"Sell the alpha, not the feature": The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR | Jen Abel

**Jen Abel** (0:00)
You need to vision cast. You need to sell to a gap. Don't sell to a problem. When you're selling to a leader, you need to be selling an opportunity. The market doesn't want to be sold to, they want to buy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:11)
Most founders would rather get 10, 10K deals than lose nine and get one 100K deal.

**Jen Abel** (0:17)
In the very early days, people will discount till the cows come home because they think that's the way to get a deal done. The best clients are not going to do that to you. If they're sitting there nickel and diming you, they're not fully bought in on what you're selling them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
It might be giving you a sense of success in product market fit.

**Jen Abel** (0:34)
As soon as you become a comparison, as soon as you become one of three that they're testing out, you've already sort of lost. It's all about differentiation. Here's what you will be able to do tomorrow because of how we're going to serve you today.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
Something else that you talk about is that enterprise sales are very creative.

**Jen Abel** (0:51)
It's more of an art. It's all about deal crafting. It is a relationship you're building with someone. If they know they can call on you, people will turn over rocks for you. I have a client at a Fortune 10 company where I was like, it's so important we get the deal done this year. Is that possible? And she's like, it's a tall order, but if it's going to help you, let's do it. These are how enterprise deals gets done. It's relationships.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
What's the state of the art on go to market, outbound tooling?

**Jen Abel** (1:18)
I don't use a tool. The thing about AI tools is they're all pulling from the same databases. I want to email someone not in the database that's getting hit by a million folks. I want to take a back door in, not the front door where everyone else is trick or treating.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:33)
Today, my guest is Jen Abel, co-founder of Jjellyfish where she and her team help early stage founders learn how to sell, and now GMF Enterprise at State Affairs. If you want to become better at selling your product, this episode is going to blow your mind and make you so much better in every way. This is the second time Jen's been on the podcast. Our first conversation was focused around getting from to 1 million ARR, essentially founder led sales. This conversation is part 2, going from around 1 million in ARR to around 10 million. This is the most tactical and in the weeds discussion you will find anywhere for free on how to actually become more effective at selling to enterprises. I am so excited for you to listen to this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube, it helps tremendously. And, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 17 incredible products for free for an entire year, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8ON, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChappieRD and Mobin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Jen Abel, after a short word from our sponsors. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercell, Plaid and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audited logs and other features required by big customers. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer, or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. This episode is brought to you by Lovable. Not only are they the fastest growing company in history, I use it regularly and I could not recommend it more highly. If you've ever had an idea for an app but didn't know where to start, Lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it, add automations and deploy it to live domain. It's perfect for marketers, spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas, and founders launching their next business. Unlike NoCo tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality and it's fast. What used to take weeks, months, or years, you can now do over a weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now is the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev.