By Allen Haynes • October 21, 2024

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Andy Stanley (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I’m Andy Stanley and I’ll be your guide. This is going to be a lot of fun because today I have my good friend, Sangram Vajre in the studio with me to talk about what he calls Belong Ship. We’ll get to that in just a minute, but hey Sangram, thanks for being here.

Sangram Vajre (00:20):
Hey, thank you so much. I think we’re going to challenge some status quo today.

Andy Stanley (00:24):
Yeah, well you always do and that’s why I wanted to have you. In fact, speaking of challenging the status quo, Sangram has a podcast, so what? There are a lot of podcasts, but Sangram has a daily podcast. Flip My Funnel, right?

Sangram Vajre (00:39):
Yep. It’s been three years or so now.

Andy Stanley (00:40):
Three years daily, so I don’t even want to hear about that. I have a hard time coming up with 20 minutes of monthly content and you do this daily. More on that. Just a minute, a bit more about Sangram. He actually ran marketing at Pardot, which eventually was acquired by ExactTarget, and then I think Exact Target was acquired by Salesforce for almost 3 billion. And you were there for all those transitions, which I’m sure was what a learning opportunity, right?

Sangram Vajre (01:05):
It was like MBA two years behind the scenes, seeing how Mark Benioff thinks about the world, how he thinks about community product services. This just was

Andy Stanley (01:13):
Phenomenal. So that transition was about a two year, two and a half years, years, two years. And then from there, Sangram went on to be a co-founder or to really a co-founder for Terminus, which is a B2B marketing company and a B2B sales.

Sangram Vajre (01:28):
Yeah. It’s literally challenges the status quo in marketing and sales in many ways, how you go about go to market,

Andy Stanley (01:35):
And for those of you who don’t know, B2B has nothing to do with insects. It’s business to business marketing. We’ll talk about that in just a minute, but here’s the cool thing, and watching Sangram’s success, what’s the first year you hit a million dollars in, I guess sales or contracts or relationships within six years? You of course, like every startup, you had to raise money, raise about $120 million, 250 folks on that team call yourselves Terminators terminus. Yeah, and the cool thing is the Terminus offices are really virtually right next door to one of our offices in the business district of Atlanta and in Buckhead. So to walk through the offices and to just sense the community and the culture there, it’s very exciting, very fast paced. I went back to our offices and I thought we need to, I don’t know, turn up the music or something, the intensity of what was happening there. You could just feel it was super exciting place to work and you were part of creating all of that culture. So currently Sangram serves as the chief evangelist for Terminus, which is one of the reasons we’re talking today. He’s authored two books on marketing, including the award-Winning, I’m told A BM is B2B subtitled, why B2B, marketing and Sales is broken and How to fix it. He’s the host of a Top 50 business podcast, as we mentioned. Flip My Funnel again, a daily podcast, which is going to bother me throughout this entire,

Sangram Vajre (02:57):
I’ll tell you the secret behind that.

Andy Stanley (02:58):
And you’re just basically just an all around great guy. So saying real quick before we talk about this new term that you’ve coined based on startup success, which is so difficult to do, we hear about the success stories of startups, we almost never hear about startups that don’t really start up there. There’s not much of a story there. So just real quick, because so many people in our audience are in startups, thinking about startups, thinking about leaving their current company to launch some sort of startup, and I know this is probably a topic for another day, but what just comes to mind if I were to say, what are the most important things to think about or maybe focus on that are within your control? I mean, we can’t control the marketplace. Nobody saw a virus coming, so there are things out of our control, but in terms of things that we can control, what does a startup or what does a team that are launching a startup, what did you think about, what did you focus on? Because again, my limited experience in beginning this organization, it was just words. It was just an idea and then to turn an idea into a something. What was your experience in those early days, especially coming out of such a company that was purchased and all of that?

Sangram Vajre (04:09):
Well, there are two parts of it. There’s a personal part of it that I was, as you were talking about, I was thinking about it, which really is important for people to recognize. And then there’s a professional part of it. So I’ll go through the professional part just for organizations and leaders who are listening to this. And then I want to share actually probably the most important part, which is the personal part of it. So on a professional part, I think about this as a magic triangle. I think people can picture a magic triangle in their head where each ends is really mission people and culture. Those are the only three things that I believe you can really, truly, if you want to say, control, which is honestly heavy word is are those three things. Do you have a mission that people believe in that you want to believe in no matter what happens, even if it’s pandemic, do you truly now believe in it or you just said it? Are you hiring the right people? We talked about that before we started recording. And also I think culture, and here’s something I learned, Andy as part of the startup of world, because I was part of the tech village and all that stuff, and I thought culture was beanbags and pool table and music, and that’s really what culture means. And I realized that there’s no other or better culture than a winning culture.

(05:18):
And what I mean by that is people got to feel like they’re winning. It doesn’t mean that you’re closing more deals faster. It’s like they are winning personally and professionally. So I think those are the three things that you can do every single day is like, are people, do we know? Are we repeating where we are going? Our mission is clear. Are we hiring the right people? Because if that’s not true, then nothing else is true. And are we creating a truly winning

Andy Stanley (05:41):
Culture? Winning culture? Because it’s one of the things we talk about on this podcast and that we try to drive through the organization as leaders, and it goes back to mission. We have to define the win, what a win is, but otherwise everybody defines it for themselves, come to work with their previous employer in mind or wherever they came from in mind. So defining the win and creating culture around the win, that’s what you’re talking about. Yeah,

Sangram Vajre (06:06):
Absolutely. For example, a win for a salesperson could be like, Hey, I’m actually making these appointments, not closing the deal. At the same time, for a customer success person, a win might be I’m saving a customer for a marketing, maybe like, Hey, I’ll just launch this thing and it’s actually making people think about our brand. So whatever the win is, you have to continually to define it because what happens, especially in the startup world, Andy, is people think the only win is real revenue. And if that’s not happening, then you’re not winning as a company. And that is true because if you have money coming in, it takes care of all sense. In a startup of world, as they call it, if you have money coming in, then you’re growing, it’s all good. But what happens is if you focus only on that, you actually breed a sales culture. So everything is all about sales, sales, sales, sales, sales. And then what happens is at some point you’re going to hit a plateau where you cannot cross that. You just cannot

Andy Stanley (07:01):
Move beyond that. And it’s like somebody just pulls the plug on the organization, even though the organization is successful in winning.

Sangram Vajre (07:07):
Now,

Andy Stanley (07:08):
Just hold that thought because it’s such a big idea. In my industry, church industry, this is where I see that successful church planters, entrepreneurs start a church, it grows, it grows, it grows, it grows. And so what happens in the same way, the wind becomes the growth and then it plateaus. And I’ll never forget, years ago, very successful church planner called me. He was so frustrated, he created an extraordinary organization in another state. I mean, it was a story from the outside looking in. It’s what everybody in our field would want to accomplish. And he was so upset because they’d plateaued.

(07:45):
He said, what do I do? I said, well, lemme ask you this question. How tall do you want your children to be? He said, what? I said, how tall do you want your children to be? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, at some point, growth plateaus, and then you have to figure out how to multiply. And so again, whatever the industry, figuring out how to create a culture that’s winning, redefining the winning within the rhythm of an industry or an organization is so important. And I never thought about it in those terms that if it’s all about sales, then when sales plateau, it’s like you feel like something’s wrong and nothing’s wrong. So how do you avoid that? Or how do you add to the income component something that creates it and fuels a winning culture? So this is it. This something, I know this isn’t what we’re supposed to talk about.

Sangram Vajre (08:32):
This is great stuff, especially if somebody’s listening as a business leader, they’re probably struggling with this right now is like, Hey, where do I spend my time? Is growth at all costs the only way to

Andy Stanley (08:44):
Grow?

Sangram Vajre (08:45):
And what we realized was especially last year, Randy, we came up with this new phrase called retention is the new acquisition.

(08:53):
Retention is the new acquisition. We realize that if we focus on growth at all costs and not focus on retention, we’re actually going to lose faster. And we are going to be always going to hire, get more customers, get more customers, get more customers. But if you really look at the financial statement of your company, it is way cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a net new customer. So we literally pivoted and say, you know what? Let’s just focus now more on retention. And what that did was our net margins, everything just went better. Our valuation became much better as a business because we didn’t really care about way more customers. We said, it’s okay to grow at maybe 20%, but it’s important to be at a hundred percent retention rate. So we changed the mechanics around it. Now every company is at a different stage in their organization. If it’s too early or too in the middle of wherever they

Andy Stanley (09:43):
Are, that can become an excuse. Absolutely.

Sangram Vajre (09:45):
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Stanley (09:46):
That pivot was in response to Covid. I suppose

Sangram Vajre (09:49):
It was Covid, but also in two, three years ago, I think we just realized this, that we are growing. We were actually growing really fast, but we were also losing customers really fast. And we were trying to figure out, well, what’s going on over here? People are excited about this new idea that we have, but we are not retaining them as fast as we should have. And we didn’t realize until we looked at the numbers we got deep into it is like, why are we growing so fast at the same time? We are losing so fast. Our financial statement we’re not in sync. And we recognized that we needed to really focus and dial in, and last year was a wake up call for us, and that became a rallying cry that actually made us better organization that led us to the whole valuation and raising another round purely because of last year.

Andy Stanley (10:32):
So based on a crisis you had no control over as an entrepreneur, of course, you’re not really as much in startup mode anymore. You basically redefined the win for the season without taking your eye off ultimately the goal of more customers. Okay. One more question on this and maybe we’ll get to why I actually wanted to interview you and maybe not going back to what you said earlier. Back to startup mode. In this startup for profit, there are at least two income sources. There’s raising venture capital, raising capital, and then there’s actual sales.

(11:04):
So you early on, you have to have both. How do you maintain a positive culture that focuses the right people on the right project as it relates to income coming? And let me try to ask it in a clear way. You could raise a ton of venture capital and feel like, oh man, we’re killing it, but we’re not selling anything or we’re selling a lot of things, but we can’t feed the pipeline because we don’t. So how do you keep that out front? Because it’s two very different things with two different people, and generally the founders are the ones trying to find startup money.

Sangram Vajre (11:37):
So

Andy Stanley (11:37):
Talk a little bit about that. I don’t know if the question’s clear, but attention is certainly clear.

Sangram Vajre (11:41):
Yeah, well, I mean it is hard. It is extremely hard to keep up with that. For example, when we raise capital, everybody looks at that and saying, you guys are super successful. And we are saying, well, you know what? If we couldn’t raise money, we wouldn’t want to raise money because we get diluted. And that is not great for a founder who has equity in the company. It’s just not always great.

Andy Stanley (12:05):
You’re giving your equity away,

Sangram Vajre (12:07):
But if you want to grow at the rate we want to grow in the industry that we are in at this point, we needed to do that because our competitor or landscape is getting way more competitive. And if we don’t do that, if you don’t grow, if you don’t go into EMEA right now, if you don’t go into APAC right now, we are actually losing opportunities to be there. We need to hire faster in those areas because we know we now have what we call in the start of world is a product market fit. Our product works, the market needs it. We have proved it. We have a thousand customers. Now it’s a matter of expansion, and that actually is going to require some infusion of capital. But in the early days,

Andy Stanley (12:44):
I was getting ready to say in founder mode, in the early days, where was the pressure on

Sangram Vajre (12:48):
You? In the early days, it was like survival mode because we are creating something that nobody has actually fully accepted. They’re like, yeah, it’s like buying an iPhone. There are people who would stand in the line a day before to get it, but two days later

Andy Stanley (13:04):
With one in their pocket,

Sangram Vajre (13:05):
Right? Absolutely. But those are early adopters. Once you’re gone with early adopters, what do you do? How do you get to the mass market? And that takes time and infusion of capital. That’s really where money really comes in. So for us, the first year, and if you’re in startup world, your first year is when you’re actually trying to create problem market fits. So there’s the two distinct principles here. One is a problem market fit and one is a product market fit. The first year of every startup is actually a problem market fit, which means does your market care about the problem?

(13:37):
A lot of startups, the reason they fail is because they assume that the market needs your product. The reality is your product could change. Our product has changed four times in the last six years. We’ve acquired four different companies to continue to grow our business because we are not tied to the product, we’re tied to the problem we want to solve. So the part in the first year is typically your problem market fit, and that doesn’t require a lot of capital. It requires a lot of focus on the right problem. But then in the second and the third year, if you’re doing everything, you get to a point where you figure out what the real product is, and now you’re going after the product market fit. And a lot of times people mix it, people swap, they fall in love with the product so much that they forget that they’re solving a problem and it’s all about them now.

(14:22):
And as a founder, I’ll tell you, Andy, be being honest and vulnerable around this thing is this, I love what we are building. And it’s hard to see somebody say, well, that’s not what I want. And I’m like, well, you are not smart enough. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. You should want this thing. Why are you don’t want it, but it’s just not true. It took parent. Yeah, it took a lot of time to recognize, well, it doesn’t matter if I like it. What matters is is there’s the right problem for the right market right now.

Andy Stanley (14:50):
And this goes back to the triangle, the mission, because the mission isn’t to convince the world that your product is needed to create a product that answers a question, solves a problem, resolves attention. That’s such a huge topic because we all fall in love with the things we create. One of my favorite, in fact, the quote is sitting right there behind you where you’re sitting right now, many, many years ago, Andy Groves talked about sitting in his office and they make computer chips, the Intel computer chips, and they couldn’t keep up. The Japanese just kept undercutting, make ’em faster, make ’em cheaper. Then Intel tries to make ’em faster, but can’t make ’em cheaper. And he realized we have to get out of the chip business. And he loved the chip business. And the quote that’s behind you that I look at all the time is he’s sitting there with their CEO, I can’t remember his name, and he said, if the board fired us and brought in a new team, what would the new team do? And they both said they’d get us out of the chip manufacturing business. He’s like, well, we should walk out the door, come in and do it ourselves. But it’s so difficult when you fall in love with the product.

(15:57):
And perhaps that explains why some startups never get started, even if they’re capital, even if they have the capital,

Sangram Vajre (16:04):
Even they have capital. Now, here’s the personal side that I wanted to make sure that people recognize because this is the part that I missed in a way, recognizing it later on. But in the early days, that was a reason actually, we did the crazy things we did, and some of it was running four events in a year. As a startup, it doesn’t make any sense for a startup to do that. We did many crazy things, wrote a book, all that stuff in the first year was because Maneet, my wife, we had our second baby. Kiara was born the same year. I decided to co-found with Eric and Eric and she wasn’t working because I was a Salesforce making good money, and Kiara was born and she was like four weeks. And then I go and meet spa and VA and say, Hey, we’re going to do the startup.

Andy Stanley (16:50):
These are the two guys that Eric and Eric, yeah,

Sangram Vajre (16:52):
They are the one who actually started Terminus. I think they adopted me into the family later on to come and actually evangelize and make it really, really where we are. But for the most part, they started the company and I go in, meet them and see and what they’re doing. I’m like, well, that’s actually a product. It’s this. It’s called account based marketing. And they’re like, they’re tech people. They’re not marketers. So they’re like, well, if you feel so inclined, why don’t you come and join and actually sell this thing? Well, boy, that was intimidating. And so I went home and told Monit, I want to do this thing. And she’s like, well, you realize you’re the only one making money. You go do this thing, you’re not going to make any money for next two years at least,

Andy Stanley (17:33):
And you want to hold the baby while you’re making that decision,

Sangram Vajre (17:35):
Right? I was way off from a distance perspective with her at that point because I didn’t know what will happen next. But we went through this week of negotiation and then she said to me, Andy, which I think every startup person needs to hear and recognize that you need a great partner. At the end of the day, she said, here’s what I’m going to do. I can see in your eyes that you want to do this, and if you don’t do, you’re going to regret. I’m like, yeah, that’s true. And she said, well, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go find a job so you can do this thing, but the biggest thing is this. You’re going to have one ear and in one ear show me this thing has legs, otherwise you’re going to go find a real job.

Andy Stanley (18:18):
Wow.

Sangram Vajre (18:19):
I tell you, that moment was so important for me, and I think

Andy Stanley (18:23):
Why

Sangram Vajre (18:24):
The biggest reason was it put fire into it gave me a timeline,

(18:29):
It gave me a timeline. It gave me a recognition that she’s putting everything on the line for me. I need to do deliver. This is no longer a dream that people think about on a kitchen table thinking, I wish I started a company. This has to work to me. This is my chance. And if I don’t give my a hundred percent right now, and if I was having a hundred percent, I need to give 200% now because she’s doing what she needs to do even more than, I don’t know if I could have done that for her. So that partnership for the first year led us to like, alright, we’re going to do crazy stuff that nobody else has done. We are going to do four events. We are going to do write a book. We’re going to create new things. We are just going to go in the market in a big way that people would just recognize us. What’s crazy about that is that really gave us the wave that we needed. Otherwise we would still be iterating on the basic idea. We just didn’t have time. The time was running out.

Andy Stanley (19:20):
Now, this is really important because I think for so many entrepreneurial thinking people or people who have a startup idea are in the midst of it. There isn’t that timeframe. There’s a financial timeframe. By December 30th, we’re going to run out of money. That’s pressure. But to combine your personal life with your organizational life in that way is very unusual. So the question everyone is asking other than when are you going to get to the topic is, I’m looking over here to our producers, don’t have a script, we’ll get to it next month probably is what happened at the end of the year, and what would you have done if this had not worked? Would you have had the courage to say, Hey, I left it all on the table. I left it all on the floor, but I got to walk away because of the decision I made at home with my family? What happened? And do you think you would’ve upheld that into

Sangram Vajre (20:19):
I hope I would have. I don’t know what did happen as in the first year we hit a million in revenue and her point was, show me this thing, his legs. I’m glad she didn’t say, don’t make a million dollars. It would’ve been a problem because clearly I didn’t.

Andy Stanley (20:35):
Well, she was smart enough to know at the end of the year, it may not be profitable, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Sangram Vajre (20:41):
So to me, if that would not have happened, Andy, I feel like at least at a minimum, I would’ve felt that I gave everything I got

(20:49):
At that point. Because to me, everyone has this itch at some point like, Hey, I want to do something. I see this. Oh, I had that idea. They just built it. But I had that idea. We all had those moments like that. But to do it is a different thing. And to have a partner on your side, I think if you don’t have a partner on your side, I think startup is infinitely harder if it’s not already hard for you to do. And then when people talk about like, well, I’m going to do a side gig. I’m like, we have the audacity to think that your side gig is going to work out when somebody’s working day and night to put you out of business. It’s just hard. It just gets harder and harder. So you need to think about the odds that are against you when you’re just trying to build something out there. And you need more important than anything is a great partner. And I think most startup founders completely miss on that.

Andy Stanley (21:35):
Well, they end up without a partner oftentimes because it just sad. True. Yeah. So when I talk to business leader or just leaders are oftentimes it’s men who are in a situation that we were where you’ve asked your wife to follow along with something that may or may not pan out. And I liken it to handing, and let’s just talk in terms of traditional family to make it simple, handing our wives a big rock, and we say to them, I need you to hold this. Now here’s the thing, because even in a somewhat healthy marriage, certainly a healthy marriage, a partner, and this can be the woman handing it to the husband, it can go either way. When somebody hands me a rock and says, this is heavy, I need you to hold this. If you’ll tell me how long you expect me to hold it, I can get there

Sangram Vajre (22:21):
If

Andy Stanley (22:21):
You hand it to me and leave me there indefinitely.

(22:25):
And three months later it’s like, just three more months, just three more months. Well, eventually, no matter how mentally committed we are or even emotionally committed, we wear out there is a limit. So the smart thing about the story you just told that I hope our listeners will take away is by putting a date out there, you said to her, I’m asking you to carry extra weight. You’re going to get a job. You’re still going to feel the responsibility of a mom with a young family. But she decided, you know what? I’ll carry this rock for a year,

(22:59):
But in a year I’m going to hand it back to you. Or what often happens is the rock just gets dropped and then there’s a mess. So there are so many takeaways from that. And for those of you listening today, Sangram’s a new voice in your life, and I certainly hope you’ll check out his podcast. It’s daily. Did I mention that daily? Yeah. So actually Sangram, actually all we have time for today. I want to thank all of our podcast listeners for joining us today. And if you’ll go to andy stanley.com, we are going to create a PDF for you to download to help take some of this content and drive it through your organization or perhaps begin a conversation within your organization. We’ll see you next month on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.

 

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