Numbers need stories

Story telling is essential to making a Technical sale in SaaS. These are my experiences as a Math Teacher + what story telling in Math taught me about selling (usually) boring topics.

Slide Notes:
2) Rainforest is growing 20% month over month.
3) Stories connect all of us.
Your take aways: more compelling pitch, more memorable, and have more fun.
4) How many of you sell SaaS products?
How many of you sell a technical product?
How many of you try to upsell customers to annual contracts?
6) TO DO: Sell the boringness.
Read the formula front to back to make it really boring.
10) Who here plays video games?!
12) Metcalfe’s law (value of a network w/ n nodes = n^2)
BigO notation. algo w/ n inputs takes n^2 time.
13) I’ve taught you something new.
It’s relevant to you.
15) 50,000 testers in our crowd, hundreds online at any time.
Tests avg 40x faster run time as compared to manual.
16) Anyone can write tests in Rainforest.
We’re fast, stupid fast, from day one.
17) “the half-life of parallel techniques is very short, because hardware changes rapidly and each new machine needs a somewhat different approach.”
“I decided long ago to stick to what I know best. Other people understand parallel machines much better than I do; programmers should listen to them, not me, for guidance on how to deal with simultaneity.” — Donald Knuth
18) IronMQ is dashboard by default.
Elegantly scales.
Switching hosts is as easy as changing keys and switching off of SQS.

Transcript

1. @rainforestqa rainforest Numbers need stories
2. rainforest @rainforestqa Who am I?
3. rainforest @rainforestqa Numbers need stories ^ Technical sales
4. rainforest @rainforestqa Your average Technical Sale looks like… “Here’s a list of our features, Cool huh?”
5. rainforest @rainforestqa Pythagorean Theorem
6. rainforest @rainforestqa Used for the Distance Formula d = sqrt(△x2 + △y2)
7. rainforest @rainforestqa There are over 100+ Proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem!
8. rainforest @rainforestqa These are features. Boring features.
9. rainforest @rainforestqa To make a lasting impression I need… novel + relevant
10. rainforest @rainforestqa
11. rainforest @rainforestqa What about buying a TV? The inches on a screen refer to diagonal distance.
12. rainforest @rainforestqa The Pythagorean Theorem can be used to compare ANY measures with squares
13. rainforest @rainforestqa You might actually remember this. Why?
14. rainforest @rainforestqa Changing the Technical Sale
15. rainforest @rainforestqa Rainforest Adjective Soup Easy to use Robust Reproducible Fast
16. rainforest @rainforestqa Creating stories: “How long does a regression take?” “How often do you deploy?” “How many devs are writing integration tests?”
17. rainforest @rainforestqa Iron.io Adjective Soup Fast Secure Scalable Reliable
18. rainforest @rainforestqa Creating stories: “Problems scaling in the last year?” “Are you scared of relying on just one host?” “What’s your server utilization rate?”
19. rainforest @rainforestqa Avoid adjective soup
20. rainforest @rainforestqa Numbers need stories ^ Technical sales
21. rainforest @rainforestqa novel + relevant = 
 customer won’t just buy cheapest
22. @rainforestqa rainforest
23. rainforest @rainforestqa Questions? On the Twitters as @ThatMightBePaul paul@rainforestqa.com