u/Imaginary-Promise-87

Hey guys, relatively new to B2B sales myself, was doing SMB marketing most of my life, and have just been tasked with trying to sale this software that is more for secure sharing of documents, but like, tbh I don't see how it differs from its competitors, besides that it's cheaper, and it's newer to the market too.

There are incumbents who have been here for decade(s) and is charging 20x-30x of the price we charge, but like, using a cheaper solution only saves people money, but doesn't make people more money, so I just go on calls and tell people "hey this saves you $xxx" but like, it doesn't feel like people care about it that much? And the people who do care tend to just ask for even more discounts?

Honestly, most products have no feature differentiations neither, it's not like they are better than us or we are exponentially better than them, which makes sales even harder.

Am I looking at how to sale such product the wrong way? Or would there be any lessons/videos that I could watch to learn more about how to sale this thing?

So Petra Labs went kind of viral on twitter lately, as a service tech provider aiming to make companies appear more on AI search, was able to raise $5.2M in 5 days, at $26M valuation. I haven't seen a raise that fast in a while, especially given their relatively vanilla background, so I thought I'd dive in and see how they did it.
I first read the resume, ummmm: The founders are brilliant, but let me be honest with you, from all the founders I've seen, they are definitely not the ones with the most fitting background that makes VC jump. None of the co-founders had direct experiences working in SEO, none of them were at the big research labs or Stanford.

But digging further through their twitter, looks like they did nail one thing right:

They were able to differentiate through story telling. First of all, they are very, very active on twitter and linkedin, they are constantly posting, no matter how much engagements they would get, and consistency is rewarded by algorithm, if you just keep on doing so, and being loud everywhere, you ultimately get customers.

Second of all, they seemed to have had a warm network prior to raising, the founder specifically spoke about how they were trying to friend-maxx while they are in NYC/SF, that to me is like collecting cards without playing them right away --- pretty smart. I think lots of founders rush to asking for an intro, that make things too transactional, they went down the other path of just holding their horses till the final moment comes, and I totally respect that.

Lastly, they created their narrative and story through creating an amazing data room, where the investors had half of the investment memo ready by just reading it, and they were kind enough to publish the source online structure, I made it into a graph for easier undersatndings:

https://preview.redd.it/xvnla13b5bjh1.png?width=1640&format=png&auto=webp&s=02c9db4acf32c89088b4b3bdd7671faa2e24fd14

The rationale is simple, and I totally get it because I used to work at a London VC (yeh and you know how European VCs are lol): We would write investment memos to get deals through IC, and honestly I also had KPI pressures to source and get more deals through.

So it's easy psychology here, if a founder helps me to find a reason to convince my partners that they are the right team to invest in, they get the funding, I get a deal on my badge (yes and lol VC don't get feedback loops until like 10 years later, so before you get your ROIC in, the track records all come from "how many deals have you done" and "how many popular rounds you've gotten yourself into"), everyone wins here.

To read more about how they did it and how you do it too: read here: https://www.peony.ink/blog/seed-round-data-room

Full disclaimer: Petra Labs is a Peony customer who used Peony data room for fundraise, we were able to get a first hand view of how they succeeded in their raises.

Guys maybe it's just me, but I feel like I really do want to enjoy some sunshine now, but no I just walked out of our office at 4 something AM lol. Like, this live deal is kind of killing me right now, and maybe my partner is in his Gstaad or somewhere idk but I'm just an excel monkey. I know yes the bonus will be nice this year is gonna be nice but I'm not sure what I'm doing anymore, looking for advice about how to keep your heads up and push through burn outs.

background:

Top UK school, IB at one of the US BBs, then got headhunted to join a LMM PE in NYC, I'm roughly 13 months in, was pretty burnt out around month 10 given that I was not taking any days off ever since joining and probably had at most 5 days of rests in total including the weekend, then got very happy when I got my first bonus but uh oh.... not sure how I'm feeling now

I always knew PE is hard, and I knew PE is harder in NYC than in London, but I'm just not sure where this is going to end, I know people say look at your seniors and see whether you'd want their life and man I know I want my nice houses and nice cars, but I'm genuinely envious of those who could pull through till year 7 or 8 and make yourself into a rainmaker --- just... how? And like, what happens after you get there? Does life actually become happier? Or just retire?...