Hank:  Enablement is better than collateral, like…

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: Because if someone has a question, you don't want to say, “I'll send you some material on that.” You just want to say the answer. 

Hank: Okay, first topic, “a prospect asking for sales material is seldom a request of a qualified lead.” Agree, disagree?

Gonto: I agree that a request for specific sales collateral is actually not a good qualified lead. I have a phrase that I really like, which is like “good sales collateral is used and not handed.”

So I think good sales collateral is actually for your sales team to become better and not actually to give in to others. Like I don't know, I'm a big fan of battle cards, which explain how your product compares to a competitor and it helps you have trap questions where you can ask them questions on features you have, but not the other person. Or know how to answer questions if asked on features the competitor has, but you don't and how to think about them. That, I think, is fantastic collateral because it makes your sales team be better and not necessarily something you send. What's your take on the phrase? 

Hank: I really like that phrase.

Enablement is better than collateral.

Gonto: Exactly. 

Hank: Because if someone has a question, you don't want to say, “I'll send you some material on that.” You just want to say the answer. And so you have to embody and imbue all that knowledge in your sales team as best possible. And so I love enablement libraries. I love battle cards. I love the internal documentation. 

I have rarely seen a time where sales collateral was requested or when it was offered and also desired. And in fact, as a person who buys software, I often use asking collateral as a way to say no and just get out of the convo. “Yeah. Send me, you got a doc on that? Yeah. Send me that. You got a case study on that? Send me that case study, I'll totally read it.” And then I'm out. I'm ghosting them. And I think that’s, it's the easiest way to say no.

Gonto: I do think, like you actually mentioned case studies. I do think case studies are one of the very few useful collaterals that I think are worthy because if it's a case study, like I buy a lot of technical products, so if it's a technical case study that explains me how a company that I admire implemented something, how they are doing it and stuff like that, that might swing me in one way or another.

It starts with the logo, of course, but then if I deeply understand, “holy shit, they've done this thing.” I never thought about it or something like that. I think that could be useful. Having said that, I think a good sales engineer will know how to pitch you, how that company implemented it, and you don't necessarily need to read.

So similarly, an enabled sales engineer is better on the case study, but if you ask me one useful collateral I think it's case study. The other one that I think is useful, not for sales, is for gated content. Like some of these futuristic or vision or something like that collateral. If you use some gated content – I fucking hate gated content –  but it works. Like it still gives you leads. You can still convert them. Like I've done that. I've done it so many times and you get a lot of pipeline from it. So gated content, yes, but collateral that you hand in, yeah, no. 

Hank: Yeah. What I'll say on case studies is they're most useful if they have a metric. A metric that your AE or SE can memorize. 

“Well, we're worried about scale”.” Oh, well, such and such company, you know, does this many requests with us. And you can look them up on our site, whatever.” Ungated content is nice.

Gated content is really good as a lead magnet. And in fact, most of this type of content, like I will say case studies are good and customer stories are good as a way to pique someone's interest, as a way for someone to go, “Oh, is that how such and such company is doing this? Like, maybe I'll look, look into this a little more.”

Gonto: What about content for Outbound? You're doing an Outbound series. White paper and content, or no white paper and no content. 

Hank: I was going to say it can be useful for outbound content. And I think with AI these days, you can actually really personalize that type of stuff.

You know, you can do research on the site. Actually, my rev ops guy just sent me an email. He was mostly just praising the email. He's like. This was a pretty good email. It was basically a personalized first note. on like, “Hey, I looked into what you guys are doing. I think you're going to be interested. If you want this research I prepared for your company, please reply.”

Gonto: But you think that's good? Like we've been doing with Hypergrowth, a lot of automated outbound and emails written with AI at scale that are fully personalized. And the ones that actually really work well, the email is personalized. It's not the content. So we actually, before we used to send a lot of content, mostly because we wanted the content to be able to target company one, and two, and three. So when you open the white paper, you will have some part focus on one, some part focus on another. But now that we can actually personalize that scale with AI, I think you can actually be more succinct and actually have all of that content in the email, making white papers and collaterals for outbound not that useful. 

Hank: Yeah, actually great point like you might as well just put all the content in the email and make it a form of ungated content and try and elicit the reply faster.

I mean there are pros and cons to creating information gaps and curiosity gaps and this is like a really… that's like how you do a hook. But you can do that hook and then deliver on the hook within the same type of content.

There's also this concept of zero click content. Like, instead of trying to get people to click through whatever…Oh, you rolled your eyes. What do you, you don't like zero click content? 

Gonto:I don't like it, no. 

Hank: I mean, you basically just, you basically just pitched it for the emails. So what's the difference, I guess?

Gonto: Because to me, on the email, you're actually writing something that's specific and succinct and short and that's it. Instead of something all like “oh it's specific” or something like that. Like I feel it's a different vibe so I, I don't know.

The other thing I do is that I've actually tried for emails (not gated content, but since we're talking a bit about outbound now and emails) is Thinking, Fast, and Slow by Daniel Kahneman has this concept called “what you see is all there is.” And he talks about how making a story coherent is more important than data points. And one thing I tested that actually works is sending an email with a lot of metrics on how better your product is and data doesn't convert as good as a story that has holes and it's not that great, but it's inspiring and people are like, “Oh, I love it” and stuff like that.

Which, nothing to do with sales collateral, but just fascinating at that point. 

Hank: Well, it goes back to, we just talked about this an episode or two ago, about how narrative and vision beat everything. And that's an interesting point with a lot of collateral. A lot of collateral misses that. 

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: And I wonder if that's a thing to think about here too. So I actually think it's very related. 

Gonto: I agree. 

Last thing, sorry,  I want to call out on this: sales enablement. Like we talked about in the beginning, but I think both of us agree that sales enablement is key and it's the most important thing. Like Auth0, I think our sales team was really good because of our sales enablement team, like we were doing.

When a sales new AE joined the company, they did a one week full time in person sales bootcamp where they actually had a teacher that was explaining them things from our different notions and white papers and stuff like that. And then there were role playing tests and quizzes where that if you didn't approve them, you'd have to do them again and again and again until you finished.

And then once every nine months, we had a refresher bootcamp with important topics from the past and new topics based on features and things that we launched. But I think actually doing an in person thing with role playing, with quizzes, with a formal teacher and stuff like that, that to me is the best sales collateral together with some battle cards. I think that's all you need. 

Hank: I love that. I'll add another thing. So… there are things that salespeople should send in follow-ups. And I think the most common are gonna be docs. If you can send docs about, “Hey, here are all the docs you asked about,” or “Here are all the docs on features you asked about, or things you seem to care about.”

And maybe “here's one or two more that you didn't ask about, but I think you should check out just doing that.” They're not necessarily gonna read it, but it can show thoughtfulness from the AE and show a breadth of product or a depth of product. 

Gonto: Um, but a doc is not a collateral. A doc is a doc.  

Hank: Exactly. 

Gonto: Um, you really think an AE would send that? I think that's more of a sales engineer. A sales engineer should be sending the docs and then something else. 

Hank: A good AE does. Some of my favorite AEs do that. 

And then of course the other thing, you know, the bigger the company, they're going to be more interested in like your slash security page or your slash enterprise page that just helps them quickly check the boxes and know that, “okay, I can actually explore this product.” And usually that's…

Gonto: Those I agree. Like the security page, trust page, stuff like that, that I don't even count it as collateral, even though it is, it should always be on your website because people are going to ask like trust, compliance, security and stuff like that. Yeah. I think it's a must. 

Hank: Yeah. Yeah. It just helps.

There are things they have to tick the boxes on before they go to their boss because they don't want to spin up a whole procurement cycle and then learn that, “Oh wait, we can't even buy this product because they don't have SOC2 type two yet” or something dumb like that. 

Gonto: And the enablement is also more important.

Salespeople, I think, ask for collateral because they are poorly enabled. I think a good, a well enabled salesperson will ask for less collateral because I've seen a lot of like, I've shown so many sales conversations. I remember like clients asking like, “Hey, do you have a feature Y? Because I want to do X, Y, Z.”

And then the salesperson would say either yes or no. But sometimes you actually don't have that feature, but you have a better feature to do X, Y, Z. And in that case, it's like, “Hey, we don't have that feature, but… We actually have this, which helps you do this, this, this, and that.” That is what you can do if you're enabled.

If you're not, the only thing you can do is yes and no and send a white paper. Like, that sucks. 

Hank: Yeah. And we've both seen the type of sales leader who isn't properly enabled or doesn't take the time to learn the product and then just demands documents and collateral from the marketing team, even if that material already exists, which is frustrating.

Gonto:Agree. Anything else on this one? 

Hank: No, interesting stuff. You know, we hadn't, we hadn't really talked about that we were going to talk about this topic, but we both clearly have a lot of agreement and a lot of passion about this. 

Gonto: 100%, but really good tweet. 

Moving to the second topic. This was a slow week on Twitter. So our second topic doesn't come from Twitter and the current thing there. It actually comes from the current thing on Laravel, which I find it even more interesting because I can actually criticize the decision that Hank and team made. 

And the decision was around credit card gates. Should you add a credit card before people can try your products? Like, do you just open like a free sign up or free trial? Anybody can try it out. Or do you ask people for their credit card before they can actually try a product, even if you're not going to charge it yet? 

What's your take? Actually, tell me, tell me first, what are you doing with Laravel and do you agree with that take?

Hank: Yeah. So Laravel, we've got a big launch, you know, I think this podcast will get out, you know, right before or right after the launch on the 24th. And it's a product that hasn't really existed much in PHP land. You know, it's a cloud platform managed infra. And we had a lot of debate around, should we have a credit card gate because we don't have a free plan and we're not going to have a free trial. Those things are…

Gonto: Why are you not having a free plan? 

Hank: So here's why: Basically the usage costs are real. You basically always have to spin up a database, which is on us. And… 

Gonto: How do the other platforms do it? How will Vercel or Heroku do it? 

Hank: Vercel is different. You know, you don't necessarily have to, Vercel, you would go and buy some of these other things and integrate them with Vercel, right?

But Laravel's fullstack with a, you know, a digital ocean, I think is a good corollary, or actually even our other products which also require this. So we had, we had some debate on, “Hey, do we want to maximize for conversion rate and adoption upfront?” or all these other things?

One of the things we're optimizing for is develop.. is our internal developer time to, yeah, we could get into all that.

But ultimately, first I was very opposed to this idea of having the credit card gate. I have research. We'll show, we'll show an interesting link with some interesting, you know, data and studies. But then I went and asked around some like, marketing groups, and I got some interesting replies from interesting companies, like people who were at MongoDB, and PlanetScale, and DigitalOcean, and they're all very, they have similar users. 

A lot of them have the same users. And they, they seem to be convinced that, “Hey, our experiments showed that the credit card didn't really affect our conversions at the end of the day.” What I'm worried about is, well, does it affect long term signups and conversions? And I think that's where you would be vehemently against this. So hit me with your opinion, which I think I largely share, but…

Gonto: I think I'll share two different thoughts, like train of thoughts that I have on this. Like number one is in Laravel, maybe it's not the same because Laravel is already well known. But if you're launching a new product that is not as well known in the beginning, you want to get the most users possible so they can try it out, recommend it and stuff like that. Because you have nothing. 

Eventually, once you have a lot of users, maybe now you have 60,000 signups per month and you're like, “Oh, I know which of these signups are actually good or not, which one will convert.” Maybe like I would still not add a credit card gate, but maybe you think about it at that point.

But in the beginning…you have something that nobody knows, you're shipping something new, you need the most users that you can so they recommend you to somebody else and stuff like that. Having said that, what I think credit card hurts is not the conversion right away, but in the long time. And I can tell you why in a very simple experiments, like I've done this with three companies already.

One thing that I do a lot is this idea of, I let the free user sign up. It's a user that signs up with a Gmail address. They use your service for free. They deploy it. They continue using it. And then, because they sign up to a corporate email with their same computer, you actually know that the user that was at Gmail now actually also works at IBM.

And they register at IBM. And they just eventually pay a 100K contract a year. And what's fascinating to me is that this John at IBM actually found it because they made a pet project, a side project, six months before on this just for fun on the weekend. And they loved it, and it worked well. So the question is, would that John at Gmail convert? Like, fuck no. But the IBM one, yes. 

And you can know, because if they use the same computer, using the anonymous ID from Segment, or Postcode, or whatever the fuck you're using, you can just link them. So to me what's important and interesting, what we saw here is that 45% of the corporate users were a free user before that deployed and tried something.

So if that's true, when you launch it, it won't matter. But in the long time, in the long run, that means that you're losing 45% potential of the people. Because, not all of them, because some will try it or will put the credit card or something. But a lot of them, if they can't try it on their free account, on their pet project, on a stupid thing they're building, they won't use it for their corporate.

I actually think it's even more important now that you can do bytes coding, and code with cursor and whisper flow with your voice or something like that. And there's gonna be so many more developers. That if you don't give them access to a free project, like, or stuff like that. They want to learn about your product.

Hank: Yeah, it'll be interesting for sure. And I think we'll be able to run the experiment, let's say, 6 to 12 months. But, uh, yeah. It'll be, it'll be interesting. We'll see how it goes. I think we'll have a special episode dissecting this whole launch because it's been a huge effort and, um, that could be fun to do.

Gonto: And PHP is a different world because Laravel, like, I'm not from the PHP world, but I knew Laravel from before. I actually thought it ceased to exist, but I started hearing again from you and Theo and stuff like that, I think lately. But it's so well known that maybe people will still connect and try it out.

But the question to me is, and there's not many clouds for PHP, because that's why I think you can actually have a credit card gate. If there were three services or even two that were really good clouds for PHP and Laravel, then you need to give people a try to see which one is better. If there's 0 and now it's only going to be 1, they don't have that much option.

Hank: They don't and they're used to putting in a credit card right away. So it'll be interesting. I think actually the adopters it hurts us with the most are the people from JavaScript land that are now intrigued by Laravel. 

But I'm not sure that we're totally ready for them to come and see, right? We're, we're just creating a platform that's been totally focused on this neglected market. This market has been fairly neglected for 5, 10 years. So for them, this is going to be the greatest thing they’ve ever seen, like, yeah, they'll swipe a card. For the JS people, we need a little more time, and we're gonna add support for that type of stuff later on, and then we might have to really consider, like, ”hey, how do we get rid of this credit card gate?” Cause then we will have other competitors that are more of that ilk. 

Hank: Do PHP developers do, like, pet projects or weekend projects or stuff like that in PHP?  Or they are more like they use PHP for work. 

Hank: I mean, yeah, they're the same as any other group, like the number of side projects.

Gonto: Yeah, I'm judging. I'm thinking of PHP developer as somebody who is like more than 40 and it's like, “Oh, I just want to work and that's it.” And if I'm young, I only use JavaScript, but that's like a, a judgmental Gonto basically. 

Hank: Judgmental Gonto would be a great emoji for my Slack. 

But I mean, there is some truth to that. There's definitely a more mature audience and there are more nine to fivers. But they also, a lot of the side projects, I would say they're more legit often has been my observation. Like they're doing a side project to like build a business, not build a portfolio, which is interesting. 

Gonto: But you need to find, I think a fantastic example of this, and I'll close with this, at least from my side, it's Twilio. 

When Twilio went public, the biggest ARR for Twilio was Uber. Uber was eight to nine percent of their ARR. Twilio started in a free account, sorry, Uber started in a free account of Twilio. And they actually were a credit card user eventually. They were a credit card, it was paying like millions a year, but still started free. And they were a small startup. Nobody thought they were going to do anything. And they became huge. And it's like, “Oh, They are huge and now they just came from their free account.”

Twilio, when they grew, they had so many users, so many signups, that they were like, we don't know how to find the good ones. So they started to ask for credit card. And I think when Twilio did that, they started to lose the opportunity to find the new Ubers.  

Hank: Hmm very interesting. Do you remember when about that was? I'm curious. I should go… 

Gonto: when they added a credit card? I don't remember exactly, but I know they did once they had between 40 and 60k signups a month based on when I talked to the CMO that was there.

Hank: Well, we'll see. It's, it's new for me, so I'm definitely nervous, but after doing a little research, I'm feeling better about it and I think it's going to be fine. 

Gonto: Cool. Hope you enjoyed our episode on this slow week, but interesting topics, the credit card gates. I didn't know it was called credit card gate, by the way, I love the fucking name. And what do you think of sales collateral? So, thank you all!