Want your tech to change the world? Sell to the C-Suite

By Leo Nasskau

Welcome to The AEA Explorer!

This month’s post has written by Leo Nasskau, is a writer for the Empowered Belonging and Vice President of Operations at Culture3, a web3 media startup.

Without further ado, here is “Want your tech to change the world? Sell to the C-Suite” by Leo Nasskau!

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We live in an era of immense technological change. That cannot be understated. Much like the internet two decades ago, blockchain and artificial intelligence represent paradigm shifts in how businesses engage with their customers.

As an advocate of these technologies at Culture3, where we lie at the intersection of technology and culture, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to inspire businesses and individuals alike, and how to best evangelise what technology promises. In particular, I care about paradigm-shifting tech. The real stuff. The stuff that fundamentally changes how we interact with other people and new products.

But without helping others understand the forces shaping our future, we cannot hope for this technology to change the world any time soon. No revolution has ever happened without the messenger. To encourage that understanding, we have to be proactive about spreading it, insightful in what we say, and strategic in who we say it to.

A core part of this mission is about asking the question ‘how can we bring businesses into the future?’ One of my mottos at Culture3 is that we can spend as much time as we want producing articles and podcasts to show individual people how our world is going to change, but we’re wasting our time if we’re not bringing businesses along with us. Business-adoption matters.

So, we play the role of advisor, evangelist, and salesperson for consumer-facing organisations interested in embracing the future. We take that interest, mix it with insight and confidence, and bring the future to them. As a result, much of my mission revolves around the best way to speak to organisations and persuade them to take a closer look at these technologies by which we are all so excited.

The best approach, I believe, is to target the C-suite. The team that reports to the CEO, the C-suite is the most senior group of execs at an organisation. They aren’t the people who do most of the work, nor are they the people who are directly selling to customers. They aren’t middle managers either, who have a direct line to that work as well as a more influential strategic role. Nor are they customers who buy the products, and thus play a huge role in influencing what products a company offers.

All of these reasons to target a particular aspect of an organisation are valid, but they don’t matter. Relatively. Not compared to what the C-suite offers, which is far more important: leverage. Whilst the C-suite does not do the lion’s share of the work, they influence over everyone who does it through their team. They do not buy the products, but they set the strategy and budgets that make the difference between products that customers think they want and those which they don’t even realise they want. It is these individuals who have the power, responsibility, and accountability to bring an organisation into the future.

The argument that tomorrow’s world-changers should sell to the C-suite is nonetheless quite a contrarian view. Modern software revolves around the product-led growth dogma (PLG). That’s a very different approach to spreading your tech around the world. When you pursue product-led growth, you emphasise individual user acquisitions. Your customers become your evangelists, inspired by how easy your software is to use and to customise, plus how cheap the subscription is. It’s the growth strategy for countless upstarts, like Notion, Slack, Zoom, Calendly, Dropbox, and Grammarly. Build it and they will come. All these companies picked up steam after onboarding thousands of individual customers, who then espoused their new tool in the workplace. These hugely successful tools infiltrated businesses from the bottom up.

So why should your tech be any different?

The difference is that your tech is changing the world.

Product-led growth is all well and good when the product you’re offering is obviously useful. People have used organisational tools for a while. Notion is just better. People have messaged at work for a while. Slack is just better. People needed video calls, then scheduling, and Zoom and Calendly were there for them. People were storing documents and emailing them to each other before Dropbox made that easier, and whilst cloud storage is a paradigm change, what the user is doing changes very little. Grammarly only blew up after it targeted people who already cared about good prose, not when it tried to get bad writers to change their minds and try to write like Hemingway. In short, a product-led growth strategy requires a product that offers clear benefits over existing alternatives. More of the same thing, rather than a completely new thing.

Blockchain products in particular are not like this. Neither are most AI products — those that let you create media, like ChatGPT for text and Runway for visuals, are the exception. Most AI products will only be shared within companies, like DeepMind’s protein structure model Alpha Fold. Ditto for blockchain, where most innovation has focused on reinventing work itself as much as how that work gets done. In other words, most blockchain and AI tools are paradigm-shifting. They fulfil desires that consumers don’t even know they want. Product-led growth does not work in this context.

Let us turn to the survey industry for proof. Most people don’t even think of surveys, like Google Forms, as an industry, but in reality, Survey Monkey and Qualtrics are the market leaders in a £15 billion sector. The thing is, it’s dominated by Qualtrics, with a £10bn valuation, and they don’t even say that they’re in the same industry. Instead, the main thing you see on the Qualtrics website is ‘experience management’.

What is experience management, you ask? Surveys, I tell you. But by repackaging surveys in terms of the impact it has on an experience, Qualtrics jumps up the hierarchy. SurveyMonkey sells to product managers and research analysts. Qualtrics sells to the C-suite. The C-suite is accountable for the impact. Managers are accountable for the process. By selling the impact, you speak to the C-suite. By selling the process, you don’t.

As Evan Armstrong writes:

“Qualtrics is better at integrating into decision-making processes in big organizations. So while SurveyMonkey is just survey software, Qualtrics comes with something akin to consulting: they have salespeople that get the C-Suite to care, they structure the process of setting everything up, … and come up with narratives that explain the bottom line simply.

“This is a lot of work. You could do it all yourself, but it requires someone to champion it — aka spend a lot of time getting a bureaucracy to move. Or the CEO could just hire Qualtrics.”

SurveyMonkey followed the Product-Led Growth dogma that traces its root back to the infamous YCombinator maxim: build something people want. By defining an entirely new industry – this concept of ‘experience management’ – Qualtrics sold something that people didn’t even know they wanted, and they sold it to the C-suite, who had both the responsibility to think about the future and the influence to embed it across the company.

In reinventing the work itself as well as the process, Qualtrics created a paradigm shift. Blockchain and artificial intelligence have many of the same qualities. The way to ensure it changes the world is to emphasise the impact and speak to the C-suite.

Leo Nasskau is VP Operations at Culture3, where his mission is to explore the paradigm shifts of blockchain and artificial intelligence. He’d love to hear from you @leonasskau.

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DISCLAIMER: None of the information is nor is intended to constitute legal, tax, financial or investment advice. Any and all assertions made by the author(s) are understood to be true at the time of writing. Moreover, at the time of writing, the author is not directly nor indirectly employed by Fetch HQ. The author is by no means an expert on Fetch and FET and autonomous economic agents (AEAs) are novel monetary and economic digital assets respectively (and thus caution is advised when interacting with them or seeking to acquire them).