EthCC 2: Aschleigh Schap

how's everybody's conference so far good yeah good it's it's nice it's nice that we get to travel around the world and you know hang out with our friends huh so yeah bizdev in crypto obviously this is kind of becoming more and more important last year was you know a little bit tough as some of you may remember prices have been down a little bit and as part of that you know we've all had to get a little bit smarter get a little bit better crypto spaces you know traditionally kind of weird we've had a lot of wacky people in and out telling you know various stories like this guy Craig Wright and oh and then this is a great this is a great lie as well might be a little too close to home for some of you depending on when you got involved now GOx it's awkward oh and then this one is actually you know we have new lies now that we've gotten past that initial phase everyone in 2017 you know I cos are not a security we don't need to worry about this well turns out we do and then you know still we have additional lies that we keep keep telling ourselves even even now people use my technology even if the UX is bad not true just not true but but this you know these are all sort of minor lies and there's another lie that I have been thinking about a lot over the last few months and it's a lie it's it's a little bit confusing because it's on its face it doesn't actually really look like a lie it doesn't sound that bad doesn't sound like anything we can't overcome but really it's the kind of lie that we all tell ourselves and it is holding us back from achieving our real potential and that lie is this if you build it they will come has anyone heard this has anyone heard this meme out there in the crypto sphere I think we all have right if I build this beautiful set of smart contracts of course I'm going to users everyone's gonna love it I don't need to do anything I've built all these gorgeous token economic incentives it's just not true and we've seen that time and time again right how many projects have raised all this money and built fantastic technology and you know hasn't really taken off tap users ship is you know a little bit anemic to say the least and you know that's on us so that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today is okay how do we you know setting this lie aside let's let's just call a spade a spade if you build it they will not come unless you tell them about it and get them in here so how can we actually get them in here and bring users into the space well a lot of that is through the business development function so we'll go over some practical advice for setting up a bit of creating realistic growth strategies how to talk to your about your project to the real world without scaring them crucially and how to move your partnerships forward so with that some housekeeping items setting up shop the first this is so important get a CRM CRM software contact Resource Management few examples here basically it just allows you to track all of your contacts all of your activities so that anyone in your organization could log in and sit and see what the status of a partnership is helps you remember everyone that you're speaking to I don't know about you guys what I speak to you know several dozen new people per week so my memory is not great not that good anyway this might sound obvious but use the CRM lots of people get CRM and then just sort of don't really use them which I don't understand it's a lot of work to set them up why why not use it third develop a plan for moving things through the pipeline so this doesn't need to be a super intensive plan but you need to be able to track you know what the status is of of every deal that you're working on and and have a method for doing that so you can kind of evaluate your progress and and sort of make plans around your beedi goals and then finally set high but achievable goals tied to compensation so for business development people if you have any working on your project the best way to incentivize them and make sure that everybody is you know moving in the same direction is to basically make sure that their compensation is tied to whatever goals that you'd like them to achieve at that time so just to give you guys an example of this can everyone see this okay yeah okay cool so this is just a very this is just a screenshot from our CRM and you can see it's a very simple flow on hold means you know there we're waiting for their DAP to be finished or we spoken and they want to wait for you know whatever however long obviously tentative commitment they've committed and then once they've said yes and we've made a plan they either go through the integrations of the marketing team or the collateral integration progress and then one unqualified are lost so this is just a very simple flow to help you track kind of where you are and then anyone can log in to your CRM and see what the status is of the pipeline okay now a few words on strategy so one of the things that I see a lot of is projects that want to be everything to everybody lots of BD people that are working on all kinds of different deals across all kinds of different verticals and that works for a while but ultimately where you'll see your Beauty people being the most successful is if you have them have a few strategic focuses and and so and to really kind of dig deep on those right instead of going a mile wide and an inch deep to really get experienced in a certain vertical for example you know maker Dow we really want to focus on remittances so one of our beady people really spends a lot of time digging into remittance companies personally I have been focused really heavily on collateral lately so bringing on you security tokens and getting them ready to prep for multi collateral dialogue so which verticals do you actually want to pick you you want to solve for usability visibility and scale so usability that means you know how they're actually going to interact with their with your with your DAP or your application it needs to be something something obvious and something that adds something to their business process visibility if it's a it's a big brand name company that's now using your technology obviously you know that is that's that's great and then scale we want to be able to actually push this technology out off to a broad organization gain users gain basically awareness of your project through these partnerships that you're creating then use a tearing system to help prior to prioritize targets and I'll give an example of that here in a minute but the way that we think about it is you know obviously there are some some partnerships that are a little bit more high value than others right and you need to give your BD team a way to focus their energy on really high value targets and so they're not just spending a bunch of time you know getting coin listings on random exchanges and then finally adjust the goals and tearing system as needed using the feedback that your BD people are getting from prospects and this is crucial the way to think about your be people there they're on the front lines they're the ones that are talking to the market about who you are and what you do they're the ones that are getting the first feedback and the most information basically on you know what what what the market thinks so you can use their insights to adjust your plan okay so this is just a quick example just so you guys can see how we do it for every project depending on what you're looking to do things will be different but we categorized in Tier one tier two and Tier three we're Tier one maybe you know focused on dye users and collateral providers right of a certain level so you know however many active users they have or however much deployable collateral they have Tier two would be you know any kind of strategic crypto relationships etc and then Tier three will be you know smaller earlier stage applications that are maybe integrating one or more of our projects or products and so that's how we kind of are able to focus our attention and effort okay so we talked about the big lie of crypto but now we get to talk about the painful truth of crypto and that is this nobody understands what you're talking about this happens a lot I talked to at least ten new projects a week and very often and I'm pretty I'm pretty crypto woke I've been I've been doing this since 2013 and still a few times a week I will have someone explain their project to me for five to ten minutes and at the end of it I still have no freaking clue what they do that's not good guys we gotta sort this one out and the reason for that is because we like to use lots of lingo and we're all very smart and we love to talk about things in our own little language that we've all built together but that's just not going to work no one no one cares right FedEx doesn't care about bonding curves so here's some examples of some that are good so Gollum is a global open-source decentralized consumer computer that anyone can access it's made up of the combined power of users machines from PCs to entire data centers that that explains what they do that's it that's a good quick explanation unfortunately you see many projects with things like this connect blockchain technology to the real world by providing comprehensive governance structure robust economic models advanced IOT integrations what do they do it's kind of crazy because of you chains actually a fairly legit project with you know decent partnerships and you know they've got a good story to tell and yet you know you go to their website and this is you know what what is this what is this why why is it okay for crypto businesses to speak like this and not and not follow suit with the rest of the world and basically say what you mean to say so this is something that we all need to work here is a short list of words and phrases that you should never use on a first call with a prospect the double spend problem Byzantine fault tolerance have any of you ever used that on a call with the prospect how does it go it just doesn't it doesn't work they don't care they don't care about this when you are talking to a if you're if you're thinking about buying Salesforce the CRM when you talk to their business development person they're not explaining you know all the technological rails of how it works they're showing you hey okay you have this problem where you need to track some information wait here's how you do that you do it quickly you do it simply if I hear the word bonding cur if I never hear that word bonding curve again it'll be too soon and don't even get me started on Unchained governance they don't want to know about that just keep it simple so it gets confusing because a lot of people don't really know what to talk about on a call if you're not they think that what you're supposed to be doing on the first call is this which is tell them what we do that's that's okay you know it's not a bad place to start but it's not great a much better place to start and which is maybe not very intuitive is this find out what they need this is a huge difference and it's not something that we are used to doing very much in this space right because we're all very excited about the projects that we've created but when you're actually going to have a conversation with you know a fortune 500 company they are not as excited about your project as you are necessarily they might be you know casually interested in it but the only way that you're going to keep them interested is if you can do this crucial step which is to find out what they need so the way to do that is to just basically figure out how we can help them so your goal in the first interaction should be to find out what they're currently doing what kind of business are they do some research beforehand what isn't working or could be improved so if it's a supply chain finance company how how are things going with their cross-border payment solutions right what are where they're where are they getting stuck come up with some ideas before the call have some some thoughts in mind but ultimately your goal is to ask these questions of them and get some answers and then of course what are they hoping to achieve so this uh you might you might think you know the answer to this when you're getting on a first call but I find all the time that I what I think we're gonna be able to do for someone isn't the main thing that they're interested in doing for example I'm working on a deal right now with the commodities firm out of out of Singapore and they want to be able to collateralize their medals warehouse medals on the blockchain and borrow against them I thought I just assumed that they were interested in doing this to lower their interest rates well in fact you know that that's that's of interest of them of course everyone wants lower interest rates but the main reason that they're interested in doing this is because they think that it can really help them save a people a whole lot of paper trail and a whole lot of time and knowing that I can sort of tailor the solution that we're building for them to them and make them much more likely to continue to engage and really invest in taking things forward so once you have these answers then you can discuss how your project can help them with that specific problem crucially you need to be understood and how do you do that practice describing your product to normies call your mom call your grandmother call your sister call your college roommate call whoever and practice explaining what you do in one minute and and see how people react if it's not clear if you can't get it yourself to the point where you can explain to someone who has never heard of a Bitcoin then you need to keep working second don't try to boil the ocean I kind of touched on this earlier but a lot of projects have a lot of different nice and cool features things that they can help with across a whole variety of issues right but really that's just not realistic don't try to boil the ocean focus on few key ideas for working together third if there's any doubt that they've understood reiterate so blockchain has got all of this like cool hype around it and it's and it's it's complex we're used to talking about these terms but when you're talking to you know the CTO of a you know a small medium business or an a larger enterprise operation they might kind of get it but be too embarrassed to admit that they don't really understand what you're talking about and they'll kind of nod their head and then you know you'll be surprised because it sounded like this guy was really interested why didn't he take my call the next time I called him why has any respondent by most recent email you need to make sure that they understand and the best way that I like to do that is to just kind of I'll kind of ask a few questions to just get an assessment for me of you know how much they get this and then finally and this one is so important use their go-to describe what you do so we've come up with in a lot of cases a lot of just ways that we're talking about a lot of us are technologists that are going to solve some technology problem for a business that we don't really have a lot of experience in in right whether it's banking supply chain finance farming whatever it is if you're building a blockchain solution you know the chances are high from what I've seen that you haven't actually worked in that industry before so you need to get sharp on the lingo of that industry for example with maker we always say collateralization ratio but that is very confusing to financial companies who always use the phrase loan to value or LTV so find out what are the terms of art for the industry that you're trying to work with and stick to those okay get them thinking this is a really important one the best way to do this is to use real-world examples and analogies to help the prospect basically understand the possibilities so before you actually get on the call do some research about the business come up with some ideas of ways you think that they can use the product and be ready to give a real-world example of saying okay if you have some warehouse of metal then we can help you tokenize it you'll then basically lock it up in a basically safety deposit box on chain right and then you're able to borrow against it take them through what a real example would look like that way hopefully they will start to come up with ideas on their own if you do this well you'll have one thing that you may go into the collet and then if you can really get their wheels turning and thinking about it the next time you talk to them they may say hey I was thinking about it last night and I actually think there's another thing that we could do together so this is sort of the goal to have them understand so well that they're actually coming up with new ideas for how to move your partnership forward or further integrate with with your suite of products all right then develop a plan so don't be afraid to start small this is a this is a big one that I think a lot of projects kind of that you get excited and it's we're gonna we're gonna revolutionize your whole business and let's start using dye in every single place in your whole company well that's not that's not really realistic so go ahead and pick a project to work on together and build the relationship you don't have to change an entire industry overnight pick something small something manageable something that everyone can agree to and get started the second one and this one is crucial is ask them to commit to something so if it's a in your partnership if you're planning to do a partnership ask them to commit to a deadline or you know maybe we'll build out this side of the implementation and you build out this side or maybe it's you know just sharing the costs of paying the developers to do this I know it's a little scary to ask for money for some of these things but even if it's just a nominal amount just to ensure that everybody has skin in the game and everybody is you know gonna be held accountable and this one is important this doesn't maybe probably make sense for every single deal but for larger deals in particular draft up a document that's basically outlining the scope of the project that you're going to work on and what's expected from both sides any deadlines or timelines that you want to try to observe that'll help everybody kind of you know have a meeting of the minds and stay on track they've agreed to partner hooray this is very exciting okay now what do you do sorry I had a little too much fun with the animations okay I'm gonna start with the don'ts you ready don't announce anything publicly until there's a working prototype or at least something real to announce we see this all the time how many how many things do we see on Twitter of like oh guys we've got this great partnership and you know you look back in six months later still nothing is out it it hurts your brand particularly if you're a good project which I'm sure all of you are then you don't really want to have your name on something until you know that it's finished and that it's good maker has done really well in this right I think we've been really protective of announcing things until you know until there's a little bit more substantial something don't assume that they will hold up their end of the bargain follow up that document that I said to get started right set some deadlines in it and let and try to get them to keep to it and then finally don't wait until the last minute to loop in your technical or marketing teams to help give them plenty of lead time these guys are busy and often times things are a little bit more complex than they might seem at first so get your teams involved as early as possible okay so now for some do's set timeline guidance and stick to it I know I keep harping on this but I cannot I cannot stress this one enough if you ask people to do things and tell them that there's a deadline they actually do want to comply with this so you can you can kind of you can help them do that by following up regularly bring in other team members to help as needed for example legal that one kind of goes without saying this one is also important use other adapts to help build the solution for example we're we're now partnered with UNICEF you're able to donate to UNICEF and I and we're partnering with we're ringing in requests we request Network essentially for their donation collection form help them not just get involved with your solution but also bring other adapts from the ecosystem that can make your make your app stand out and make it look a little bit easier stay organized that's a given and this is also really important so start planting the seed of other deeper partnerships you could work on together as the first project comes to a close so for example with UNICEF where they're now accepting dye as a donation type and that's great but UNICEF does so much financial operations and so many interesting places in the world that have you know weird currency situations and you know under banked populations and so because we've got this you know first kernel of a partnership going now I'm able to sort of expand my reach into the organization and so ask for introductions to other teams say you know I want to talk to your team that's doing you know last-mile aid in Syria for example and and and start kind of spreading out you're spreading out you're putting some more hooks in the water so to speak around the organization during the the initial partnership and then finally help them get as much press media Twitter attention as possible once the partnership is announced to make this easy make some I would recommend every BD person to make some friends at Coyne desk and you know the other big you know publications out there and really kind of help them get the word out that it helps you as well so final thoughts don't be afraid to go whale chasing this is one thing that we don't see a lot of you know every now and again we get some big partnership oh IBM's doing something or oh FedEx is doing something this is very exciting well those conversations with huge companies like those have to start somewhere so doesn't matter go go call them these big companies are actually way more interested in stuff than you might think I don't know if you've noticed but stock prices tend to climb quickly whenever a publicly traded company announces some blockchain integration initiatives so you know they're they're definitely thinking about these things your success depends on your ability to listen understand a problem and propose a concise and coherent solution and this is on concise and coherent be an educator but lighten up on the jargon a lot of what you a lot of what I do on the phone and in meetings is teaching people right teaching people how they can use this technology helping them get ideas about how they can move things forward in their own business by integrating some of these things but you know it's also a little bit scary so don't just just lighten up on the jargon just use plain English and then finally business development is on the front lines of the market you use what you learn there to inform new strategies if you think that you know you're going to be a product for one certain industry and then you get in that industry and they say you know you're not you're not really getting a lot of success switch it up try something else don't don't you know hold on too tightly to one thing just because that's what you put in your white paper you can always these things can often be used across a bunch of different places within one company or across different industries so that is all for me follow me on Twitter I'm occasionally funny usually not but yeah and I think that's I'm thinking about a time here but um is there someone coming up next okay cool you ready thanks guys [Applause]