#5: The Importance of Customer Profiling in B2B SaaS with Mia Negru

Soren: Too many different ideal customers, and too many services in your offering, complicates the heck out of everything because they get multiplied. Which means, if you have to work on anything, you don't get deep enough in to any of them to actually understand if this is, you're getting any traction. If you're getting better, you're just spreading yourself to self too thin.

Christian: Welcome to the Messy Growth Show, the podcast that dives deeply into the heart of B2B growth stories. We are here to unmask the raw, the real, and the often messy road to success, because let's face it, growth isn't always neat and tidy. Join your hosts Soren and myself, Christian, as we sit down with top leaders mining for proven strategies to accelerate your business. Welcome to the Messy Growth Show. Your roadmap to success starts here. Alright, Mia, welcome to the Messy Growth Show this is, one of our big outlier episodes because we are gonna do a live, kind of guidance of you, to help you scale your company. So this is not something we've done before, but, we thought you had a quite interesting case, so we were like super excited to get you on this call.

Mia: Thank you, Christian. Thank you, Søren, for having me. There's no problem, you know, to, because we are just improvising business development, on some cases that we know. So, yeah, no, I'm looking forward to this. I'm Mia Negru and I'm co-founder in 2030 Builders, which is a platform that helps, accelerate, the green transformation in companies by activating the human capital. Short and short, really, engaging employees inside organizations to deliver to the sustainability strategy of the company by providing them with the right tools and infrastructure to it. I am, also as a co-founder leading the sales and marketing. I this weird name of c r o, which sometimes I'm even, reflecting it as I'm telling people it's a relationship. It's not so much about revenue, because revenue was quite hard to, achieve, in the, in the past, years also due to the fact that I think we've all gone through some really, un unmet, you know, economical conditions with the pandemic and as well with the energy crisis. And as well when you are just a startup on a go-to-market phase, where you're trying to penetrate some companies or some personas that have a frozen budget.

Christian: Sounds like.

Soren: Okay, so I'm. Happy to clarify the CRO thing because in marketing we also call it conversion rate optimization. So.

Christian: Chief Revenue.

Soren: The.

Mia: Yes. Yes. Exactly.

Soren: Relationship.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: We were thinking to through Definition of who your dream customer is, are the ideal customer profile. We'll get back to that and talk about within those organizations then your ideal customer profiles, who are then the decision makers that you ought to focus on. And we're gonna talk about, there's some details on that because the next thing we're gonna be talking about is when someone has to buy your product, they have to have a pain, a problem, a challenge, but it's great they have a pain. But if it's not big enough, then there's no reason to act. And so we call that impact. So what's the pain? What's the impact, the size of the pain if it doesn't get solved, and what is the desired outcome? That they're really looking for. What situation is it that they want to achieve? Because if they understand that this is the desired outcome, they can relate it to the service and the solution that you're offering, which is the.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Pain, impact of pain, desired outcome, and then your solution.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: What we need to understand because if the client starts to understand that they're better able to buy, they don't understand that they're really having a great difficulties in buying and arguing within their organization, with their stakeholders and the colleagues of why they should invest money here, and most of them are not very clear about it. That's also your job is to explain what are the pains and what does it mean for your organization if you don't solve these pains. And then, in the end we will discuss your solution because that relates to the final part, which is the value. What value does you do, you provide? Because if the impact of the pain is so big and the cost, including the internal costs, and your, the cost of your is less than that, or there is a very short payback on that, then people are gonna be less flabbergasted on the investment they need to do to hire you or use your.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Soren: It's kind of a justification. It makes sense why we should pay this.

Mia: It's.

Soren: That's what we're gonna go through.

Mia: I think it's a very nice exercise. I definitely think that it's quite challenging. I think that, sitting as a startup founder, you know, to figure out all this, if you actually don't have some kind of coaching into understanding what are the questions and how to formulate the questions. So I have had a lot of demos during the pandemic, which I got to conclude at the end. You know, that not many of them have been, converting, that it was mainly, some kind of interest in understanding what's out there, getting some kind of inspiration. And I did exactly what I was not supposed to do. I was just pitching, you know, how I thought that is so great, what we are doing. And of course you probably agree with me that all your employees need to be right engaged in this. We tried this exercise a little bit in the house, but we don't have the answers because this kind of questions, you know, you need to ask the customers. And that is, I think, very important to really, have this kind of coaching to understand how to formulate the question, right? What is the sequences of actually formulating the question and actually being able to stay on the point, you know, and come back and really, you know, get back to theirs. So that you give this reflection time, you know, to the, to the customers.

Christian: Asking.

Soren: One thing.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Christian: Sometimes we also miss out we ignore or forget maybe half of the people that are involved in the buying process. And then you end up in a situation where the deal may cannot move forward because you forgot to involve the legal team or the.

Mia: Yes, exactly. And.

Christian: That. Right.

Mia: We, got to that roadblock as well. Because the idea was that. Initially we kind of did a testing on, okay, who's the persona, Right. Who's gonna buy what we want to sell? Who's gonna buy employee engagement in sustainability? So then we tried, to reach out to sustainability manager. There was mainly the manager level, not So much. We, I got some conversations with VPs, but not as many, They're too busy I think there was also not as many positions as VP at that level. You know, right now it's gaining more and more, we reach out to hr, to human resources. There was not a lot of involvement. We reach out to communication because we felt that maybe we understood in big corporates their responsibility to, the communication and engagement on that. There was not a lot of response on that either. We figured out that maybe for them we are even kind of competing right to what they need to do internally, and they wouldn't want to, just, get an extra tool, you know, for just putting out their, communication, about what they want to do in sustainability, you know, and what people want to do. So we did these tests and we definitely got the biggest engagement from the sustainability positions. So then we said, okay, this is whom we need to go to. But then after many demos where there's nothing happening, no buying, no going next to the, to the next, level, then we got to understand that they actually didn't have budget they didn't have a budget to spend. The budget was sitting somewhere else. And I think where the budget sits is still kind of a mystery. And I think it's also shifting a little bit in 2023 with new regulations coming from the European Union where the sustainability reporting will be incorporated in the financial reporting. So in this case, I think a lot of it will kind of go in, synergy in between our collaboration in between the sustainability position with the cfo, which ha.

Christian: To make it clear, like your platform helps the companies, you know, get their teams together, employees help the reduce the emissions in general, so the company is actually getting more green. Right. These, reporting requirements, that's not.

Soren: That's measuring.

Christian: It.

Soren: Progress.

Christian: It's like the punishment or the public like, thing that you need to comply with, right?

Mia: Yeah, so we are actually active on all sustainability levels, right? Cuz sustainability has three pillars, the social one, economical one, and environmental, which is the most pressing because, this is the one we are talking the most about. So what we do is that we are actually, let's say bringing a medicine, a solution for where the company can see they have problems. So, we are not doing good in the emission, then we can actually engage, our employees. So everything is actually about, making the inside organization, right? Shifting the culture from people knowing about sustainability to doing it because everybody has. Some kind of contribution to what the company wants to do in regards to sustainability. But some teams, like for example, human resources would maybe look more into diversity and inclusion while, for example, procurement would look more into, how green our suppliers, what is their missions, you know, how do we get our own materials and so on and so forth. So then through our solution, the company can cascade the strategy, you know, the goals that they have in sustainability to every department, connect what they want to do, you know, with, education. And we have individual learning, like a learning, and we also have collaborative trainings, you know, that we deploy so that we get people to really understand how that sustainability topic, we're talking CO2 or we're talking, waste reduction or water consumption reduction or recycling or whatever, how that concept is connected to their specific job role. So we don't give. One size fits all, but it's customized content and it's content that make every employee reflect and then act, right? Understand, Hey, how has this to do with me? Right? I work in sales, I'm like, I'm not, you know, doing any of this. But then you get to understand how your job and what you do in your job, you know, what activities are actually, impacting, you know, negatively, yeah, the numbers that the company needs to report on. So through the platform, you get to export, all these actions that people take and measure them and be like, Okay. So this year we reduced this much, we did this much with our employees. We did this social activities, we did this, you know, trainings, this, human rights, you, know, activities. And, we reduce this, my co2 to give it as an example. So it's like an activation and mobilization.

Christian: Okay.

Soren: You help them clarify their goals faster and mobilize people faster by, because you provide the education and the understanding of what the goals they have decided are. And me as a person, I get up to speak faster because I can access training and understanding and understand how I.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: It becomes a little more fun because now when measuring progress, we're not quite as frustrated of not really knowing what to do and what's most important because your platform helps me understand that.

Mia: We also measure, so we give an opportunity to the employees to take actions. In the same time when Seran goes to our training, right? And he says, oh, I can, I'm gonna give this example, which is very violating Denmark. Let's bike to work, you know, I can bike to work instead of taking the car. And then you put that action out there and that becomes an inspiration, you know, for your colleagues and be like, oh, I can do this as well. So people commit, you know, and they complete the action. So it also becomes a place where we get to peer support, and peer pressure each other to actually deliver more on this, you know, and start doing more and more every day.

Christian: Posture.

Soren: Right.

Christian: Peer pressure, like.

Soren: One of, as we go through this today, you will, just an early warning, you will feel a sting of formal fear of missing out as we go through here because Christian and I are big believers in the one thing.

Mia: One metric.

Soren: It's to make things more simple when you start a business, because too many different ideal customers and too many services in your offering, massively complicates the heck out of everything because they get multiplied.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Which means if you have to work on anything, you don't get deep enough in to any of them to actually understand if this is, you're getting any traction. If you're getting better, you're just spreading yourself to self too thin. So we're gonna be talking about a lot about one. So let's start with your ideal customer profile. What are some considerations you have there? And when we say ideal customer profile, it can be type of industry, it can be size of business, it can be, attitude or proximity to. CO2 reduction or any kind of sustainability. It can be geo Geographic, it can.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Soren: Us through what considerations you've.

Mia: We've been testing that as well, through cold outreach tools. We've been testing out both the personas, but as well what size of the company, it's actually Yeah. More receptive to what we do. The solution with that is that, we got more. Positive responses from companies in between 5,000 and 35,000 employees. I mean, that's the narrowing. We could go a little bit broader. We've been testing out just above a thousand, right? So above a thousand, it's those that would actually not be able to easily do it inside the house, right? And be like, Okay. We can just have a workshop facilitator and we'll click some post-its and then we know what we have to do, right? So a thousand to 50,000 or 5,000 to 35,000 the best reply. Companies in manufacturing or I would say as well, B2B solutions, right? So PE like companies that are kind of pressured by their customers, to be compliant, To reduce their emissions. Cause their emissions are affecting the footprint of their bigger customers. Right. So I think this is actually a sweet spot for us. It can be manufacturing. But the challenge with manufacturing it is that they have a lot of blue collars and our product is delivered, through two devices, interactions. So you need to have a smartphone, you need to have access to a screen. So then, you know, yeah. The white collars would actually be the best people, To really access the platform, you know, and get the benefits of it.

Christian: That's an interesting, little challenge.

Soren: You men you mentioned, you mentioned, compliance. So are there any, what are the reply compliance, the legislative, requirements right now and what industries are impacted by them? Who needs to comply today?

Mia: Starting 2023, all the companies that are on the stock exchange and that have above 500 employees, they will need to report on this, corporate sustainability reporting, due diligence directive. So it's new standards from European Union and, this is affecting, let's say, at the, at the European level, around 50,000 companies, European Union.

Christian: Okay.

Soren: Is it that they need to.

Mia: They need to report on. So in their financial statement, they need to report on what is their, negative impact on the environment. What are the actions that they take, to address this negative impacts? What is the negative impact they have on socio problems? Eh, how are they putting in place governance, mechanisms like reporting. And does leadership, you know this, do they have, not necessarily whistleblowing mechanism, but you know, a reporting mechanism from employees to, if there's anything you know, wrong with, for example, connected to human rights or So it's, they think they need to report in around 1000 and a hundred, data points and around 87. Yeah. Bullet points, you know, 87, directions, if I can say it. So what do they do about water? What do they do about pollution? What do they do about what? Biodiversity, what do they do about this, right? So if they do, or if they don't, do they need to report on? This? And then as well, there's a big part where they need to look into the, impact, risks and opportunities, right? So where is it that there's a risk, especially now as well, financial, right? So they can say, oh, if. Where, for example, sourcing from a different, continent might have some issues, or if we're sourcing our palm oil, from Amazon and there's some unrests or we are, you know, impacting negatively the environment there and they're, we're impacting the society, like the local communities, you know, negatively or positively because we give them jobs. So everything across their value chain, so across their value chain, how they produce their goods and their services, they would have to analyze that and do an impact assessment and be like, okay. Totally transparent about Yeah. What are they doing in connection to that?

Soren: I think this is part of, this is called the Transparency Act, right?

Mia: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely transparency. We are requiring transparency. Let's see how much of that is gonna, is gonna come.

Soren: You look at these, requirements across social, I mean, are you products that includes child labor or the social part? The water. Consumption, pollution.

Mia: Those are environmental, yeah.

Soren: Parts. This impacts manufacturing as you've identified as your ideal customer.

Mia: Everybody because actually the companies need to show how they're spending their money. Yeah.

Soren: If you look at what industry is impacted by all of them most of them, then manufacturing is impacted by.

Mia: Yes. Exactly.

Soren: Which makes it a little more complex perhaps a segment that would really need your help on getting.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: This. Right? So that's a good point. So manufacturing makes sense why that would be a ideal customer profile because of all the compliance requirements that, applies to them.

Christian: Just to be clear, like those, like you don't solve that with your current solution, right?

Mia: The compliance.

Christian: Solve the re the reporting compliance part. You, I get you're like you said, you're the medicine to help them be better, right? And like, you know, lower their and don't.

Mia: Our platform gives them what to report, right? So the thing is that once you do an assessment and you figure out, oh, we have problems with our. I don't know, you know, the way we produce our chairs, for example, right? We produce furniture then there's a couple of people that they need to think, how can we solve this? How can we improve this so that we are compliant? What happens in the majority of the companies is that there's two, three people sitting there and deciding on what needs to be done. And then it's communicating to the lower people being like, okay, from today you're gonna use this product instead of this one. Right? The thing is that with our product, you give an opportunity to people to understand why do we even need to think about this, right? Oh, so what do we need to think when we produce chairs? So we need to think about what materials we use, how do we source the materials? How do we transport those? How do we recycle, blah. So making everybody participate in understanding why is it that we need to look into this and why sustainability is important. You will actually get solutions. So from a team of, I don't know, 10, 12 people, you will get solutions connected on the entire, for example, value chain. So then what the platform does is gives to the compliance responsible sustainability manager, whatever managers that need to report on this. Here. We have some actions right here. We had some ideas at the beginning of the year that our employees brought in. We start acting on the most impactful ones, you know, that we understood that it will give us the most return of investment and now we have something to report, right? During this year, we've done so much connected to our co2, connected to all that. So the platform is the one facilitating giving them the opportunity to have something to report on.

Christian: Got it. Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Soren: Looking at that. We could have a discussion on who the persona or the decision maker should be, but maybe we should actually start talking about the pains the organization is experiencing before we decide on who the decision makers is that we need to reach out to. Because I think you alluded to us early on that initially you wanted to have conversations with the ones that wanted to talk to.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: That was somebody that you had the common interest with in.

Mia: Yes.

Soren: They do not necessarily have the budget. So let's step back now look at the pains that, these compliance requirements provide. What kind of pains does that bring up in a manufacturing.

Mia: What I can identify, it's in general, like if actually sustainability is not understood or not act on, like what are the pains that can bring? And, one of the most obvious ones right now, I think it is connected to branding. So it's still, sustainability sits in a, kind of like in a branding area inside organizations where they need to do something or, brag with something so that it looks good for shareholders and it looks good for, you know, social media for customers and so on, so forth. But not doing things right now becomes very risky because we hear a lot about the greenwashing, you know, and all these. Scandals. And now we have legislations in some countries, proposals for legislations of actually, or companies taking to court, like, I think. Yeah. I'm not gonna say a name now, but a fashion company, you know, from the Nordics taking to court because they are making claims that are not real, are not true, are not based into actual facts. Right? So the branding risk. It's quite high. And the branding risk, it's also brought in by, for example, having, sales and marketing or commercial teams that go in and they don't actually don't really understand what the company is doing connected to sustainability. So then you have a salesperson going and trying to sell, I don't know, let's say machinery, right? For another company. And being like, so now we become more sustainable, we are cutting down our co2, and then we reduced 20% our co2. So then the customer is asking, Okay, so how did you do this? Did you use offsets? And then, The person is blocked cuz they don't understand what does that mean? And then they'll be like, yeah, I dunno. Our sustainability team, you know, is handling that. And then the customer on the other side says, this is probably greenwashing. I mean, if you're doing that, I don't agree with it. It's not helping us. If you're not doing that, I need to know what you're doing because you know, we need, we need transparency, you know, from your side. So commercial teams are losing an opportunity of, you know, creating, generating more revenue because they actually don't understand how to talk about sustainability and the sustainability actions the companies is taking and they're not able to defend it, you know, in front of their customers. And that takes us back one step, lower to from the branding risk to, well, when these people don't understand what's happening, right. Managers that they need to manage teams. And right now there's, they're companies that actually have. Financial rewards connected to the CO2 emissions, you know, of the managers or of teams. So these managers, mid-level managers, are actually the one that hold the most pressure because they are the ones that need to go back to their team and be like, sustainability is important. And they're like, what is sustainability? Well, many things super complicated. I don't know, I have to explain to you, but just don't drive to work. You know, just do this for me this year. So the idea is that when you don't have, you are not taking care of your employees to be upskilled, right? To understand these are new skills that are connected to whatever job you have. You can be marketer, you can be hr, you can be project manager, you can be procurement officer, whatever. You need to understand sustainability and why that is important for your company. So when these people are left in a blank, They get demotivated. Some of them, they get the pressure. If you know they are like you or like Christian, that have kids. I mean, maybe Christians is not the, is not putting that much pressure on climate anxiety. But if you would have, for example, children at the Greta generation, lower or upper. You will get pressure, you know, from your family saying, what is, what are you doing? What are you doing in your job? Are you responsible for this mom, dad? Well, how are you, making, sure that we are gonna live in a, in a nice world. So you feel the pressure from home, you come back to work and you're like, I think my company is doing something. I can see we have a sustainability report. I can read some things here. I don't understand exactly what it is, right. I don't understand what we're doing, but I think we're doing, because I heard something, there was a newsletter that we will, we will change our fleet with electric cars. So I think we're doing good. I think, I'm not sure if enough. Right? So this people, you're losing talent and we saw a big shift, you know, of talent and also the talent attraction. Not only, retention, but also attraction when it comes to, is this company doing the right thing in sustainability? Yes. Or not. So this would be, I would say the three things, not to mention others, like now I think we need to shift the discourse cuz we will probably have to be approved by CFOs. So they need to understand, how do you save money and how do you make money with sustainability? And I know that some of the transition costs will be high, will be high to change. The fleets will be high to change towards, green electricity will be high to change machinery. And also that your operation becomes better higher acquisition costing of materials if you want to change your suppliers to the ones that are compliant, right? But it will pay off because, when you have this understanding of sustainability, then also people understand. How they can apply it in order to reduce costs. And here we have, I have an example, and I'll stop after this because I know I'm going too far away, but employees in a airplane manufacturing, discovered that if they run five minutes, the engines before running the tests instead of 30 minutes, they can reduce 25 minutes of emissions, of CO2 emissions, pollution and electricity, expenditure. So just 25 minutes of a process, that is an employee that thinks about it because a sustainability manager doesn't understand, you know, all the things that a company could improve, you know, in their process. Makes a big difference on the long run. So. If you start calculating that with five times a day, let's say five week, five days a week, you know this many, then you get a multiplied impact. That makes sense financially as well for the company.

Christian: Okay.

Soren: Can I just repeat what you said here? Because branding. Maybe not. Maybe it's me. But branding doesn't hurt.

Mia: You mean like it's no bad publicity is.

Soren: It's a funny pain because it's really undefined by just saying branding. So I like the suggestions you came up with Of course, there's gonna be legal implications and legal costs and proceedings that you haven't budgeted for just yet, and it'll cost you on your bottom line, your.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: There's gonna be lost sales, as in customers to whom it's important that you are compliant with this, and you can show compliance and that'll be lost revenue because of that. So it might be a good idea to find out how much that is. It's easier to gauge what legal cost and implications are, but it's more complex to figure out what is actually the impact of lost sales. If this, if we, if we don't manage to get up to speed with our compliance, and that obviously will depend on the pricing of the equipment or products that the manufacturer sells.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Because a sale a manufacturer that sells $2 million machinery, well, if they save a thousand a year, okay, but it's a.

Mia: It's a, big sense. Yes.

Soren: Then. So there's the loss of sales and profitability. But what happens now as companies and manufacturers, they develop, they constantly invest in new machinery, new processes, new technology. What if they accidentally unaware, in machinery? Or others that are not compliant either. So it comes back now to the procurement and the investment of that particular company that you are talking to, that large investments could be misplaced had to be redone.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Then you have the, missed opportunities because you said you actually, by going into this and engaging, committing to the process, you realize that you could actually save.

Mia: Yes.

Soren: Process utilization. So a cost would also be missed opportunity for increased efficiency, missed opportunity for cost reduction. And by actually you don't, you don't have to be empirically correct. When you calculate these, you can take examples one and. Make it general without showing a logo on it, on who this happened for. Like when Deloitte does this, they take an industry or something, and then they, accumulate what they know from various customers in this industry. So you could do that. You don't have to be client specific. I would actually advise against doing that, but you could look from a, your ideal customer profile perspective and say, we have seen of cost or lost opportunities like this. Because now we can not only define the pains, we can define the impact. And that's why I said branding is a bit funny because you can't, what is the impact on branding? Well, you would need to have to look at all the things we just discussed.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Christian: You also had the employee churn, like, the demotivated stuff, that's.

Soren: Yeah.

Christian: Cost right there. That's another one to add to the pool of impact.

Soren: Yeah. So what we normally do is that we take each of these and then we try to size up the impact cost wise and explain how the impact occurs.

Mia: That's a great exercise.

Soren: Because people that are looking for solutions may, in most cases not be aware of this.

Mia: Probably.

Soren: They've heard some of them, but not all of them, and they've heard of the pain, but they haven't heard about the size of the impact.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: The next thing is in a, in a dialogue with a prospect talking about this, you are talking about, if you are talking to a sustainability, they will not be answered to able to answer the impact of these pains.

Mia: Probably not.

Soren: That's one of the reasons why you will ask these questions, because if the sustainability manager says, I don't know, your next response will be, well, who among your colleagues is it that we need to talk to find out? And now you are in the process of finding the budget because whoever's got the biggest pain will have to flip up the wallet.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.

Soren: It's also a good idea because maybe one in, the plant manager has a big pain here. But about the sales department or what. The CEO and.

Mia: Yeah. Also.

Soren: Now you actually can pool budgets together. That's one thing. You can pool budgets together around a common cause, and that's important. But instead of each department trying to figure out their own solution and take a more corporate approach to finding a common solution.

Mia: Yeah, exactly.

Soren: Instead of doing things piecemeal in separate departments, we are here to solve Company X as your company's problem.

Christian: Doing that.

Soren: Who do we need to involve?

Christian: You also avoid the risk of, you know, getting pretty far in the sales process. And then suddenly a person that, had an opinion about this area had some part of the bank gets involved. And he's like, no, I already talked with this other provider. And then you're.

Mia: Exactly. It's a waste of time. Yeah.

Christian: A, Yeah. Huge.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: In, sales.

Soren: The pains are good to be able to explain on your website and the impact of the pains, because that's part of the realization. People are researching of, solutions and possible solutions and finding out what the problem is, and getting educated about what you are gonna be talking about when they reach out. So, if this costs a certain amount of legal, and if this require, means that loss of sales, and if this means loss of, investments that have gone wrong in new technology, equipment, suppliers, what have you. Or if we have missed opportunities for optimization and efficiency, then what is, what does the desired outcome look like? Where is it that we want to be? What does that world look like for us? So what are they, what is it that they want the end?

Mia: They want to make sure that this doesn't happen. They wanna make sure that they take the right decision.

Soren: Well, ideally in the end, they want everything to be fixed.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Want to.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: With pollution.

Mia: Everything.

Soren: Consumption, child labor, and the whole.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: They want to be compliant. But what kind of situation is that? Is that they, as a customer, well, that means that maybe they are seen as an advocate for. Of this, maybe this becomes, part of who they, supplier network looks like. We would love to have suppliers that looks like this. Maybe that's how they envisage the company. Maybe they envisage the kind of manufacturing, technology process that has minimal water consumption and almost no pollution. Or they see themselves of how they manage pollution and how they fix.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: What does that decide outcome look like?

Mia: It will, because compliance wise, I think starting next year or two years, the big companies will also be responsible for their suppliers, you know, to comply to this. So again, I think, I mean, the idea of providing enough awareness or enough education, right, to the employees to be able to take the right decisions, it's kind of the first step. But I think if the process is not continued and here, you know, we might, we might have an objection as well. We do your learning with our learning management system in the house, right? So we send this to people and we say, we want this, but are you actually hearing, you know, what they think, what they say? What are the barriers, you know, for them for doing more? And can you also follow up on the next steps? Can you actually see that something had happened? You know, from what needs to happen to deliver right on the, on the goals.

Soren: Now that's a, that's a good point. There you have with desired outcome because it's stepwise first we want to fix.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Then we want to fix that, and so eventually we will achieve this. So you show them that this is what they should actually be looking for, desired outcome wise. And not to be confused about a product presentation. That's not the purpose.

Mia: Yeah, exactly.

Soren: It's where they want.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Because later you will show them how you help them get this.

Mia: Yes, exactly.

Soren: That's the product presentation. Because if you understand with each prospect, you're talking about how one pain is bigger than the other and maybe not significant, some pains are maybe not significant for them, then you can focus on their pains and focus on that decid income. And then you can make a customer-specific demo instead of a product.

Mia: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Soren: Now you just demo exactly what solves.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: In take. Instead of taking 'em on a Penn City tour, just take them to this parts of the city, because that's the ones they wanted to.

Mia: True. Yeah. Very valid.

Christian: Then when you do that, of course after you've shown them, you ask them, you know, if this actually, they can see themselves using this, because then they will start to.

Mia: Bring objections. Yeah.

Christian: One or two things, either objections of like, no, this wouldn't work for me because this is this And that. They would say like, yeah, this would be great because this is this and that. You would get both the pros and cons. For them and you know, that's ammunition that you would use later in your, in your sales process like saying, when they say like, you know what, it wasn't the time anyway and so on. It's like, which happens?

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: You would be like, but then you would miss out on all these benefits that you described yourself. So.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: Powerful.

Soren: The impact will still persist. You will still have these pains. You will still have these legal proceedings. You will still have. These lost sales and Yeah. But this is the way to figure out if they're gonna do.

Mia: Yeah, exactly.

Soren: Now it becomes hopefully more apparent how you showcase your value.

Mia: Yeah, I think it is a lot about actually having a structure for qualifying right? And really understanding like, what, how is the best way, what is the best way, in a sense, well, structure wise, right? To ask these question. Keep to the point and be able to take the feedback take the input right, and really understand. Okay. Now it's very clear I can have the picture of where you are on the scale of what is important for you know, out of this five points, you know, from a scale from one to 10.

Soren: Then Christian, you mentioned So what kind of objections are.

Mia: Yeah. I think the majority of the objections that we got so far was that, people would like to use their learning management system in the house. Because also the way I was presenting the product was very much focused on the learning part. While I think that the biggest value proposition that stands in the platform is. Having a place to follow the progress of people from awareness to advocacy, And giving them an opportunity to come back somewhere to do more about sustainability. So, while you do a e-learning, right, which is really maybe general inside of organization, and then organizations will spend months to figure out what is the content that they wanna put in there. We already have the content, it's very easy to customize, but actually we do that fast because we wanna take people to the next step to really get to understand, what is it stopping them, you know, from doing more, what is motivating them to do more? So, internal, like organizations say, no, we have our learning management system. And then when in regards to communication, we'll send the newsletter and how many people open the newsletter, you know, and how many people are actually acting on some kind of call to action to that newsletter, right? So what happens is that what is not understood with sustainability is that it is actually paradigm shift. And a lot of the companies want to change behaviors, of the employees. Because of course when you see someone doing something not very sustainable outside, you know, in the society, then you know, oh, he's working for this company. You know, so they will kind of put a label on this. So then companies come and say, oh, we want our employees to behave more sustainably. And you're like, Yeah. But how do you drive behavior? Because you, it is actually the ultimate, you know, goal. It is to make people change the way they do things. Cuz that's what the paradigm shift of sustainability in titles. But if we don't understand that the first. Into changing the behaviors. It's actually changing the mindset. It's changing the way people see this. We are not gonna get to the behavior, you know, you can make them, and there's plenty of apps out there that I'm gonna make you know, take, a tote bag, reusable bag instead of going and buying, a plastic bag, right? So you're gonna do that for seven days and then expect that's gonna be the behavior you're gonna adopt for the rest of your life. The problem is that if you don't connect sustainability with the internal why, you're not gonna get to the mindset and you're not gonna get to the behavior. So people might do it, you know, for a couple of days because they maybe have an app and they have fun doing that, but it's not gonna be sustainable on the long run because it's not based in how we are as humans, you know, and how we act as humans.

Soren: I would love to make an analogy here is that, In manufacturing, for example, we hire and we recruit new machine operators, assemblers, et cetera, and it's not really up to them how fast they need to get up to speed and, giving them the info they need to fulfill their job. That needs to happen within a certain timeframe because now they need to be productive and deliver machine parts and products.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Somehow we don't quite have that approach to sales just yet, and we don't have it to sustainability.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: We accept that it's something that people need to fall into and like, and it needs to be popular and good. And no, this has an impact on the business quite dire. And it all goes to the bottom line. And we need to fix this. So what does the process.

Mia: Exactly.

Soren: Why need to get up high enough in the organization that there is somebody that takes this as an initiative and expects to see some results and some.

Mia: I, and I'll, and I'll add on that because I think it's really, you're really touching on an important point Sustainability becomes an important part of the strategy, the company's strategy, growth strategy, right? So we claim this and we put it and all this stuff, but we are expecting it that the people that deliver, you know, the sustainability strategy are doing this out of passion, right? So.

Soren: Yeah.

Mia: Listen guys, we're not gonna hire a cleaning company right? To do the cleaning for us, because we think if you like to, if you're passionate about working in a clean, you know, office, you are gonna clean it yourself, right? You're just gonna spend one hour of your working time or extra working time to clean your offices because you're so passionate about, cleaning and order And all this. This is exactly what we do. Sustainability, it's very important for us, sustainability. But please do it out of passion in your free time, volunteering, you know, oops. And deliver everything else.

Soren: Now we're, now we're back to.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Because this is part of the reason why, and I would too, if I have something that pertains to transportation that could make the world a more efficient place, communication or sustainability, I would definitely pick up the phone and call a mask because they put money where their mouth is. They invest in companies, they invest in technology that will eventually, make ships on the ocean free of using bunker, which is the fuel they're using, right? Communication for more efficient dispatch and knowing where, ships are, et cetera. They put their money where.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: They put people in charge. Where it is not a hobby issue, it is that have delivered, executives, et cetera, that becomes, spearheading these initiatives because they invest to get effect.

Mia: The thing is that I believe that these big companies, and we had a big pharma company from Denmark now, and we talk about it, I think the big companies are coming and they're looking into how are we doing it? But then they would like to develop it inside, right? They have their IT people, they have their, you know, lot of specialists, and then they're like, Oh, we're gonna do it ourselves. We had a, we had a demo with, probably I can say the name of the company. I don't know. It's a rec global recruiting company, placement, you know. And then VP Communication came into demo with sustainability, ESG manager, and said, you know what? We have all the tools we need. We have everything, then we need in the house, but why I'm here, so we are not gonna buy. But why I'm here is because I wanna understand how you're. I said, well, you wanna see how we're doing it, then you'll need to pay for it. But for some other companies, like I'm saying the big pharma, you know, company here, you know, we really wanted to bring and be like, okay, we developed this competency fair framework, so we have all the courses you need to get your managers up to speed to use it for they were interested to understand like, how would the competency framework look for like, onboarding, you know, the employees they're hiring for different, opinions. Right? And then we got there and we explained how we do this, you know, through the process and we want, and after that, oh, my colleague is gonna, is gonna get back to you. Yeah. I send this to my colleague. What happened is they just wanted to see, you know, what we think it's important and, what we're looking into and they're gonna probably choose to do it online, inside. So that's why this really big co Yeah, exactly.

Christian: It just took your.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: Knowledge.

Soren: Heaven.

Christian: Some secret sauce. That's part of what I'm hearing, like some things that they cannot just easily clone. Training is easy to.

Mia: Yeah, we are working on that.

Christian: That.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: But you know, the best SaaS companies, they have some feature where it's like, where their customers, if they wanted to do that solution themselves, would have to spend years on trying to figure that out. Or they don't have that kind of skillset. Like, you know, we had AI to.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: Employee scheduling something like, wait.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Soren: Maybe, FinTech is a good analogy here into your space, because banks don't need all these apps that are coming up. They could do it.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Banks could do it themselves. The problem is they don't have the. And they certainly don't have the amount of resources that would ever make it possible for banks to develop all these FinTech, businesses that have been exploding over. The last years. Plus a good amount of them are going to die.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: They're not viable.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: The ones that are left, could the bank ever figure this out? Because that would, in a, in a similar context, be that they have invested tons of money into stuff that would not and which ones are the, that's going to survive. So the best fintechs also have the banks have the dependency because they add data. They don't just use the data the banks have. They add data that the.

Mia: Yeah, exactly. And this we do as well.

Soren: So what's the analogy of that? Did you add the training? But maybe that's easy to get. I don't know if it is. Do they update it? Do they get it from the right sources? Who's to say that their sustainability project is going to succeed? The fact that they say they can do everything in-house on their own. That mean they understand what it takes to make a sustainability project succeed?

Mia: Yeah, I think they're just copying what was successful for others at this point.

Christian: Do they actually.

Soren: Then I'll.

Christian: Their own job? If their job is to actually do these kind of things and then they bought your solution, like there would be no much need for them. That i've sensed that risk in what they're kind of.

Mia: It could be perceived like this in a sense of, you know, I mean, if you are really, on the side of. Of, employee engagement in sustainability kind of role, right. Or sitting from the communication side. What we need to make more clear, I think, in the value pro position is that we are just a tool for them to deploy whatever they think, that they want to deploy as a content or as actions or, you know, it's a tool for nudging people into doing what they know. Cuz they are in a position where they know what is expected, you know, from the company to deliver on. We are an enabler and an accelerator, you know, of, for example, their job. But to be honest, we also looked into can we do like sustainability engagement, officer as a service, right? For example, for smaller companies that cannot afford to hire a person to do this, but be like, okay, we'll have someone that sits and do assessment and reporting. We do everything in between. We are assessing that. But again, the idea of going towards smaller and medium enterprises right now, is that the need, it's still growing up for them, you know, the pressures and Yeah, we need to look at budgets and not, yeah.

Christian: Where the pain is, for sure.

Soren: Somebody who says, we're going to go in, do this ourselves. Who says that? What job title says that?

Mia: We had, for example, sustainability managers that they said, we are gonna do the training by ourselves, you know, inside, with our learning management system, or we have already a learning management system. And I think, to be honest, it's also a little bit sad, that a person that works with sustainability doesn't understand that this is a change process. You know, it's actually a shift in everything you do. And that getting the data out of a learning management system that says 90% of the people finished the training, 70% of them got above 80%. What are you gonna do with that? You don't do anything. You don't understand what's needed at the next step. Right?

Soren: To me this is like just in follow up, what questions set here to me, this is a huge qualifier too. If they don't have the perception and the definition of the role that needs to spearhead this initiative or use this tool as an enable. Then you're not gonna get a sale.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Then you need to focus on the ones where during your qualification a clear idea of how this responsibility is going to be positioned with job titles inside the company.

Mia: There's more and more transformation managers coming inside some organization, some of them very much connected to sustainability, right. But it's just coming up, you know, surfacing as a, as a kind of.

Soren: As we said, we would get back to the decision makers later when.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: This. So it sounds like that the, managers they don't have the budget, but they're certainly an opinion maker. They certainly have a stake in the.

Mia: They are ambassadors.

Soren: They don't have. The, budget.

Mia: No.

Soren: Who, and it can be very different from organization to organization who has the budget.

Mia: Yes.

Soren: That's part of the discovery. As you get engaged with.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Sustainability manager or whoever's spearheading this in HR or communication, you need to find the budget by saying who can, who can answer to, questions on these and impact as we talked about before. Because you need to get to the budget, which is not the sustainability manager. Who else could it be? Who's suffering some of these pains here? The legal costs.

Mia: This is also what we're trying right now to identify if we should go to towards cfo. So we have some kind of success actually with, head of marketings right? Or head of commercial departments that I understood, that they needed to upskill their manager or the workforce in the, in, commercial, positions to be able to talk, about what the company is doing at a sustainability level.

Soren: I mean, if you're talking about.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: I have been in manufacturing of Danish floor manufacturer and in manufac, so most companies have the, some similar job titles, right? But they each have different scale of power, depending.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Because that's where the most and money and the most people.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: In manufacturing, the, you have the c coo, the chief operating or the guy who manages all plants and production. He's one of the king. And so is the cfo. Cause they have huge investments. They have a lot of purchasing sales, manufacturing process before they see any money. So he's really, CFO is so important in man making the cashflow work.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Then the cu so you might, and then you have, people with influence, but I would say most typical, those three are kings in manufacturing.

Mia: Yeah. Got it.

Soren: Any change that you would have to.

Christian: One was the last one? Legal or.

Soren: The cfo, the ceo, and the chief of.

Mia: Operations. Yeah.

Christian: It.

Mia: I think the CFO also will be responsible now with the new legislation, right? Because he's the one signing the financial report. Yeah.

Christian: Exactly.

Soren: I would say those should be the three that you somehow need a dialogue with and maybe gauge from them whether this is actually on the.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: How big of an issue it is.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: They will be able to tell you if you, they direct you to somebody else, but at least you have a communication line with them now.

Mia: Yep.

Soren: For budgetary reasons understanding how this is going to operate internally.

Mia: Yeah. Yep.

Soren: Because this way, you, c o or ds e o, you, we don't need to talk. If this is not on your agenda, we can get back to, and talk later. But if this is not something that you are about to establish as a fundamental initiative, if you want to know more about how to do that, I'd be happy to help you. Maybe that's why they need to get your first inspiration.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: Would something like this.

Mia: Yeah, exactly. And here is, cuz I think this is also a challenge, right? Because when you talk to a CFOs, this is the perceived, like the sustainability, you know, value proposition is perceived as being very soft, especially, you know, for CFOs that need to see money and money out, right? Yeah, so here's where we need to sit and really create that case, you know, for the return of investment and being like, well, yeah, this is the risks and this are the opportunity that.

Soren: If you can come in like Christian and I in marketing, in lead generation, in sales, any CEO would love. To see the day where he can see that all the marketing money he spends actually generate some sales.

Mia: Yeah. Exactly.

Soren: Because he's looking for more details than he's given.

Mia: Yeah, exactly.

Soren: In a CEO that could get inspiration or proof of concept in terms of how he can, his company's productivity, efficiency, compliance, with sustainability. Wow. That would, if when he starts asking different questions down in the organization in regards to sustainability, then that would necessitate a discussion with you even more and your tool, because what could have happened in those that say they're gonna do it themselves is that as Christian and I, say at any one point in time, There are only two to 3% of prospects out there that are actually looking for a solution. Next month gonna be another two to 3% of the month after, but any point in time, two to 3% of everybody out there in your total addressable market are looking for solution. So if you only talk to those two or 3%.

Mia: It's time spent.

Soren: Probably have been out looking for solutions, haven't found what they're looking for with their understanding of how this works. And then you, they say, oh, we're gonna produce it ourselves because they are, in the buying mode right now. They need to do something and it's now.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: You need to start focusing on the 97% of the right ones and start helping them get to a decision point where they realize. Now I'm comfortable. I'll throw some money at it.

Mia: Totally makes sense. I think qualification was definitely a problem for us, but I also think that the process of qualifying is changing right now, you know, with the new, the new legislation.

Soren: Think the last part, Christian, one of your key points about what's the differentiator, how are, how are you different, I think is very important as a, as a topic here now. So lead that please. But what's different about what people are comparing you to, because it may not be a competitor, it may be, compared to doing it yourself, so. Where's that?

Mia: Yeah. Actually we were just thinking about writing an article about that. So we really, you know, pinpoint on how we are different than behavior apps. How are we different than learning management systems, right? How are we, different than just trying to do it internally with send a newsletter, do a town hall meeting and gathering some post-its, right. So we're really trying to make this more clear, of course, our secret sauce, it is a methodology of, activating people. But we need more, let's say, technology behind it like an algorithm. So we have it in paper, you know, we have it in, okay, this is, these are the steps, You know, that we need to do, but we just need to, include, you know, technological, support to it so that it's really making it more like faster and we can show and visualize more data if that's for any interest. Right? Because again, I also got the feedback, you know, from someone being like, Yeah. But you know, we, in our company, we don't care about like, what employees are thinking and feeling. You know, this is probably something for more mature companies, right, that are set up in place for us. We decide it's like this, then people need to, need to do it, right? We are not gathering feedback from how people are feeling, you know, and what they're thinking to start a revolution. Cuz I think this is what, you know, a lot of the companies are afraid of. What if our employees, you know, get so smart about sustainability that they're gonna think like, oh my God, we're not doing stuff, but we are helping companies to be transparent and be like, this is a heart, you know, transition that we have to do. You can see how hard it's for yourself to do small changes, right? So we need you to be part of this in order to support, you know, this shift that we are, tr Yeah. We're going through right now. So, yeah.

Christian: Wow.

Mia: See if this.

Christian: Quickly, find out if they met you ICP with that? Kind of mindset, you know, because the employees are a very important part of your.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: Outcome. I was just a randomly playing around with a pitch for you, just before like time runs out here. And it was like, I help manufacturing companies reduce cost, through sustainability, compliance gamification. Something.

Mia: By gify the, yeah. Yeah.

Christian: Yeah.

Mia: Interesting.

Soren: Proven process for achieving goals.

Mia: That's very nice.

Soren: Aside from that blog post you mentioned you had, right. I think the other blog post you need Right, is How to Achieve Success in Sustainability Projects. I mean, what does that process look like? What, who's involved and what makes the difference between success and failure?

Christian: Also I wouldn't just make a blog post about those kind of objections. I would have it as part of my, like on my FAQ or whatever on my website. Why shouldn't I just use my e-learning system, you know, handle those objections.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a good idea.

Soren: How about interviewing companies that have succeeded with sustainability projects? Out and talk to them. If you are allowed, bring it on video. Have a podcast or video channel where you discuss how to achieve success in sustainability project. You become an expert.

Mia: Yeah. That was actually on top of my mind, and I guess I just needed to get a little pushed. But it's also, you know, the challenge, you know, of being a startup and being an entrepreneur is that, there's so many to-dos, you know, and there's very few people you can delegate to, so you need to handle everything yourself. But for sure, this is a priority and I'm super grateful for all your inputs and all this nice process, of coaching me through giving me foot for thought and really trying to get deeper into the insights that I got so far. Right. We, hopefully also good some of. Cuz some of them are also maybe assumptions. I really loved this process. It was really both fun, you know, engaging and, I felt, you know, like, you hold my hand to, until the end of here's your pitch.

Soren: The beauty.

Christian: There are so many entrepreneurs that are very lost in this, and I've been there myself, honestly. You know, we try to hit everything that is in the market and we just start to hit nobody. But when, you know, when you, when you get to this level, you know, you're talking to manufacturing companies and you can just move so much faster, like son said in the beginning.

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

Soren: Understand you can, you can, when you talk to another manufacturer, you can use their analogy, you can use their pains, the impact it has on them in manufacturing and that makes communication so much easier than if you have to take a perspective from a farmer perspective or manufacturing perspective. Now you can't communicate clearly anymore. You don't resonate, and it becomes very.

Mia: Yeah. Indeed. Actually.

Soren: World is a big place. There is no shortage of customers. You just said at least 50,000 in your total addressable market, more will come. So just be the go-to in a small niche where it's so evident that I shouldn't go anywhere else because she's talking stuff in my industry. In my business.

Mia: It totally makes sense, you know, to narrow down, narrow down like this. I mean, we've tried a little bit to maybe target lookalike, you know, audiences or lookalike companies with the ones that we had already as customers. But I wouldn't say that the message were very, was very crispy, you know, in making and differentiated, you know, so, hey, we're talking to you. We're talking to companies like you. So I think, that's also something.

Soren: Alike. That sounds to me like the previous decisions you made that brought in the customers with that you're now trying to expand on instead of stepping back and say, this is my ideal.

Mia: Yeah.

Soren: I will speak to no one else but ideal.

Mia: Yeah. Exactly. No, we're totally, yeah, that was the approach indeed.

Soren: The other one. Sounded like a Facebook algorithm or.

Mia: Yeah, exactly. It.

Soren: Uca like.

Mia: A, it was a, cold outreach algorithm.

Christian: That's some stuff you can start to do later on when you have.

Mia: Exactly. When.

Christian: ICP and you got the traction, you know, the messaging, the pains, all that. Then you can go down that path and it's just about adding more, fuel to the fire. Right? But you're not there.

Mia: Yeah.

Christian: Now.

Mia: Exactly. No, thank you so much. This was really insightful and, I'm super grateful for your, for your coaching.

Christian: Welcome. Yeah.

Soren: We'll.

Christian: Find you and look. Look up more about your company and you.

Mia: 2030 builders. So we are not, building, apartments, flats, in houses, but we're just, building a better future because we get a lot of visits, you know, for that as well. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Christian: Amazing.

Soren: Where do they, is there a link to your LinkedIn profile where people can engage and converse with you.

Mia: Yeah, of course I can share it with you, but as well, you, can find me at, Mia Negro on LinkedIn. I'm actually quite active there. And we also have a Scandinavian sustainability group, where we, bring in communities for sharing, yeah, best practices.

Soren: All right, but we'll have your contact information.

Mia: Thank you.

Soren: We appreciate.

Mia: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Christian: Sharing and, good luck out there.

Mia: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Needed.