• 19:19
  Melinda Lee: Right? Right? That's where practicing practicing in front of an audience supports them.
• 19:24
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 19:24
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, getting that feedback getting.
• 19:26
  Chris Sterbenc: Picture family, pitch your kids, pitch your wife, pick your pitch, your husband, anybody get their feedback right.
• 19:32
  Melinda Lee: Right? Right? Well, it works, it works. You've helped all these these startups make it to success.
• 19:39
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 19:41
  Melinda Lee: I mean, I'm so fascinated that you just what made you just enjoy and go into the startup world. What is it that fascinates you about? It?
• 19:49
  Chris Sterbenc: It's kind of interesting. So I actually, I went to Uc Santa Cruz. And I got a degree in computer science and and I. I was of that generation where Pcs in schools was like a brand new thing my senior year in high school. We actually had. They were apple macintoshes right.
• 20:05
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:06
  Chris Sterbenc: 2 E's, I think. And I was just fascinated because I never had my hands on a computer. Prior to that moment I was 18 kind of a science math geek. And I was like, this computer stuff is really cool. And so I applied to the various University of California schools. And I didn't know what I wanted to do, like a lot of kids in high school age.
• 20:26
  Chris Sterbenc: But I was interested in in the tech, and I just thought it was really interesting. So I figured I would start a degree in computer science while I figured out what I really wanted to do.
• 20:34
  Chris Sterbenc: And so I started that degree. And after my freshman year I wanted to get a summer job, as we all make some money over the summer, and I sent out like 23 paper letters.
• 20:46
  Chris Sterbenc: And I got 7 paper responses and 4 interviews and 2 offers, and and the 2 offers were from Ibm and some other company that I don't even remember who it is now. But Ibm was offering 8, 55 an hour at the time when minimum wage was $3 an hour, and I was like this is huge. So I took that internship for the summer, and what it turned out to be was one of the big sales branches in San Jose, and it was effectively a Crm database administrator.
• 21:14
  Chris Sterbenc: They didn't call it that yet, but it was their their big database of prospects. They were trying to sell their stuff to right. And so my job was to cleanse the data, pull lists, and we would do letter stuffing. You would print letters and envelopes and labels, and we'd have stuffing parties. And it's just like email spam. But it's paper, you know, and we would mail stuff out it'd be an invitation to a luncheon or something, right? And so I did that for a whole summer.
• 21:39
  Chris Sterbenc: and for me the thing that was fascinating was the stuff I was studying at school, which was like data structures and databases.
• 21:46
  Chris Sterbenc: and I could see how you actually applied it in real life in a usable, useful way, like, Oh, this is why businesses buy computers and use these databases. This is what you could do with that right.
• 21:57
  Chris Sterbenc: So flash forward. They invited me back every summer, and I did it for 3 years, and when I graduated the branch manager sat me down and say, Chris, you've done a fine job here. We really like you, and we'd like to offer you a job when you graduate. And I'm like cool. That's amazing. He goes. Well, you get a choice, though. There's 2 different jobs. There's the sales rep role. And there's a systems engineer which is like a pre sales technical engineering person.
• 22:19
  Chris Sterbenc: And and they all really thought I would take the Se role because I had this computer science degree.
• 22:24
  Chris Sterbenc: And he's like, which one do you want to do? And I go like the sales rep role all day, and he's like, really like, why is that
• 22:31
  Chris Sterbenc: as I've been watching this for 3 years now, and so the sales reps look like they're having fun. They were really nice looking suits. They drive nice cars, and then the poor Ess are schlepping gear around, and they're all sweaty and like the Demos never work, and like that seems like a no brainer to me right. I didn't know about quota yet about how you get to be a successful sales rep. I just watched their day to day, and I was like that looks like a much cooler lifestyle.
• 22:57
  Melinda Lee: That's hilarious!
• 22:58
  Chris Sterbenc: So my 1st job out of college was Ibm sales rep. And I did that for 3 years. And what I took away from that was still really into this technology stuff
• 23:07
  Chris Sterbenc: I like selling. And I'm good at it.
• 23:10
  Chris Sterbenc: not real keen on the giant corporate environment, right? And so at the same time. When I came out of school most of my friends became programmers, and they all went to work in the Silicon Valley. Some of them went to Apple when it was still very early.
• 23:24
  Chris Sterbenc: but a bunch of them were at startups, and they were like dude. You wear a suit and tie every day. You work for this big Ibm company that must really suck, you know, and we were having all this fun over here. We have beer bus every Friday, and and I was like I kind of did have a grass is greener kind of thing going on. And so when I left Ibm I joined my 1st startup as a sales rep. And that was the beginning. And I've been doing that for the rest of my career since 1990.
• 23:49
  Melinda Lee: Wow!
• 23:50
  Melinda Lee: What a journey!
• 23:52
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 23:53
  Melinda Lee: That's awesome.
• 23:55
  Melinda Lee: That's such a I mean to have both. I just you know you have the both the technical, and you're able to integrate that into the sales and bring all of that. That's why I was like sales and chief revenue officers like usually so separate.
• 24:07
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 24:08
  Melinda Lee: Or not, it could be both so.
• 24:10
  Chris Sterbenc: Subset, usually, yeah, so.
• 24:12
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:13
  Chris Sterbenc: You've got all the customer facing. So you've got sales marketing and customer success. Typically, it's all customer. But yeah, it's a super set of sales for sure. Yeah.
• 24:22
  Melinda Lee: Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:24
  Melinda Lee: Oh, my gosh, well, Chris, can I ask you the the last question I learned so much today around communication, pitching, the importance of messaging, and so so many wonderful tidbits. And what would be your one last golden takeaway that you want the audience to remember.
• 24:41
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah, great question. So I think this is particularly appropriate for the startup universe. But it's true everywhere, which is like.
• 24:48
  Chris Sterbenc: don't be afraid to fail, get out there and experiment and and do it in iteratively in a cycle. Right? So go try things fearlessly and know that they're not always going to work, and you're going to get a lot of no, and things are going to fail
• 25:04
  Chris Sterbenc: and take the good parts that seem to resonate and build around those and continue to experiment. And just don't be afraid to get out there and do it in the startup world. That's just the nature of the business is that 9 out of 10 don't make it 5 years.
• 25:19
  Chris Sterbenc: There's a lot of failures, businesses, crater. It's a race against time and money really show enough traction before you run out of money to raise the next tranche of money and continue to grow the business. So you need to be kind of fearless about it. But you also need to do it in a way that is
• 25:37
  Chris Sterbenc: structured where you're learning by failing and not just trying and failing.
• 25:42
  Melinda Lee: Other questions that you generally have people ask themselves during the 3 months of
• 25:46
  Melinda Lee: to consider, to reflect on.
• 25:49
  Chris Sterbenc: Well, I think the big thing is, you know, is is anything you're saying, resonating to your target audience and and then focus on that piece and expand upon it, and you know I'll give a really quick example at at learn to win. When we were I joined the company, and the mission was to find the sweet spot in the market for this training platform. There's over 700 different Ed tech
• 26:09
  Chris Sterbenc: products out there, very busy, very crowded, very noisy space. Where is learn to win going to be successful? And that was what I was hired to come in and figure out. And we had the very basic sales deck in the beginning, and one bullet point on one slide was about sales training.
• 26:26
  Chris Sterbenc: And that was the one thing that seemed to really put people's attention up. So that became that bullet became a full slide. That slide became an entire deck.
• 26:34
  Chris Sterbenc: and that that one bullet which became a slide in a deck became half of our commercial revenue within 3 years. Sales training sales. Enablement is the sweet spot, one of the sweet spots, 1st one identified for learn to win. But it began as a single bullet on a slide. And so when you do the pitch you're watching for, where are they nodding, where are they?
• 26:54
  Melinda Lee: And yeah.
• 26:55
  Chris Sterbenc: Body language, and and then where the questions coming from? And then again, you hone in on the areas that are resonating and gradually expand it out, and that can become your whole pitch at the end of the day. It's kind of crazy.
• 27:06
  Melinda Lee: Hmm!
• 27:07
  Melinda Lee: That is really crazy. That's fascinating.
• 27:10
  Chris Sterbenc: Yeah.
• 27:11
  Melinda Lee: Cause you you wouldn't, and you wouldn't know until you go out there like you said fearlessly, with your messaging to get out there. Talk about it versus build this whole thing out, or make it all perfect, or make your, you know, have everything be perfect before doing it. So just go out and be fearless around it.
• 27:28
  Chris Sterbenc: Give it your best shot and get the feedback, tweak it to do it again.
• 27:31
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, yeah. And hopefully, along the way you get some money. So you can go again.
• 27:36
  Chris Sterbenc: Exactly exactly right.
• 27:37
  Melinda Lee: Love it.
• 27:38
  Melinda Lee: Thank you, Chris. Really appreciate your time and your experience and expertise and sharing that with our audience really had fun today.
• 27:47
  Chris Sterbenc: Feels great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
• 27:49
  Melinda Lee: Yeah, thank you, Chris, and thank you. Audience, I trust that you got the nuggets that you need. For your business or your profession whether you're working on a startup. If you are, and you need some support. Grab Chris, we'll put his contact information in the show notes, and if you're in corporate leading a team, you can use a lot of this is applicable and take the nuggets that you need, and we'll see you on the next show. Take care, have a good one.
• 28:18
  Melinda Lee: Bye-bye.