The Hidden Signals Driving CleanTech Sales | Eben Meyer, CEO @ CleanTech Growth Lab

Oh, today on the show we have Ybin Meyer. If you have been a good and uh consistent listener of this podcast, you know that Yebin is uh one of the partner companies uh of this podcast and he runs clean techch growth lab which uh do go to market for clean tech companies. uh

he is a wealth of information about how to do these things correctly, how to think about customers, think about sales, think about marketing and we are doing a series uh of episodes running through uh how to most optimally move from series A to series B. Uh the concepts we cover in this episode uh

apply to most any company uh in any stage, but um specifically his work recently has been with series A uh to series B. So, uh, very in, um, informative conversation. I learned a lot. There's a lot that I will be applying to my own business, you know, this this, uh, this podcast itself. I

know that you'll get a lot from it as well. Thanks as always to Clean Tech Girls Lab, uh, and also Craz Friends, the producer of this show. Uh, with that, I give you GI. Oh, welcome to another episode of the Grove. Shout out to our sponsors, Crazy Friends and Oh, again we got Clean Tech

Growth Lab on the pod. What's up, Yabin? Welcome back. Hey, Blake. Good to chat to you. Good to be back. Uh lots to talk about, lots happening. Been loving these conversations with you, man. That's right. So, this is uh episode two in a series that we're doing together.

Uh last episode we uh and we expected to walk through uh a number of things but really got deep in why customer acquisition cost is structurally higher in climate tech. Uh very interesting conversation for me but it left me thinking now what you know we have this uh this truth and uh what do we do with

it? And so uh your answer to that is buying signals. So I just want to get right into it. Let's let's let's lay the foundation for someone that's not familiar. How do we make sense of what buying signals are and uh in in the landscape of uh high customer acquisition?

Yeah, I mean I guess buying signals is uh going to be one of those things that everyone's pushing like a like a silver bullet of some kind. Uh it's very fashionable right now. You can go online, you can see lots of people talking about these. Um, and some are better than others. And I

think maybe the best way to think about signals is if we have this information on hand, if we have these kinds of signals to work with, what does it change about the way that we organize very limited resources, you know, both for sales and for marketing? So, it would be cool today to chat through some

examples of, you know, what what would you do with this versus without it? Then what would those like two realities look like? And then given the potential for the reality to to get better, what can you then knowing that you have access to this information, what can you do with it? And how should you allocate your

resource? Yeah, I don't know. probably a very helpful um metaphor that really helps me fix this in my head is to think of it as like you as an organization, you you're helping people, right? So, you're almost like a like a medical room. You're like a a waiting room in a hospital and you

have this salesperson who would be the expert practitioner. This is the doctor. This is the person that can save lives. You have the nurse who's going out to try and find who needs the most urgent help. And then you have the waiting room which keeps everyone, you know, protected in ambient care. Maybe there's

a a comfortable place for them to recline. Maybe there's some information on the walls. There's some beautiful music. Uh keeping everyone kind of calm and and and and happy. And you can see that as marketing, like marketing is is warming up the space for you. It's providing that education. But really the truth is that not everyone in that room

needs to see the surgeon or needs to see the doctor. Um and really the trick is finding which ones which people there in your ICP which ones really need the urgent care immediately. And if you see it like that now you can see okay there's a new reality where the doctor doesn't need to treat everyone in the

room immediately. They just need to focus on the person that has the biggest stab wound and they're bleeding out and they need help. um and they need to you know prioritize these people. Interesting. So just just uh a little bit further on that analogy but in in the from the perspective of running a

company uh it does happen and it's it's a very um fortunate opportunity when you do have a problem that is like a doctor's office where people are coming to you and they say hey I know I have this issue and I need to solve it and I need to see you to do it. Uh but

oftentimes uh especially in climate tech, we're selling into a market where uh you're solving an issue um that people don't know they have or know that there's a better way to do it. So, in that analogy, I guess in that in that space, you know, that that warm room, it's almost like everybody is there but

doesn't necessarily know that they need to see the doctor, maybe. So somebody needs to come out and say, "Hey, by the way, you should, you know, you do have this problem." And they say, "Oh, okay. Let me go see the doctor." Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like m maybe you maybe you're in wastewater treatment and

like you know that you have aging infrastructure. That's fine, right? You know that that's something that you struggle with and you know that you're working with old equipment and you do feel the pain, but there's not enough push. there's not enough of a catalyst, right, to get you there. And I think that if we use that example, then really

what you're looking for is an EPA enforcement action notice. So the facility is sitting on that old equipment. They were previously uncomfortable, but when you get this notice saying, "Okay, there's a regulatory body. It said that you're not in compliance. Uh you have a defined timeline to fix it." It's not so vague

anymore. It becomes something that's got a date. it's got a time and there starts to become some kind of mobilization happening with that organization, right? They're starting to prepare to react to the reality that's been pushed on them.

And that's a totally different position to one that just has old infrastructure to one that has a uh huge compliance action. Perfect. Perfect uh uh transition because you'd said something um you almost like a little foreshadowing. So, good job uh last episode where you said um a lot of people look at things like

hiring as buying signals uh and it's useful data but they're not necessarily buying signals in the way that would be useful to think about it for our context. So, can you elaborate on that? Sorry, can you repeat the the question so I understand it properly?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, so last episode you had said something interesting which is uh hiring hiring data for example people use as buying signals but it's not necessarily a buying signal. It's just some uh it's it's inference on what could be happening inside of a company. Uh a lot of intent uh uh data from companies like

uh I think Pando or Pendo or something like that where they they give you all these information about uh what people are doing on your website that's just inference data. So, it's very different from the opportunity we have in climate techch where a lot of the the buying signals and the levers are compliance

and they're driven by regulatory envir um environments that are publicly available. And so, I just wanted you to elaborate on on on what you meant there because it's it's a it's kind of a new perspective on buying signals relative to how I thought about them before our conversation.

Right. Yeah. And because it's there are all kinds of buying signals as well. Like you could see them in like there's a gold, a silver, a bronze. And you know, I would say maybe a hiring signal, it's a it's a great like bronze signal because yeah, if you're hiring for someone whose job it is to improve the

analytics of your energy optimization like yes, there's down down the line there's going to be investment in this, you know, that matches the hire, but you don't know what the timeline is. And I think that's the biggest challenge with that signal is like it's still fuzzy.

It's still not clear. Um and to contrast that, you know, the buying signals that we want to look at are the ones that essentially have a timeline baked into them. So if there's a timeline, you can work back from that timeline. Like uh let's say with the wastewater treatment, right? So you have a discharge, there's PAS

contaminants, it's above the threshold. based on the law, you know that they're they're going to be given 18 months to fix it. And then you can start to work back from that. You know, if there's a legal deadline there, they need to start doing vendor uh requirements and vendor sourcing in the first 3 months of

receiving this uh you know, this knock. And so that's something that you can work with not just from a timing perspective, but also from a context perspective. Right? So, if you you've read the news, you've read the um the official filings, you can learn a lot about their position and if they're here, you can see that they need to get

there and you have that in specific detail. So, when you when you go to them, you're no longer saying like, "Hey, here's my product. Here's what we do." Um, you can go straight to them and speak to their context and say, "Hey, I just saw this happened." Typically, what we've seen is in the market in the next

60 days, this is what needs to happen. these are some of the challenges that people in your position have to navigate. We are working with other people that have been through this exact process. Um, can we share with you some of those examples? So, you're being much more consultative because you have that

context to have a more valuable conversation, right? Instead of having to pitch them. Yeah. So, so in practice, you mentioned um how to do this would be uh and I have it written split awareness uh between sales activations.

Split Yeah. What what what does this mean? So split between awareness and sales activations between ICP and signals, right? Okay. Yeah, that's a good distinction cuz it's really about the specialization of what each of those two teams are trying to do. So if if you don't know who's hot and who's not, right? If you if you

assume the whole market is equal, you're going to do marketing to them that's attempting to convert some of them and you're hoping for the best. And that's that's an inefficiency because they're simply not there to buy, right? So what marketing in a perfect world would be doing is it would be flagging the ones

that are able to move further in a conversation. And for everyone else, what it's focusing on is it's focusing on that awareness, that engagement, getting people thinking about these things and giving them ways to self-help themselves until they can no longer self-help. So marketing is, you know, providing that kind of content that's

valuable enough that they're they're navigating, they're understanding, maybe they're deepening their understanding of the problem, which then leaves you with sales on the other side. So sales would typically again try and knock on doors, create relationships, create inroads with these individuals, not knowing whether or not they're actually able to have that conversation. But if you can free sales

up to only focus on that uh 3%, the conversation is much more it's much more focused. You're not trying to I think often what SDR teams are trying to do where there's no awareness is they're trying to do that whole thing, right?

They're trying to break in with the relationship um form some kind of personal connection with the person and in that process pro process you're trying to create trust which really marketing should have been doing as well, right? Marketing should have been creating that brand awareness. So if you can specialize then each of those

functions can get really good at what they're supposed to be doing rather than marketing trying to do both or sales trying to do both. both of which are very inefficient. Do you do you I mean do you see that happening often where um companies are conflating sales and marketing? So, this this is something that's uh specifically

interesting to me because it's almost the core of what uh of why I started this business or why I started this podcast is because a lot of times uh in deep tech uh I mean climate tech just happens to be my passion, but deep tech it's it's a lot of really brilliant people that have uh engineered or even

invented in a lot of cases uh a new way of doing something that's very uh technical. and a very elegant solution to something that's a a critical issue in the world. A lot of times those same people are not um uh taught at any point in the in the journey how to run a business or be an

entrepreneur. And a lot of a lot of entrepreneurship is sales and marketing. Exactly what you're talking about. So I feel like um the the framework that you're laying is a very uh high level efficient ideal version of what go to market what growth is uh and for any business but specifically in climate

tech I think it it uh it doesn't happen as much as it should. So in your experience, if you could give one example of uh a company that you worked with, audited, whatever that was not doing it uh as efficiently as possible, thought that they were but was very clearly not after you engaged and then either how that

company transitioned to doing it more effectively or just another company that does do it uh as effectively as you're speaking just to ground this uh in in an example. Yeah, I mean it's so tough to get right because we're all starting with the the problem, then building the product, then building the you know the the pilot phase for that

product and then eventually trying to scale that system. I think the biggest challenge is really honestly knowing which gate needs to be unlocked next and in what order those gates need to be unlocked because let's say and I'll use the example I'll use is a a carbon accounting platform that I've been working with for some

time and this is a founder sales motion. It's uh it's a very deeply like very knowledgeable, very charismatic founder. Um can create a relationship with almost anyone, right? So there's no there's no problem in like getting that meeting set up with the founder. There's going to be a good conversation. What they struggled

with was after having all these positive initial conversations. So they're selling to uh mid-market and then sometimes the lower side of the the enterprise sustainability teams of two to three people selling this this carbon accounting platform. They'd get into the conversations and they'd get into like the problems. There's climate disclosure laws that they need to uh be ready for.

There's some timelines in place for that. And the conversations all went very well. Everything seemed to be going well until the vendor selection. So there's a proposal out. They're reviewing the options. They're reviewing the competitors and every single time at that stage the deal would drop. And there were over 15 of these scenarios

where the deals would drop. And you know, you look at that and it looks like a sales problem. It looks like there's a conversion rate problem between proposal to contract to deal one. And so we try to solve that as a sales problem. We try to make better um brochures, better sales assets, better

ROI calculators to help build the business case for this product when in reality we were trying to solve the wrong problem. It wasn't a sales problem. It was a product market fit problem. It was that for somebody in that position which has carbon accounting is such a competitive space right so many options you can go

with for the customers in that position what they lacked was something personalized enough to their segment so like if you're doing carbon accounting as a manufacturer it's very different to if you're doing it as a healthcare provider or as a financial services provider and the product I was working with was trying to do it for everyone

And that's why there was a lack of fit. Right? So that's one of the hard that that was one of the biggest inefficiencies that we had. We just struggled to see it until we came up to the point where we realize that the reason why none of them are going forward is because their compliance

requirements aren't addressed by the general approach of the product. They needed something that was specific. So did you see in that example then um great example by the way? Did you did you see them uh not utilizing or optimizing maybe the distinct roles of marketing and sales in the way that you were speaking to? Is that why

uh is that why this um perpetuated for so long this problem of theirs? It's definitely about roles, but in this case, I'd say the role of product for sales was marketing. I think that was the that was the cloudy part of the diagnostic, right? So we were not we were not asking the question like well

if product would change how would that affect the sales process? Um and it's always it's always got to come like product is at the top of that hierarchy and then sales and then marketing. Um and that's something that we didn't we didn't think to change or to play with that variable and that was the biggest

wait sorry that that was the structure that existed not or or one that that should have that should have you know like should have asked first has the product been validated as a competitive solution in such a competitive space.

Okay. Um Got it. Yeah. And then you would ask about the and and then if that's yes then you would ask about sales and then you would ask about marketing. Yeah. And you would you would kind of like it's kind of like positioning messaging delivery. It's like if your positioning is not stable, all the changes you make

to messaging are built on an unstable foundation. And if the messaging is not stable, all the distribution challenges you're trying to solve are also not stable. So you kind of need to work back to the original. Okay. Yeah, this is so good.

So I'm curious Yeah. What have you what have I what have I uh found as far as this goes? Oh, I I it's it's uh the the reason I get so excited about this is because it what what I found um I guess to answer your question in the same way that I was speaking to you

before is that just a number of times on this podcast I've spoken to um let's just let's just take a recent example of this guy uh that started Meion. Let's say so Memberon is a is a company. We'll shout out uh Greg. Mebron is an awesome company. Uh it's been around for like

eight years or 10 years. They spun out of a university and um at the very beginning they were, you know, PhD. It was it was a lab, you know, they were doing really cool research on a spec on a new material that you could use uh for membranes uh in desalination in a number of different contexts. And

so the original hypothesis that they had was that there was going to be um if I remember correctly an application at uh either data centers or some type of center that's very energy intensive and has to do with the grid. Uh cuz there was a very specific application for that. But again, here goes the the

difference between the the science and the and the entrepreneur brain. It took them a year and a half to realize that that market wasn't big enough. And uh they had a you know, I guess to go through hierarchy, they had a valid product and it and it fit this market, but it wasn't big enough to be able to

support uh the growth of a real company. Uh and it took and it took 18 months for them to figure that out. And so um it's not a direct you know answer to your framework or your question but I just feel like the more content that is out there around how to think about um

motions growth motions once you have uh an idea in climate tech it it it really will uh and and and you know we'll we'll get to this but it it really will introduce an environment where you are really specific about how much waste is happening um and uh and and it will help you know

companies like member on now they they pivoted after that to wastewater uh treatment plants like like you mentioned before and they've been extremely successful and so impactful in that space you know and they've just taken off since then. Um which is just so cool. But to think that that could have happened earlier or that there's a

company now that's in that middle of that 18-month period that that once they take your framework be like oh wait you know we're looking at the wrong the wrong market or or we're you know we're marketing in in the wrong way or you know we're selling in the wrong way is really inspiring to me. Wow, that's

tough problem to solve, right? Like some rabbit holes, it feels like some rabbit holes you need to go through and to see the end of the hole before you can come back out and say, "Well, okay, not that one." Yes.

Yeah, that's why it's so important. That's it is a tough It is a tough issue to solve and that's why you're you're going to you're going to save a lot of people from that. So uh so the the last thing before we get to that that uh uh that mindset piece I talked about because I think

that's also super important is uh I have a note here to structure and prioritization of uh marketing outreach. So we're taking what you were saying and just tying a nice bow on it. So in practice you know the the uh the the correct way to do things this framework product sales marketing like how how can

we think about this tangibly? you know, how do you actually work through this to get to a point where things are working? Yeah. I mean, I I think so tangibly we should go into an example of some kind.

I I think a good um just a good visual for this is just to think of it as like you've got different gates, right? And you're you're trying to ease the flow of water through these gates, right? And it's all about the order in which you're able to open the gates. Um so, for

instance, like Sorry, just question. So I think I I think if you you had mentioned that carbon accounting company realized that they could be specific across industries. Is that is that an example of what you're saying with uh the the different gates like they were able to move in there and in industry

specific? That would be like a yeah like a competitive differentiation insight like you can't compete in the general market because the competitors will have like 10x 20x the funding but within that there is an opportunity to work with a subsegment of the market where it's underserved and therefore your product development can satisfy that that

problem like that was the the realization was at the product level really once that realization If it's true, once that realization is made, then you open the product gate, then the sales gate becomes the next blocker. It's like, okay, how do you communicate that? How do you repeatedly get people interested and get people uh trying the product,

right? And then validating that assumption you had at the product, if that makes sense. It's kind of like being being willing to go back to the previous gate if you're finding something's not opening up further down the line. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I I I I like that. So, so let's just let's just stick with it if if it makes sense. So, they let's say hypothetically that carbon accounting company, they're trying to be too general. They looked at their product. They said uh it's not specific enough to the industry application. So,

then they um you know, they they edited their their product, however, however they did that. And let's say they chose manufacturing as an industry where they really wanted to move into. So, then they they open up that gate.

They say, "We have a product for manufacturing and we know it. It's validated." Now we go to Now we go to sales. So you're saying all the um how do we communicate this so you get like sales copies, sales enablement, like what does it look like for that gate to be lifted then?

Yeah, I I think the the gold in that part of the process is going to be having you have these calls, you're going to have these objections that are coming up on the calls, right? And each of those objections are essentially the the market building your requirements document. So if if you've been serving

the segment for a while, you probably already know what it needs to be for manufacturers. But if it's your first time going out to that market, you're going to speak to people that are buying and they're going to start revealing that there are certain like operational complexities that you need to help them,

right? So there's certain reporting styles that are unique to their way that the business operates. and if you can't report on that within your your accounting um that's going to not be a good purchase for them. So every little objection that comes up in the sales process is essentially a product development cue and that will feed you

back. So in the early days that's you know that's gold. So then so then let's let's again say hypothetically. So you go through this process. You do uh outbound sales motions. You reach out to your network. You know, you do a little bit of marketing with your with your high level hypothesis. You get to those

conversations. You experience the objections and you collect this data about how your product actually fits in this specific direction. So that gate, let's say the sales gate is up. Now you're at marketing in this framework. So how do you address that?

So maybe you found with uh within the objection collection process, maybe you found that there was a repeated misunderstanding about um exactly the nature of the penalties that are coming for an organization that isn't able to act on this. Maybe people like let's say there's a there's a climate disclosure law in California SB253 which applies to

organizations of a certain size. It applies to organizations that are doing uh revenue or sales in California or they're doing hiring in California um or they have a location in California. And it's very common for a sustainability team to because of all the regulation they have to stay on top of, it's very

common for them to miss some of the nuances of that. And it might come out in the sales process that someone will say this is not a priority for us cuz we don't actually uh we don't fit within the the penalty. And if they're wrong about that, which is often the case because it is it's hard to stay on top

of it, that objection is essentially a non-objection, right? It's one that they should already know that they're sitting within an area where they need to go and report for compliance. So, that would be good marketing material, right? So, to pre-educate people that um actually if you fit any of these requirements, it might not seem like it at first, but

looking at the rules and how they define sales in California, you probably are on that list and you do need to know about it. So the the marketing's role is then to educate the market till they get to the point where that's not an objection that the sales team is having to to

handle. I I just I just want you to keep going, man. This is just such good stuff. I'm just like I'm just laid I'm I'm laid back and I'm like, "Wow, this is uh you know, my mind is is really going." So it sounds like there's it's it's uh it's a lot. What we're what we're laying out is

a lot and that's why there's a need for it. That's why both of us are doing what we're doing. How do you think about this stuff with with the with the right mindset in order to uh ask the right questions, get the right information and grow your climate tech company effect?

Man, what a great juicy big question. Yeah. Um, man, I don't know. I guess it depends what stage you're at, right? Well, you have a I mean, you you you do uh you've been you've been releasing a lot of good content about specifically the road from series A to series B because there's a lot of companies that

struggle with that. Um, but you have a good a good catchphrase that I actually am excited because I haven't asked you about it yet and I've been meaning to. Uh, what does zero waste what is the mindset of zero waste mean?

Um, I mean it's an it's an idealistic it's it's the idea that we could remove waste from all growth, right? Like if you you have a company that's got revenue or you've got a company that has investment, your goal of course would be to grow to its potential without wasting a single dollar that would be great. Um,

in reality there's always going to be a little bit of waste in everything that we do. But I think what we what we're all struggling with is understanding like what are the wastes that are unnecessary that we could cut like what are the things that are not learning or university fees that come with all

campaigns that we launch what are the things that we could completely um sidetrack like what are the common mistakes that people have and I think that that's like the essence of that is knowing what to do and in what what order because obviously exactly what you should be doing is going to be different based on

like what do you know about your customers? What do you know about the product? Like this is such a deeply specialized question. But I think what everyone can what we can all benefit from is sharing how we're doing at the different stages. you know, if you're preede or series A and you don't have

strong positioning, you don't have a strong website, uh you haven't articulated the solution very well, of course, running a giant marketing campaign is going to be a waste of money cuz you're basically trying to you're trying to feed a funnel that doesn't work yet. So, that's that's an easy and extreme example. I think where it gets

really hard is where, let's say, you're sitting at series A, you've already got some happy customers, you've got product market fits, um people are staying with you for more than a year, so everything looks good. The question is what's stopping us from growing right now? You know, what's the next unlock that we need to um release and to focus

on? And I think that's where you have a lot of choices to make. And that's where it's helpful to look at how other people are doing it. like see in the space how others have grown um because often that's going to be you're going to be making a decision between like do I use

the channel uh primarily if I'm growing if I'm selling to utilities do I want to sell directly or do I want to sell through existing vendors and do partnership model yeah these are really obviously really big questions um and they can differ for everyone in this case I would say it just really really

helps to to look around and to look at what other people are doing cuz if you want to figure that out yourself it's going to come with uh university fe Yes. Exact. That's and and that's why I would always defer to having people like you do it for me because I'm not I'm not

spending time doing that. But uh but but so if if if I was going to do it myself, which you know thankfully uh uh I I get to collaborate with you in doing, but if I was going to do it myself and I wanted to take a stab at it and you know pay

that university fee, um we we have in this in this mindset, you really want to focus on the sources of waste like you're speaking to. Idealistically, you don't want any waste in your growth. Um what let's just focus on series A because you're putting out a lot of good content about that. You mentioned

already a good example of usually where there is waste. Um but how would you if you're running a series A company? How would you look at things and you say I want to approach and we want to grow. We just raised um you know we're we're heading towards series B or we have

series B in the horizon. We know we're going to do it. How would I look around and use this mindset? Because we we laid out a great framework. How would you use this mindset to start asking the right questions? Um, you you did mention already and I wrote it down a uh the

correct order of operations to do things. So, if we could just, you know, tie things up with with that, how do I use this mindset to ask the right questions and what does it mean to do things in the right order of operations?

Okay, so let's let's use series A then. Beautiful. Absolutely. So you're sitting Yeah. I mean obviously you're sitting on some dry powder. You're sitting on a limited runway. You already have good recurring revenue, but your target is probably going to be a huge multiple of that, right? So like let's say you're sitting

on a 5 million revenue target by the end of the year. The best this is not always information that everyone has available but the best position from which to start that exercise is to look at that that funnel.

So you look at your closed one deals, you look at the opportunities, you look at the proposals, you look at the sales qualified leads and you look at the marketing leads and you look at that whole that that funnel and you want to try and understand for each of those drop off points of which it's

inevitable, right? We will always have drop off in a funnel. But at which of those points are you above or below the benchmark? Because if you are let's say experiencing like an MQL drop off, it's very common to see anything between 25 to 40%. MQL to SQL. If you're seeing something in the range of 60 70% that is

yes, a it is alarming, but b it's an opportunity. you know, there's there's probably an improvement you can make in that stage. Um, so if you're looking at that and you're seeing, okay, well, I'm supposed to hit 10 million, but of that 10 million, I'm losing 2 million between these two stages. You know, if I'm

forecasting forward based on the current drop offs that I'm seeing, then that should galvanize you to be able to really put resource in that part of the funnel. And like practically speaking, if you have a low MQL conversion, it's almost most likely it's going to come down to targeting. It's going to come

down to looking at the which of the MQLs that moved to SQL that was successful and that eventually became closed one. What are the attributes that they shared? You know, take that as a segment out of your CRM and look at the difference between the ones that don't close to the ones that do close. run

that analysis and see, well, if I just targeted the people, are there some patterns? If I just targeted those ones that did make it to close one, would it change my targeting at the top of the funnel? And if it does, then that's definitely an experiment, you know, worth running. Um, but so, so then this framework, this

framework from earlier where we went product, sales, marketing, does that exist at series A still? uh because there's more of an understanding between your product and you know with the with the successful um closed clients you know uh revenue things like this does that framework still exist at series A uh or is there a different order of

operations to take like you were speaking to? Um, yeah, great question. I mean, you should you should probably have a very stable core like anchor product, right? That that is now stable because you've you've got those recurring customers.

So, the product should be stable. But I think where that will come back in again is if you're trying to go maybe you've got mid-market, you're trying to go into the enterprise segment. That's an entirely new realization of the same product, right? The product's going to have to go through some changes to

service a new segment. And that would apply even if you're going out into a new industry segment, a new company size, maybe a new buyer as well. So there's all kinds of ways that series A and I've seen this a few times where series A companies, they'll get to series A with product market fit in a

certain segment, but when they want to get to series B, they need to expand that. Uh, and maybe they're seeing, oh, we had really good good success, but we were sitting on a 10k average contract value. with the first segment and they wanted to get to 50K. To get to that, they're going to have to make some some new

uh new sales motions. Probably going to need some new product customization for that as well. That would that would return to the uh doing things in the right order. Yeah. And refreshes that whole process. Yeah. Well, I think the uh signal of a good uh conversation is when you're left with more questions than answers. Um and and

when the questions that you have are, you know, an elevated version of the ones that you came in with, which is what happened for me. I learned um like I said, I wrote down these things. These are not just uh really important and relevant for climate tech companies, but I think, you know, any any person, any

company looking to grow, I think this framework is really useful. So, selfishly, I will be listening back to this to this episode while simultaneously pushing out content saying, "How can this apply to my company?" Um, and I was thinking about how to um how to how to ask this because uh you know, we're doing multiple episodes and

you've answered this question a couple times now. So, I'm going to ask you uh a different version. What inspires you about the work that you've done recently um with your clientele and your team? Um yeah, I mean honestly working with people that are very passionate about what they doing and the way that

I've seen that the best operators are usually the most like they're actually the most humble ones. The ones that are doing doing the greatest work are the ones that are able to like have an idea, ship the idea, put it in market, see it fail, and then very quickly ask those uh tough questions like why would this have

failed? What could I have been wrong about and what can I what can I do differently? And we see that in the kind of stuff like we were talking about now, you know, which is like big big questions of positioning, big questions of does the product solve the problem.

But it also filters all the way down to you run a marketing campaign and you have these ideas that these are the value propositions that the audience really cares about and maybe ah you think they care about like financial forecasting is the most important thing for an energy business management platform. Um, and we all feel very

strong about this and we this really makes sense to to the research that we've been doing. Um, and you go to market without messaging and you test it and you realize that no matter how hard you want it to work, it's not what people are buying buying with. They're not engaging on that content. So that's

that process of constantly going forward, putting out the message, seeing the results, and then asking the question like, are we maybe wanting this to be the case more than it really is the case? Are we getting different signals? Um, and what inspires me, like there's an example recently where we we did have

that idea where we were very certain that this was what the market is going to bite on. Uh, this is going to be the most attractive value proposition when in reality it was much more simple. It was really just time-saving for the very overworked buyers that were working with the product. And it seems like such a downgrade in

product vision that you're only selling the time saving, but once you've sold it on the time saving, you can then sell them on all the other beautiful features that exist. It just took us, you know, getting down from the the positioning pedestal, getting down from this like big grand vision of what it could be to

just just asking the question like, okay, so what's going to cause someone to start a demo of the product today? Um, and that process, it's really fun, right? just really inspiring and kind of keeps you keeps you on your toes.

So, a ve a very tangible example of uh this framework that we're talking about today. Test and learn and be willing to be wrong. Yeah. As many times I I I always enjoy uh these conversations, Jebin. So, uh I'll take I'll take as many of these as I can get and I know I have more questions for

you, but uh for today, I appreciate you walking through this uh this framework. I'm very excited to get it out to the people. I think uh if anyone would like to take this and apply it to their own company, it would be helpful and then they'd realize, oh my god, there's so much to do. I need help, but at least

they'd be uh be able to ask the right the right questions relative to just um you know, waiting 18 months to find that there's a different market that you should enter. So So I really appreciate uh all the conversation, man. Thank you for this episode.

Appreciate you. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for the ideas. It's always so exciting and it's like so stimulating and I'm going to have just like a buzz after this conversation which I always appreciate that. You got it. Well, enjoy your day.

Likewise. See you soon.