Cee Ng (00:01.502)
Things are not cooperating today.

Cee Ng (00:09.088)
Man this weather is absolutely insane. I don't know what's going on. I'm just like wow the wind is nasty, you know This atmospheric river is insane like I mean like I have been here only a few years like it has not this is like Pretty insane. my gosh, and like everyone the bear is like we're gonna get it next week. I'm like, man Okay Like watch out the wind

Sanjit Singh (00:16.93)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (00:28.335)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (00:41.81)
Okay, we are live talking about the rain and wind. Okay, so Sanj, let me just say, hey, welcome back. Round two. This is awesome. We had such a great time. So let's keep on going. I don't think you need much of an introduction because we've done that. If anyone has not seen our first episode together, they need to go check that out because this is really a continuation going strictly in detail.

Sanjit Singh (00:48.483)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (00:53.55)
Thank you. Round two, let's do it.

Cee Ng (01:11.362)
And, but to kind of just preface it, since you are a five times founder, three times successful exits, angel investor, and you're a fractional, chief revenue officer. You've done a whole bunch of sales. You understand the bridge of sales and marketing. You don't compete between them. you totally understand that you understand not just the business size inside, or not just the number side. You also understand the human side of it too.

You totally understand the mindset of startup environment, everything about high stakes, but you also specifically understand the reality of it. And you understand how a startup founder and the ecosystem of that founder who they are associated with and who's on the ground, whether they have not just one investor, but quite a few investors.

that they're talking to and that they have a whole handful of customers kind of thing and trying to balance that act in addition to their mentors and advisors and everyone else in between how the hell for them to do this when they are in Q4. Holidays are right around the corner. Maybe they're a first time founder and all their attention is being, you know, everywhere.

and how for them to focus in sales and marketing in a way that's really going to count so that they can complete this Q4. Cause what you and I know very well in the finance side of things, January, it's just a cycle every single time. What do we do in January? Who are we going to lay off? What are we looking at? We're going to review the numbers. We're going to look at, know, what does reorg and restructure looks like? How are we going to, know, what

do the what does the Q1 board meeting gonna look like, you know, and it's not very it happens every single year. This isn't just specifically in tech. So, you know, this this quarter really counts. So what we're going to cover is three specific topics. One is hunting versus farming. And I really want to dig into this a lot.

Cee Ng (03:08.888)
basically most of the time, because, people who are also listening, who are engineers, let's say if they are in thing right now and they're like, man, I really want to do the zero to one switch. want to be a startup founder. You know, there are certain skills right now.

that they can take into consideration of how to maximize their opportunities and thing right now so that they can be better off when they do go into startup mode. And then if they are currently a first-time founder or even second-time founder, because they could be one or not the same depending on their circumstances, what skills are they missing right now today that they need to actually not be focusing on but leveraging their strengths.

and then working with the people who have those complementary strengths to move forward so that they can really win through a Q4. So the hunting versus farming of CAC, skill diff, and how founders can balance acquiring new customers with retaining existing ones in the real cost of neglecting early supporters, which I can talk on forever. The second topic is cutthroat pivoting to fail fast.

how to differentiate between stagnation and the calm before the storm and turning crisis into opportunities, which requires you to be optimistic, which is a double-edged sword. I know, but it's very, very important for growth rather than reacting and spiraling, ruminating, which are hidden daily costs, whether you talk about it or not. And then the last third, and the last third topic is founder ownership.

Sanjit Singh (04:30.764)
Yeah, that's great point, yeah.

Cee Ng (04:36.326)
usually founders, CEO ownership and accountability. Whoever the one is supposed to be waving the flag. The importance of taking full ownership of outcomes. The number one person who's accountable and transitioning from a corporate mindset to an execution driven experimental approach and a zero to one startup environment. Shall we begin?

Sanjit Singh (04:57.391)
Let's begin. Just the easy stuff you want to talk about. This is just the easy stuff.

Cee Ng (05:04.071)
All right, let's go into the topic of hunting versus farming. So the first question of what's the skill gaps between hunting and farming, especially for founders coming from Fang or just a very large enterprise where there's so many domains and departments who lack cross departmental operational experience, no matter how senior they are. What patterns do you see and how they bridge this gap?

to survive in the startup grind because let's spell it out because they don't know what they don't know. And it's very important to call out these blind spots. And I want us to be as blunt as possible and very direct. No fluff.

Sanjit Singh (05:46.799)
Okay, no fluff, only blunt stuff. so you want to talk about hunting versus farming. Okay, so it's a great topic. It depends a little bit on who you're targeting, how you might think about this. If you're only targeting really small businesses, it may not be a very helpful concept. If you're targeting large enterprises, it's extraordinarily helpful, right? And why is that, right? And so the first thing is,

They are different skill sets and some people believe that you would hire a different kind of personality for both. Right? So what is hunting and what is farming? Okay, so we're generally talking about selling accounts, bringing new customers on board. And so a hunter is one who goes out and gets a new customer that we've never had before. Right? It's, you know, it is hard work.

It's a lot of outreach. know, who's ever doing the outreach could be marketing within the outreach and then sales takes over. Or it could be a combination. Often salespeople are having to do some outreach on their own, even if there's marketing, even if there's inbound leads. And they have to turn leads into customers or do some outreach, get leads, and then turn those leads into customers. So it's a grind. It's a lot of hard work.

And have to be very skilled at winning trust from people and communicating your value proposition to them. Farming, on the other hand, more of the, it's more about the process of taking existing customers that are giving you a certain amount of revenue and then getting those customers to give you more revenue than they're giving you now. And so it's growing existing accounts, right? In a lot of, know, particularly in tech companies,

This is actually not usually done in the sales department. It's usually done in the customer success department, right? Which other industries, there's some industries that don't have customer success. I see it being most prevalent in the tech world. Because at some point, folks in tech realized that customer success is really just, I mean, customer,

Cee Ng (07:51.645)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (07:57.513)
Correct.

Sanjit Singh (08:13.315)
what we usually say customer service, right? That's usually just, well, customer service is more like somebody calls in, they're pissed and we help them not be pissed and go away relatively unscathed. Right, yeah, yeah.

Cee Ng (08:17.065)
account management, yeah.

Cee Ng (08:26.184)
Yeah, they're like Verizon wireless though. But when we're talking about like big tech, we're talking about, were you really talking to another person? It's corporate to corporate and there's a representative.

Sanjit Singh (08:33.647)
You're right. Yeah, so we changed the term from customer service to customer success. And I think it was not a trivial name change. I don't think it was fluff. I don't think it was a sleight of hand or anything. I think we're really trying to communicate the idea of we really want our customers to be successful because when we're selling something technical, like software, in a lot of cases, if we sell software,

customers are only using a small percentage of what it can do. therefore, they're using a fraction of what it can do. Therefore, they're only gonna get a fraction of the KPI movement that they seek. And we don't want that. We want them to be very successful so that we can get more users, increase their spend with us, get the NPS scores higher, get better online reviews, all the things that create the virtuous cycle, right? More referrals.

Cee Ng (09:04.894)
Right.

Sanjit Singh (09:30.959)
testimonials, all of those things are really virtuous for us, right? And so, and most importantly, if you look at the, you know, I would say that if there's one, if I had to say there's one equation that every founder should know, which I'm sure a lot of them do, above all other equations, like one equation to rule them all, yeah, one equation to rule them all, it's LTV over CAC is really, really, really important, right?

Cee Ng (09:52.139)
Let's remind them. Yeah

Sanjit Singh (10:01.099)
LTV, lifetime value of a customer, what is the expected amount of revenue we will get from our average customer over the lifetime of that customer before they churn or whatever, right? And so CAC, as many of us know in the marketing and sales professions and founders is customer acquisition cost. So the question is, what's the ratio? What's the ratio of lifetime value over customer acquisition cost? It's a really important,

ratio for investors because the last time I looked at it, it needed to be at least three. Maybe that's different now. But basically you want that number to be as high as possible. So there's two ways to do that. Increase LTV and decrease cap. Increase lifetime value of a customer, decrease the cost it takes to actually acquire a customer, right? So increasing lifetime value is what a farmer does.

by increasing the amount of revenue we get from a customer and making hunters really, really, really efficient reduces CAC, right? And not just hunters, but marketers and that feed hunters and sales development reps or SDRs that actually the whole, yeah, all of those folks, the whole lot, we add up all their costs in a year and all the new customers we got that year and divide, right? To get the CAC.

Cee Ng (10:58.53)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (11:07.585)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (11:15.585)
demand generation people, Yeah, the whole lot, yeah.

Sanjit Singh (11:28.057)
There's other ways to do it, but we think in a simple terms, right? So we say, well, you know, this is how much we spend on marketing divided by the number of customers we got. It costs us as much per customer, right? So that's what a hunter is. We covered what's a hunter, what's a farmer, why are they important? How do they affect the outcome of a startup, depending on the different roles. And you might find, so we did this thing in business school called

Cee Ng (11:29.571)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (11:45.188)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (11:57.473)
sensitivity analysis, which sounds really fancy, right? But all it is is if you put X amount of effort into, let's say, making hunters more efficient, how much does that affect that ratio? Versus if you put an equal amount of effort or investment or time into making farmers better at what they do, how much does that affect LTV? And how much therefore does it affect the ratio?

Cee Ng (12:14.116)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (12:27.841)
And so you could start to figure out, well, let's just say that you're in an industry where it's fairly easy to expand a customer size and it's much harder to get a new customer. It's probably worth your time to make sure you optimize that first, that you spend more time there. You still continue to do what you do on the new acquisition side, new customer acquisition, but you definitely want to put your time and money into growing those customers because it's such, if...

it's such easy money, you can, let's say you could triple a customer size. That's like getting two new customers, and it costs you generally a lot less. So farming is really important. But again, it's usually not done through, some companies will split it into salespeople that are hunters and salespeople that are farmers. But in tech, it's usually salespeople are hunters, and customer success people are farmers. So does that all make sense?

Cee Ng (13:02.029)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (13:24.367)
Okay, hold on. Yes. And I want us to go in and really define what new customers can mean. Cause I feel like, you know, this, this word, everyone knows what new customers are, but in less, I want us to visualize the environment because especially how everything is like in relationship sales and networking and everything, people have built a network. Maybe they haven't, but new customers.

can really mean when you're a hunter, you're in the fricking jungle. And that means that it may not be someone you know. It can be, but it doesn't, it's not always necessarily. And that's why that outreach is really important, how to qualify someone. And if they're not qualified, if you can't qualify them in five minutes, they're out there in the back of the queue because you want to be able to serve people that sees that, shoot, they have, you know, a solution to my problem and their.

they're in the market, they're out there in the jungle waving their flag, like, I need help! I need that rope, you know, to help me get down from the tree! And you're like, I'm here! I see you! And so, but what the jungle is rather than, know, whereas in Enterprise or if you're especially from Fang...

Sanjit Singh (14:21.154)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (14:38.787)
You're not really in the jungle. You are in a very interconnected commerce hub. You're in a ecosystem where there's a lot inbound happening. There's a lot of structure already in place. It's a concrete playground in effect. And so when you're farming, I mean, there's opportunities and goals left, right and center all around you that you're probably just like, I just want to go home and

Sanjit Singh (14:51.96)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (15:00.913)
do something else. But like there is, but there is, that is a very different. So, and the different skill gap that you have to be used to and really grow thick skin of not just rejections, but also being like, this is not what I'm used to. I'm so used to getting new customers this way and they don't realize that was farming. And then really active mindset of feeling like they're in the jungle that they're actually going hunting. So can you kind of talk a little bit more about that new customer approach? So

Sanjit Singh (15:30.679)
Sure.

Cee Ng (15:30.704)
kind of removing some of that mindset. Cause really it's a lot of mindset stuff about money.

Sanjit Singh (15:33.176)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. yeah, couple of things, sure. So a couple of things. So you mentioned FAANG a couple of times. If somebody doesn't know what FAANG is, it's the heart of scalers. You want to say Facebook, Amazon, is it Netflix? And Google? I can't remember what it stands for, but basically if you're from a big tech company, it's what you meant by FAANG, right? Yeah, so if you're from a big company, this is a thing we talk about. Apple.

Cee Ng (15:42.108)
Mm-hmm

Cee Ng (15:48.061)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (15:52.551)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (15:58.61)
Yes.

Cee Ng (16:02.035)
Apple. Sorry. I was like, what is the other A? Yes, apple. Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (16:05.075)
F, yeah, Facebook, Apple, right, yeah. So if you're from a big company, I was just talking to my friends last night that we went out and had beers and we're all startup guys. And we're talking about how people who come in from big companies and try to do startups or succeed in doing startups, it is definitely an adjustment. mean, from a big company you think, well, they're just doing this thing.

Cee Ng (16:18.162)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (16:34.339)
They're just building a product and I build product. No, no, no, it's very, very different. Usually in a big company, you're doing something much narrower focus. In a startup, you have to do everything, even things like sales and marketing, which may be completely foreign to you, but you have to do it all. You have to do fundraising, right? There's so many things, you have to wear so many hats and a lot of them will be unfamiliar to you and you have to build skills in those things to be successful. And of course, sales and marketing is one of them.

When you, if you've been in a big company and you've been a farmer, right, growing revenue, and now you come, you do a startup, now you have to learn some hunting skills too, it's very, very different. And some, again, some argue that you may not be able to because there are different kinds of people. I think you can learn skills in farming and hunting, but you know, it's a mentality difference. The other thing I want to point out is, so that's big versus small, big company versus startup.

Cee Ng (17:31.465)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (17:33.039)
The other distinction I want to make is the distinction between early customers, because you can do a whole lot of wacky things to get early customers. And that's great. I mean, my attitude is I don't care how we get early customers, let's just get them, right? But after you get early customers and maybe you get a round of funding, before you get to the next round, you have to do something that is very different and can be very difficult.

Cee Ng (17:48.725)
Yes! Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (18:01.849)
You have to create a repeatable, scalable, predictable sales growth model because your early customers may have been, and I think this is great way to do it, is you take your ideal customer, whatever they look like, you get something like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you put in the filters for without ideal customers, and you click first connections, and you say, okay, I'm gonna talk to first connections I have. That's easy, right? You reach out to them, they're perfect.

Cee Ng (18:17.216)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (18:30.831)
ideal customers potentially. And then you talk to them and you try to get them to become customers. After that, you uncheck first connections and you check second connections. Then you ask your friends for intros, your first connections, you ask them for intros to the second connections that are ideal customers. This is a really good way of getting early customers. It's not, I mean, it's repeatable and scalable only to a certain point, right? So it's really not a good long-term strategy, but who cares, right?

when you don't have early customers and you need them, it's a great way to sort of go from the warmest possible leads to next warmest. And then after you're out of second connections, then you really do have to know something about sales and marketing. Because now you have to do a scalable thing. Yeah.

Cee Ng (19:16.277)
I love that.

Yeah, and what you're saying is like, whoever's listening right now and you're like, I have I haven't done that, that means that you just haven't exhausted that option one. And two, it's I want to double click on what you're saying about.

These founders who are having a hard time with sales and marketing, that it is their kind of first time skill set in a way, they...

When you are surrounded by certain people, friends and family, your first investors, your advisors, your network that gave you the sale, let's say an early on, like I want to double click on like the scalable part of like the other side of like unscalable so people can see what the difference is. Cause it may sound so, that's so easy Sanjansi to make things scale.

But like let's take what the picture really is Unscalable means that you had a blue J in your circle that had a great amount of connections and they would be they were able to get that sale for whatever that reason was great now you have that metric but then you have to do actually the business side of it to make it repeatable in the sense of like is someone gonna buy your product is someone going to also be your customer and if that person who brought in that customer or create that relationship

Sanjit Singh (20:21.559)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (20:34.478)
That's right, yeah.

Cee Ng (20:43.069)
that per something happens. You know, and I'm not saying like a huge crazy, you know, tragedy kind of situation, but like anything could happen that they are just not with the company anymore.

What are you going to do? And so while they're still there, like you should be talking about it with them or that they are able to somehow video record what they're doing, what their tactics are in the fact of like how they can, you know, share what is happening that they saw in the product or just something. But me to say that that one customer that came on board or even the second or third or fourth or fifth.

Sanjit Singh (21:18.979)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (21:20.441)
may not be what you need to actually make that scalable thing happen. even though you have a few customers on, you have revenue coming in, you, that's when you should be doubling down. That is not when you're like sitting back and be like, ha ha, you know, we're going to cruise by kind of thing. Like that's when you should be working even harder. No.

Sanjit Singh (21:42.475)
No, absolutely. In fact, when you're let's say pre-seed or seed round, the expectations are relatively low compared to A round, B round and beyond. And the expectations go up dramatically with each round. And so when you have used some of the tactics we talked about, whether it's using LinkedIn or passing out flyers or calling your friends and family and seeing who they know,

Cee Ng (21:49.337)
Yes.

Sanjit Singh (22:12.303)
Who cares? Great. All those are great to get early customers. But usually when you get around and you have some early customers and you have validation, the round that you get is to scale. They want to see scale. So this is how I work. I like to work backwards. I say, okay, usually the first question I ask a founder that I'm coaching or even if it's a customer of mine, I say, when's your next round? So we just got around funding.

We're planning on the next round and usually average is about 18 months, right? I said, okay, what metrics, so let's say they're going for an A round at 18 months. What metrics do investors expect from you? I don't know. Well, go talk to some investors and talk to some people that, yeah, talk, or maybe if you're an incubator, some of the mentors in incubators happen to be investors or VCs or whatever. Find out from the horse's mouth, what kind of metrics do I really need?

based on my industry, whether I'm B2C or B2B or whatever. And you say, okay, these are the metrics I need. Then you say, essentially, I know what I need to do between now and then. I need to get this many customers, assuming the average contract value of this much per customer per year, whatever. So then I get to this MRR or this many customers or this many downloads or users or daily active users, whatever the metric is, right? It varies. And so then the question is,

Cee Ng (23:24.038)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (23:41.177)
Can you really use the passing out flyers or do LinkedIn second connections? Can you really use that to get to that? Usually the answer is no. The answer is no, I have to actually build an engine that can create scale. And that is where you need, I divide it into three areas. There are three general areas that can get you there. Business development, marketing, and sales.

Cee Ng (24:09.499)
Yep.

Sanjit Singh (24:10.285)
different animals and you probably don't need necessarily all of them, but you may need two of them. You may need all three. If you're B to C, you won't need sales, right? But you may use business development and you will certainly need marketing, right? If you're scaling. If you're B to B to enterprise, you will absolutely need sales, right? So it really depends on what you're selling. Business development is essentially the idea that we can

Cee Ng (24:22.461)
Mm-hmm.

Cee Ng (24:26.587)
Yes.

Cee Ng (24:33.5)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (24:40.302)
The attractive thing about business development for startups is startups are highly resource constrained. Business development is the process of can we find partners that already have tons and tons of customers, the kind we want, and do some kind of deal with them where they will either, you know, they will market to or basically bring you customers and then you pay them a percentage. Yeah, yeah, it's a shared revenue stream that you create.

Cee Ng (25:01.682)
And that's unlocking partnership revenue streams.

Sanjit Singh (25:10.741)
And it's great for startups because startups don't have the muscle usually and the amount of money they need to really market to that kind of an audience. And it's great for the big company who's got a lot of customers, who usually doesn't have super exciting technology. They're probably a little stagnant. They're always looking for something fresh to upsell to their customers or whatever, right? So that's a natural partnership. It's fraught with...

potential issues that could go south, so you do need to think through some things. But on balance, it's a really good thing to think about, right? And a lot of people don't think about that. Marketing is the process of putting a message out to a large audience at scale, and then you're getting a rather small percentage back as leads, right? Potential customers, prospective customers, prospects, right? And then sales is

Cee Ng (25:59.336)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (26:05.411)
What happens when that lead comes in? How do we take that from lead to customer? And that is what sales is. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean a salesperson. You can automate that, and you actually want to automate leads being converted into customers. If you can automate it, and it works well, automate it by all means. You have to automate it. If your ACV is less than 3K,

you almost certainly have to automate it because you don't have the unit economics to actually support salespeople. Yeah.

Cee Ng (26:41.269)
Okay, here we go. Okay, yes, because if a founder and CEO were able to actually really determine what their time is and worth and value every single

And they look at the unit economics and they're like, okay, how many events am I going to? How many of these sales calls am I doing? All this kind of stuff and really figuring out where their time is and then looking at it and looking at the whole picture, the financial picture and being like, what should I actually be doing with the capacity that I have, the resources I have, how I am enabled, who am I backed with?

you know, in a way that how we all leveraging each other in this partnership unlock revenue stream kind of stuff. You know, what seasons do I have to be, you know, maybe it's not a long term partnership kind of thing. Maybe it's just a season that something, you know, like there's some kind of technology partnership that could happen in the marketplace. But I think it's the unit economics that they don't look at. And this isn't like a incredible fancy spreadsheet at all.

Sanjit Singh (27:48.238)
No, it's not. It's really, you don't even need a spreadsheet. It's unit economics are what do we make on this customer? What do we charge a customer in a year? That's your annual revenue. And how much is it? Is it more than 3K or less than 3K? That'll give you a clue. It's not necessarily the only thing to look at, but it gives you a clue as to whether you should even think about salespeople. Sales is by far the most expensive, generally the most expensive of the three.

Cee Ng (27:57.558)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (28:17.699)
because it's so labor intensive. That's why you don't do it at scale. You can't do it at scale. You need marketing to do things at scale, or you need business development to do things at scale for you. But when leads come in, particularly an enterprise lead that's contemplating a million dollar software purchase, marketing is certainly not gonna cut it. You have to have salespeople there.

Cee Ng (28:20.503)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (28:44.12)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (28:46.434)
That's a complex sale, multiple buyers, long sales cycle, high dollar ticket, and so you have to have sales in that case. So multiple touch points, yeah, yeah, many buyers. You have to have your shit together. But it can be incredibly rewarding, because you can get a big sale, sometimes you can expand that sale, and so on. And there's even strategies about

Cee Ng (28:56.343)
multiple touch points, multiple stakeholders. Like you gotta get your shit together. Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (29:15.545)
how much to hunt and how much to farm of that big. Like we determined at one of my clients, I said we were selling to universities and we realized that $10,000, if you're selling above that, the number of people they need to sign off on it and the number of hoops they got to jump through, it goes up dramatically. If we start under 10K, it's a much easier sale.

Cee Ng (29:25.751)
Mm-hmm.

Sanjit Singh (29:45.474)
we said we're gonna start under 10K and then we're gonna expand. We actually have a name for that, land and expand. But it's not just land and expand, we actually chose to specifically get a lower land so that we could get the expand as much easier once you get the land. But some folks go into universities trying to sell a super expensive product, maybe they have to, but if you're trying to sell a really high ticket item, you're just gonna have such a longer sales cycle.

Cee Ng (30:10.371)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (30:14.592)
If you have the opportunity, which we did, get under 10K and then expand. It's a way smarter strategy.

Cee Ng (30:21.722)
And this goes to the next thing of like, what's the real cost of failing to treat every customer like it's your first or your last? Because in that way, you know, let's say you have the customer in and then you're selling to them again and again, which is the farming part of it, but you're increasing that LTV. It might not be completely upfront, like how you want with an enterprise sale. that could be a lot of monies, but it can, and it can help so much, but like, how can you be like, all right, what?

What is the plan of how I can keep on offering and do above and beyond to be able to,

Cee Ng (31:02.085)
Because you never know what's going to happen with networking or marketing, right? You never know what's going to happen with referrals. You never know how much more if they win, if they are growing, you are going to be growing too. software, if they're winning and they are increasing jobs on their side, that's more users and licenses, you know, or, know, it's just like your their win is your win. So if you actually help solve their solution. Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (31:24.003)
Yeah, their success is your success, yeah.

Cee Ng (31:28.966)
So how can you, what do you think is the real cost though that when, and let me just do one specific example here, like in my real life, we had a massive, I mean, my agency life, a massive, domestic, sorry, health company. Everyone knows this brand, this fortune. Anyways, they know who it is. And that was our bread and butter. Then,

I was also signed to another account for a massive, massive pharma company and it was a shiny object because it had such great potential. Like literally it was like a like multi-million dollar kind of account situation. What happened at the end? And I was basically badgering, we gotta be farming!

The first account because they signed on with us first so we had every single freaking line of business that we're already working on but we weren't nurturing the relationship and everything we're just doing things because it was okay we already had the jobs and everything but if we just put

Sanjit Singh (32:20.479)
huh.

Cee Ng (32:32.969)
10 % of our time and for the leadership and creatives and everyone and for the digital team and the whole entire tech crew to be like, hey, we need to create solutions that are innovative, then we would have gotten so much more because of that existing relationship. And then, yeah, but not even knowing the future of the other one, which they crashed basically. my God.

Sanjit Singh (32:49.003)
It sounds like it, yeah.

Cee Ng (32:56.008)
And so like that is the real life example of if you do not pay attention to the customers that you have right now, literally the one that you have signed the contract with right now and they're existing, they're paying you the invoice next, like in this month, like you are freaking missing out. So anyways, what's your point of view if the real cost of failing to treat your customer like it's your first or your last, wrap up there. Sorry, I went off.

Sanjit Singh (33:16.867)
Well, no, it's great because you, it's a great point. Well, I like the enthusiasm. It comes from a real life example. I can hear your frustration. And it's good for people to hear what kind of frustration mode it put you in because they ignored these important fundamentals, right? I mean, your customers have to be happy.

Cee Ng (33:27.782)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (33:42.375)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (33:45.578)
and they have to be successful with your product. And if they are, there's so many rewards. You ask them for referrals, you ask them for a video testimonial, you ask them for a written case study. These help you sell new customers that are similar to them. And not only that, just the sheer idea that we could have turned that health customer into 5X the revenue with 10 % of our effort, it's a no brainer.

Cee Ng (34:02.109)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (34:15.075)
Right? And do we know that ahead of time? No. But I mean, you have to start experimenting with these things in order to figure that out. Right? Like, which growth methods should I use? You know, there's a book called Traction by Justin Mares where he's like, you know, write all the growth methods down, discuss, pick the top two or three that you really think could be good growth methods for you. Try them.

Cee Ng (34:15.506)
Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (34:42.606)
And then you just keep doing that and keep trying things until something works. And then you start doubling down, tripling down on what works. In that case, if I was with you in that company and I said, hey, why don't we do what C is saying? Why don't we spend, let's just invest 10 % of our time on this customer. We'll put the rest on the other prospect and let's see what happens. And after let's say two months, we would have realized that

my gosh, we make so much more money. We're making so much more money with 10 % of our time than we are with 90 % of our time that it then it becomes a no brainer. Right? So I think people have to experiment. have to be free to experiment. They're, you know, founders have to let their marketers and salespeople experiment. And then, but you know, monitor the experiments, have a dashboard and get the data, figure out what's working, what's not. Hey, you know what?

Cee Ng (35:36.5)
DALA! Get the fu-

Sanjit Singh (35:42.07)
We've spent, I was in a meeting with a client, said, okay, we tried this. How much did we spend on it? 6K, what did we get return? 150K. I'm like, okay, do you guys think that's worth doing more of? Yes, we do. I said, I think so too. And had they actually sat down and wrote it down? No, but they understood that this was a good exercise for us to do. And then things start becoming really clear.

Cee Ng (36:12.52)
Yeah. And it's just, it's when people are chasing shiny logos and then it's like they put all their time there and neglecting the current retained and anchor customers who believe in them first. And especially if they're early stage as well, especially if they, know, even in early station, mind you, even for bigger enterprises, it could also mean a new team. It could be the same mature company, but new team.

It can feel different. And, anyways, it's the true gold mines that's going to help them to keep the lights on, to understand, to re-evaluate what bread and butter actually means. So we don't have to go through stupid ass re-org conversations that you can mitigate in the first place. One, and then also be able to chase shinier logos, you know, with a more robust team.

Sanjit Singh (37:01.294)
There's that frustration again. Yeah, but you know, other thing that helps, know, again, keeping it simple, you don't need fancy software. You use Excel, put all your customers in a spreadsheet, put how much revenue they give you, and always be thinking the 80-20 rule, right? In general, 80 % of your customers, or sorry, 20 % of your customers are gonna give you 80 % of your revenue. That is where you need to make sure you put, they are the golden egg.

You gotta protect them, you gotta try to grow them, if it makes sense. And don't ever let them be upset for too long, right? You gotta fix stuff for them because like you said, that's your bread and butter. 80 % of revenue, I'd call that bread and butter, yeah, for sure.

Cee Ng (37:45.739)
Yeah, and just show them that you care. Like, my gosh. And that will allow you to not, you know, leave, stop leaving money on the table and balance that farming and hunting mode. Sanj, this was a fire conversation. We didn't even get through the-

Sanjit Singh (37:48.386)
Show me care, yeah.

Sanjit Singh (38:02.168)
was fun. I loved your frustration.

Cee Ng (38:09.552)
I'm just like, my gosh, time, we are at the time. We're just going to do it again. So look, thank you so much for coming on and being able to share this and talk about standards as well and the takeaways for people to, know, grab a beer tonight and like just do the math real quick. You know, it doesn't take a whole week. You know, just sit down like you said, you know, it's not.

Sanjit Singh (38:11.419)
that's what we're gonna have to do it again then. Yeah. Yeah.

Sanjit Singh (38:30.595)
Yeah.

Cee Ng (38:33.123)
Fancy ass frejgy, you know need a fancy ass software like how I chat GPT to go through the formula that son just just told you earlier in this podcast, you know, but your numbers in I love it son. Thank you for your time

Sanjit Singh (38:41.592)
Do it during the first two beers, because it gets harder after that.

Sanjit Singh (38:50.808)
Thanks, C. Thanks for having

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