Recently, I've been contemplating the gift of learning patience from longer sales cycles. In a previous life, I come from kind of prosumer, B2B, SaaS world, where a lot of sales were driven by scarcity marketing or incentivizing customers to purchase because [00:00:30] there was perhaps a discount available with a promotion that's going away. Or some bonuses that came if people buy the product by a certain time, and that went away. It has many of the sales characteristics as Groupon, right? There's an offer and then it goes away and if you don't buy it before a deadline, then you don't get the thing. And when you do that, you can predictably drive sales in [00:01:00] markets that have consumer-like properties. 

But in more B2B sales cycles, I've found that a lot of the buying behavior is driven by the customer. And that's how it should be, right? And I've had a few experiences recently that I'm actually kind of grateful for that have taught me that longer sales cycles can indeed end up fairly [00:01:30] fruitful. So I guess the first example that I want to run through is around us raising VC money. One of the VCs we approached told us up front that they were in the process of raising their fund and it would be a while until we heard back from them. And I at first thought this was code for, "We just want to hear your pitch. Maybe get intelligence from the space. But there's [00:02:00] no way on earth that we're going to invest in you." 

So I a little bit begrudgingly gave the pitch, even though I trusted these folks. And after walking them through our business and what we were doing, I didn't hear back from them for a long time. And frankly, I didn't expect to hear back from them. I thought it was a done deal and that it would never happen. And then low and behold, maybe a month and a half [00:02:30] later, I heard back from them and they said, "We're in." I was taken aback. I thought they were going to get on the phone to just provide a rejection but that wasn't the case. And then a little bit later, they actually told me that they wanted to up their investment which I was happy about, because I really liked them. And there wasn't exactly room around but we wanted [00:03:00] to make some for them because we really, really liked them. 

And it was just a really positive experience that proved me wrong about my skepticism. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be impatient and skeptical. We're used to hearing a lot of rejection, right? I think if you have ambitious goals, you tend to hear more rejections than acceptances I guess. So that's the first example I wanted [00:03:30] to lay out. 

The second example is around our biggest customer to date and they had approached us really before we even officially had our API out of beta and they'd approached us about purchasing our product. And that deal didn't go through. But then a few months later, conversations resumed and [00:04:00] again, things seemed to be really kind of dragging along. And I was patient. I waited and we tried to respond to them as quickly as we could. And three to four months later, that deal closed even though again they initially said they couldn't. That they had gone in another direction. They came back and then something happened. And that was another really positive experience for me. [00:04:30] Again, I'm an impatient person. I'm used to rejection and I think sometimes I can be a little bit skeptical. But again, that resulted in our largest sale to date. 

The third example is around a company that I led the acquisition of at my prior business, Leadpages. We acquired a company called Drip...

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