Burn The Playbook

Burning GTM Myths with The Big Book of Braindumps | Richard Blundell - Founder of Vencha

• Digital Rebels Consulting

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Summary

In this episode of Burn the Playbook, Marc Crosby interviews Richard Blundell, a SaaS sales and go-to-market expert with over 20 years of experience. They discuss Richard's journey as an author and consultant, the importance of understanding customer needs, and the common pitfalls founders face in scaling their businesses. Richard emphasizes the significance of empathy in sales, the necessity of revisiting foundational business strategies, and the critical role of differentiation in a crowded market. The conversation also touches on effective pitching strategies and concludes with actionable tips for founders to enhance their sales approach.

Richard Blundell is a SaaS Sales and Go to Market expert with over two decades of experience scaling and selling B2B software companies as Founder, CRO and CEO. He’s helped dozens of software Founders grow from base product to recurring revenue, helping guide them to beyond $1 million ARR and the goal of investment readiness. As Founder of both Vencha and the Vencha Scale Academy, Richard delivers practical, proven Go-to-Market strategies to early-stage software businesses. His approach cuts through the noise with clarity, structure, and deep real-world insight using lessons learned from the trenches. Richard is an author, creator and most recently lectured his Go-to-Market Playbook at the ESCP Business School in London

Links From Show

New book 'The Big Book of Braindumps' link: https://book-of-braindumps.com/
1st book 'The Go to Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders' link: https://amzn.eu/d/etGSkGq
The Vencha Scale Academy - https://academy.vencha.team/

Takeaways

Do not obsess about your branding; focus on your customer.
Introverts excel in sales due to their listening skills.
Churn is a critical metric for business health.
AI can enhance outreach but shouldn't replace genuine connection.
Differentiation is key in a competitive market.
Keep messaging simple for better customer understanding.
Practice your sales pitches to build confidence.
Regularly revisit your business fundamentals and mission.
Empathy is essential in understanding customer pain points.
Engage directly with customers to build relationships.


Sound bites

"Keep it incredibly simple to differentiate."
"Be bright, be brief, be gone."
"Churn is the most important metric you should monitor."


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Richard Blundell and His Expertise
09:04 Common Growth Strategies and Mistakes
14:25 The Power of Introverts in Sales
19:29 Team Alignment and Customer-Centric Practices
29:01 Revisiting Business Fundamentals Regularly
37:57 Simplicity in Messaging for Success
55:46 Actionable Insights: Engaging with Customers

Keywords

SaaS, sales strategies, go-to-market, business fundamentals, growth strategies, introverts in sales, customer understanding, differentiation, pitching, business tips

Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:01.046)
Welcome in, I'm Mark Crosby and this is Burn the Playbook. My special guest today is Richard Blundell. As a SaaS sales and go-to-market expert with more than 20 years of experience scaling B2B software companies as a founder, CRO, and CEO, he's helped dozens of founders grow from first product to recurring revenue, guiding many beyond the 1 million ARR mark and towards investment readiness. As a founder of Venture and Venture Scale Academy,

Richard delivers practical proven strategies that cut through the noise with clarity, structure and hard won lessons from the trenches. He's also an author, creator and most recently taught his go to market playbook at ESCP Business School in London. Welcome Richard.

Richard Blundell (00:41.324)
Well, thank you for having me and can I say how much I've enjoyed your podcast series? I subscribe and also watch all the clips on LinkedIn to get the nuggets that I've missed. yeah, great pleasure to be here.

Digital Rebels Consulting (00:53.984)
Awesome. Thank you so much for that. And I've also enjoyed reading your big book of brain dumps. I have it right here. I think it's a fantastic book. I'm curious since this is not your first book, what went into the writing of this one and how does that differ from the first one?

Richard Blundell (01:10.168)
Well, the first book is the Go to Market handbook for B2B SaaS leaders. I've got a copy here. And that is out and out all about Go to Market. It's a handbook for early stage technical founders. And it specifically focuses on Go to Market. I think it's very challenging for technical founders. And that could be in SaaS or in any market, to be honest. It could be an engineer that started a business.

you know, engineering and technical skills come very naturally to these people and go to market is a completely alien area. And you raise, you range in thoughts from, my product's so good, I won't need to sell it. It'll just fly off the shelves and customers will come queuing through to people who are sort of consciously incompetent and say, if I'm going to scale my business, I need to find some advice. I need to find some guidance.

I was just thinking about a LinkedIn post I think you made yesterday about the value of consultants and how they can come in and make a transformational difference to an organization as a consultant rather than being full-time on your payroll. And I think the comment I made on your post was, if you're going to climb up Mount Everest, wouldn't it be a good idea to take someone with you who's been up there before? Because it's a treacherous journey. And if you step in the wrong places, you end up...

exiting stage left. The air gets thin, it's incredibly tiring, you're carrying an enormous weight. So the difference between book one and book two to answer your question, book one, the go to market handbook for B2B SaaS leaders was out and out about how to stack the odds in your favor of successfully launching and going to market with your product.

The latest book, the big book of brain dumps, is a collection of 70 LinkedIn infographics that we've posted over the last 18 months that have had something like 25 million views across LinkedIn. I mean, it's been an extraordinary success story. It started off with Chris, my business partner, Chris Tottman, who is a founding partner at Notion Capital, which is a big European VC firm based in London, posting one infographic.

Richard Blundell (03:33.742)
And it started from him seeing a problem that founders were doing again and again. And rather than write a thousand words, he thought he'd create a picture and then comment on the picture. And it got some ridiculous number of likes and reposts. And he thought, well, I'll do another one. And I think sort of, you know, one turned into 10, 10 turned into 50. I think there's something like 250 different one page infographics that help.

founders or frankly, I mean we talk about this in a software world, but it's any founder in terms of how to prepare your business when you're first getting going, how to prototype and pre-prototype your products, how to test your thesis, that your thesis works, right the way into how to raise capital, how to build a pitch deck, who to approach, which sort of investor to approach, how to approach them, how to behave, how to negotiate.

right the way through to how to run your business, lead your business, and ultimately at the end we've put in some sales and go to market stuff. So it's a collection of 70 incredibly well viewed LinkedIn infographics, each with a three or four page commentary, which allows us more space to explain the infographic than the few words we've used on LinkedIn.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:55.7)
Yeah, if nothing else, if you just looked at the infographics, I just love how they're, how they're written, how they're laid out. They're just very practical as far as just the words that are used in them. And I think, you you mentioned founders and software businesses. I know that this is a targeted to, you know, founder led software businesses, but I think you could probably apply a lot of these principles to, you know, any business, any startup, even in larger enterprises.

And I'm looking at page three here, as far as just the hierarchy of wanting to start up and just some of these just basic fundamental principles of a business. I don't think that, you know, boardrooms are actually having these sorts of conversations because I think that as you grow, you probably lose your mission, your vision, your strategy, your goals and what the roadmap looks like. mean, just the simple questions of what are we trying to achieve? What are our plan and how to achieve it? How do we measure progress? I mean, these are problems that, you know, large companies with a hundred thousand people are trying to solve, let alone.

you know, a startup or founder led business. So I think that there's a place for this particular book, whether it's in universities or whether that's in business, large businesses, small business, I think you can take and apply these principles across the, you know, the far large landscape of business in general. What are your thoughts on that as far as just how these apply to other businesses?

Richard Blundell (06:10.238)
Well, two things really. you know, one of the surprising things about the Brain Dump series is that, they initially came out in no particular order. I mean, there was scattergun all over the place. And the first job that I had was to sit down and, you know, print off a hundred of these, literally on the floor and put them into some kind of chronological order that makes sense. The two things I'd say is the first is that we've been amazed by how many consultants, academics,

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:17.781)
Hmm.

Richard Blundell (06:37.086)
universities have got in contact with us saying, please, can we have a high-res version of this? And of course, we will provide that because I think, you know, it covers such a view of starting up, know, starting scaling, growing up a business, any business that we've been surprised by how many people actually use it in different talks and different walks of life. I've had people buy this book, you have nothing to do with software and they're buying it because the fundamentals.

are the same whatever business you're setting out. And the second point I'd make is we wanted to create something which cemented in business fundamentals. The feeling being that, you know, starting your own business is scary. It really is terrifying. Running your own payroll. Well, let's go back a step. Leaving your job. Deciding that you're going to go away from your warm office, your regular income.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:27.86)
Hmm.

Richard Blundell (07:35.276)
your pension, your life cover, your health insurance. Sorry, these may not translate across the US, but hopefully you know what I mean. They're all called something different. But you give that up, you go home and tell your partner, your family that that's what you're going to do. And that's a brave thing in the first place. And if you've never done it before, there isn't really a handbook that takes you right back to fundamental basics.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:42.887)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (08:01.794)
that start, as you say, with the very first infographic on page three called, you know, the fundamentals of starting a business. And the fundamentals are, you know, have a vision, have a mission. You are going to need something to go back to on the bad days and you're going to have a lot of bad days. You're going to have far more bad days than you're going to have good days before you get real traction. So you've got to keep your eyes focused on that vision, on that mission and

Equally well, return to it, you know, once a quarter, go back to it. What were we trying to do? How do you know where you are in life if you haven't got a map? We, you know, we use Google Maps every day of the week. We use GPS every day of the week. We're familiar with maps telling us where we are and how long it's going to take us to where we want to get to. In business, they don't exist. So going back to your vision, your mission, your values, that the fundamental parts of your business.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:33.011)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (09:00.16)
is a great starting point and that's what we try to do at the start of the book.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:04.596)
Yeah, no, that's great. I love this book and there's a lot of lessons to be learned here and you've probably seen a lot of mistakes made along the years as far as just guiding founders and businesses. And obviously the main goal for a lot of these businesses is growth. And so what are some of the most common growth strategies that you've seen leaders try to attempt that just don't work and you think that they should get rid of them?

Richard Blundell (09:29.774)
think if I had one that I would come out with straight out the gate, it's from the minute you start your business, please do not obsess about yourself, about your branding, about the color palettes of your logo. Your only obsession, your only obsession has to be to see the world through the eyes of your buying persona, through the eyes of your customer. Do not live a day in your life, live a day in the life.

of the person that you're trying to convince to buy your software, to buy your service, to buy your architectural drawings, to buy your bricks, your mortar, whatever it is you're selling, do not, do not think of the world and look at the world as to what makes you happy and what you think is cool and what you think is clever. Think only from the world of that person and through the eyeballs of that person who you are trying to convince to part with money.

part with reputation, take a risk, make a jump, and to invest in you and your vision and in your dream. You need to think about what they're thinking about on the way to work. You need to think about what is their 3 a.m. stare at the ceiling, slightly sweaty voice track, mind track that's going through their head that you believe that they can solve. They have a family, they have children, they have a car, they have a mortgage.

they are ambitious, they want to get promoted, they want to get a pay rise, they want to get their bonus. How do they get their bonus? By hitting the objectives that are set to them by their boss or their CEO. How can what you do help them hit one of those objectives and therefore help pay for the family holiday or help pay to get the kids through school or help get the kids through college? How can what you do help them get promoted?

How can what you do stop them getting fired? How can what you do means they get a pat on the back from their boss, from their peers for saying, do you know what? Our process was broken and you fixed it. Our process was lacking AI and you've brought AI into our business. Our business was full of Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints and Word documents, which is frankly early nineties software that still persists today. We're all...

Richard Blundell (11:52.078)
probably old enough to remember Windows 95 and before. We still use the same software 30 years on. It's not been replaced. And we were drowning in it and businesses are drowning in PowerPoints and version one and version two. So the biggest mistake I see founders falling into is thinking that they are incredibly clever and they fill their websites through acronyms and deep tech and

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:54.577)
Hehehe.

Richard Blundell (12:21.89)
The odds are pretty high that the person that you're selling to will never use the software or the service that you are selling themselves or buy it for the benefit of the business, for the benefit of their team. But the principal reason they are buying your service, the only main reason they're buying your service or your solution or your software or whatever product you've got is will myself buying this product make me look better?

Might I get head hunted? Might I look better in my business? Might I be rewarded for my efficiency? So I would recommend that early stage founders, anyone running a business, literally spends many days in the life of shadowing, following around your buying personas and just understanding what their life is like, what it's like to sit through your 13th one-to-one that day.

when they're telling you that the service is rubbish, that the process is poor, that the company is frowning at you, and to think about how they're going to hit their bonus, how they're going to hit their target, and how they're going to do well with whatever you've got to do. So look through their eyes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:37.509)
Yeah, I think putting yourself in your customer's shoes is something that I've typically always done in all the commercial roles that I've ever had. talk about it frequently in my consulting businesses. I think that's just the way to position your solutions more effectively. And it becomes less selling and more consultive and it becomes more of a partnership. I think when you have that mentality and I think part of that mentality, at least for me, I think it comes from, and I heard you say this on another podcast, that you might be an introvert.

And I heard that and I said, well, you know, that's funny because I am too. And I think that's actually made me a better salesperson because I'm always taking my time. I'm always thinking, I'm always listening instead of talking more. and I think just effectively that has made me a better salesperson. And so would you say that introverts are better salespeople than extroverts?

Richard Blundell (14:26.606)
100%. I mean, there was a time 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when, you know, shiny suited salespeople would turn up in their fast car doing donuts in the car park and would walk in and, you know, I'm trying not to think of Wolf of Wall Street, but I mean, that is the archetypal salesperson of the 80s and the 90s. And it was the same in Thatcher's Britain as it was in Reagan's America. And those days have gone.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:44.783)
You

Richard Blundell (14:56.694)
And if people don't realize that and they still think there's a place for that, I think they're very wrong. think, you know, introverts are deep listeners. I tell you what introverts are brilliant at, that extroverts aren't, is deep empathy, deep understanding. And, you know, I was doing some mentoring for one of the founders that I worked with the other day and we were talking about the seven habits of highly affected people. We were talking about, you know, win-win or no deal, which is, you know, habit number four.

and how it has to be a win-win to make the deal work. But it reminded me of a phrase that Stephen Covey uses, which is people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that is equally true. If you are setting up your own business to sell into a particular vertical and you are not an expert on that field and in that vertical, you are going to look very foolish very, very quickly. You need to be able to empathize with your buying persona.

deeply and not just find out what it is that's frustrated, what it is that's broken in terms of process or what's just not happening well for that organization. What is the manifestation of that broken process? Is it, know, everyone's complaining, everyone's moaning, we can't get our products to market fast enough, we can't build quick enough, we can't drill oil quick enough, we can't... What is the manifestation? And yeah, sure, there's time and there's money and we've all done ROI courses and...

try and establish that along the way. But the real winners are those introverts that can show deep knowledge, deep empathy, deep understanding, and particularly drill down on personal frustration. You know, how does that frustration, the heartache, that what is broken causes that you can fix? You can take all of this away from them.

and, and the more you understand that, the more you learn, learn that the faster any deal will go down through your sales pipeline. The less of that you have, you'll hear people say at the end of sales pitches, do you know what? love his product. just can't stand the guy. You know, I'm not buying from him. I don't care. I love it. It can be bought from somebody else or is there another product like that? the greatest salespeople I've ever seen in the software world and the technology world. And I'm not sure how this computes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:07.278)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:12.045)
You

Richard Blundell (17:21.07)
to your world Mark is what we call sales engineers. You know, the technical people who sit between the IT team and the sales team who are very heavily involved in the installation, who sit very close to the user, who are very clever at once the software or the program or whatever it is you're selling has gone live. Take time to make sure they're using it and that it integrates properly and they're getting value and the dashboard works. They are the very best salespeople because you know what? They're not selling.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:22.318)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:50.947)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (17:50.958)
They're not selling and yet they are. They're, know.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:55.677)
Yeah. No, I was just going to say that that does translate very well into kind of all the different roles that I've had coming from the manufacturing space and always relying on technical people and engineers and chemists in order to get their perspective. And I think that that's part of what it is, is just not thinking that you have all the answers, no matter what seat you sit in, whether you're a CEO or you're a sales rep or you're a customer service person, always understand that there's value in talking to other people within your business, getting different perspectives. I think.

Without that, you're never going to be able to have a clear picture of what it looks like to stay in your customer's shoes if you only have one viewpoint. And so typically even on sales calls or presentations, I'm typically bringing in, not just myself, I'll bring in the technical people, I'll bring in the engineers, I'll bring in the customer service people, anybody who has a perspective or an opinion that can help at least shape the vision of what we're trying to achieve together in a partnership and providing solutions. I want those people in the room, especially since, and I some people, like you said before, just have this perception that salespeople

are not, know, genuine as far as their approach and they're just trying to sell because they want to commission. And if I bring other people in the room and they have another opinion and they're not tied to a commission, so to speak, I think it just speaks volumes as, Hey, we're here all together to try to help you solve your problem. It's mutually beneficial. but I think you have to have that team involvement. I think team alignment as well. It's one thing I think to probably get like a founder or a CEO to understand that you need to put yourself in your customer's shoes. But how do you do that across an entire team?

entire organization, what do you typically teach as far as your practices and what's in the book?

Richard Blundell (19:30.69)
Well, I think war gaming is really important. mean, there's something that comes out of the book, both the first book, the go to market handbook for B2B SaaS leaders and, you know, how to grow, run and raise money for your, for your software business. You know, two things come out. One is, you know, testing your thesis before you go into a customer, particularly if you're an early stage business, you know, you have truths that you hold to be, you think are correct, but you need to prove for certain.

that your thesis is right. Why is it in software, unlike say pharmaceuticals or manufacturing, we don't actually market test what we do before we go and tell a customer what's wrong with their business and how you can fix it. And you could be completely wrong. The second thing we don't do is practice. When I was, I don't know, 12 years old, 15 years old, I went to play golf with my dad, a local golf course in the UK, Wellingarden City, just north of London.

And we turned up and there was a kid in a bunker with a bucket of balls. Now it's quite rare that you see, you see people on driving ranges with bucket with balls. It was just unusual. We walked past him and had this great big, you know, rack of, rack of balls and he was in the bunker and he was hitting bunker shots, you know, over and over and over again. And we played around, I'm going to guess it was four hours. I mean, it must have been, you know, maybe longer. And we came out and the guy's still in the bunker, right? Still hitting balls and it started raining. And he was now hitting bunker shots out of, you know, light sand, heavy sand.

you know, all kinds of different things. Anyway, we walked in and we're chatting to the pro, you know, thanks for round, blah, blah, blah. So by the way, guy's incredible out there. He's been, he must be the best bunker player in the world. And the pro said, no, he's not, but he wants to be. Anyway, remember his name and his name was Nick Faldo. And, know, Nick Faldo hit a thousand golf balls a day down a driving range. And that's why he won six majors till his hands bled. Right. And that's because he practiced.

And yet we'll go into a sales environment with a team that turns up at different times, dressed differently, with different opinions, different points. Probably don't even know who we're meeting. Know nothing about the backstory of the person we're meeting. Haven't read their LinkedIn profile, hasn't read their blogs, hasn't deeply researched what's important to them, doesn't know whether they've got kids or whether they're a Cowboys fan. I'm trying to make this as American as I can. Or a Manchester United fan or whatever. Some kind of hook.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:51.208)
Hahaha

Mm.

Richard Blundell (21:55.138)
to get the conversation started, to get over that awkward bit when you first walk in. So war game, know, what are we going to say here? You have to win their trust, right? And trust is something that takes about a year to build and about 10 seconds to lose. And when you've lost it, it's gone. You know, don't over promise and then under the deliver. If someone says, does your product do this, this and this? If it doesn't say no.

The biggest word I try and get early stage founders, any founder to say, any executive in any business is no more often because otherwise you end up with a product set and a process set that gets bigger and bigger and wider and wider and wider and your business can't support it. And then you end up letting your customer down. You lose your customer, you get bad reviews and you're out the door. So, you know, that meeting when you meet them, be honest, be true. When it doesn't do something, say no, it doesn't do that.

the moment. It's a great idea. We might do it in later iteration, but you have to have to build that trust and you have to practice the meeting before you go into it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:58.848)
How do you manage that for a founder led business when the goal is to make more money and typically most businesses they're in the business to make money and sell, sell, sell. And I think it's very tempting to just probably sell your product or whatever it is, whatever industry it is to as many people as possible. How do you get people to...

understand that that's probably not a good strategy and maybe, you know, niching down is probably a more appropriate one. How do you balance that as far as just making those sales and then making the right sales to the right ICP?

Richard Blundell (23:31.264)
Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the difference between startup and grow up really. I think, you know, when I was a founder, we were just so grateful that anyone said yes, you know, in the early days. You remember you're starting somewhere from scratch. You've seen an idea. By the way, there's probably three million founders in waiting out there right now who are working as an IT, you know, someone in the IT team for a big organization who are spending their evenings and their weekends working on.

some kind of agentic model AI to do this or do that or do the other, know, waiting for their moment when they feel it's right to take their genius to market. And I don't know whether you've ever written a book or painted a picture or sung a song or written a poem, that creator anxiety you have, you know, in the early days, I've seen it in art galleries where people are being so rude about the art and yet you know the artist is in the room. You know, it's, it's, you know, watch Amadeus when

the abuse that Mozart gets from Sally Arian from the court, you know, and he's his genius has created this music and it's heartbreaking, right? But in the early days, you're so pleased when someone says yes, and you're running along a figurative line of machine guns waiting for where you're not going to get repelled and find the gap. And then you run through that and hope you're going the right way. So it's very, very common for early stage founders to end up with 12, 15 different customers with 12 or 15 different use cases because everybody

You just don't care what it is. You just want someone to say yes and to recognize your skill and your genius. Then your mind turns to, and I hope this crosses over to your world, Mark. Your mind turns to as a founder, I now need to hire a salesperson because if I hire a salesperson and a marketing person, I'll make more sales. Completely incorrect because hiring a sales team and a marketing team too early,

You know, and it's, you've absolutely not only validated your, your product pain fit, it's been absolutely validated. You need to have a whole card of delighted customers, 12, 15 customers who love your software, use your software, are raving about it on dark social who are, you know, slacking other friends, other industry people, WhatsApping saying, have you worked with these guys? They're absolutely brilliant. You know, only then when you've had all of that.

Richard Blundell (25:47.118)
and you've got a very, very niche and tight, what we call uncomfortably narrow market map and uncomfortably narrow value proposition should you then consider, even begin considering about hiring a sales team. But my world is littered with founders who have hired highly expensive sales and marketing teams too early. They failed. They get fired straight out the door. know, job number one, get rid of the sales team.

Actually, the problem normally is upstream of that in the core value proposition that is not understandable enough to an 11 year old. Steve Jobs was right. You know, I a mobile phone that, as he say, seven year old could pick up and use. That's still right in every product. And yet how many times do we look at websites and have a completely inexplicable value proposition on the homepage of a website? So, you know, everyone wants to grow. Everybody wants to

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:42.442)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (26:46.51)
you know, make more sales because they believe that makes more value. How many companies do we know went off like an absolute rocket for 12 months, you know, taking on customers that were just churning waiting. And then they get to a point where they plateau and everybody realizes the product doesn't work or it doesn't integrate with their CRM or it doesn't, you know, work with their processes. And then they all churn, they all give out the business crashes. Everybody loses their money and goes home. So

To answer your question, the reason we get niche is you want 15, 20, 25 delighted customers who are coming out with comments like, God, I love what you've done getting our products to market quicker. What else do you do? What else can you fix around here? That is the ultimate buying signal. It's a salesman's dream, right? I'd like more of what you've got. I'd like more of you. Can you white label this so we can sell it to our partners and our customers?

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:28.649)
Hmm?

Richard Blundell (27:40.758)
So just be careful, do not scale too quickly. Don't go and raise a million dollars and then spend half of it on an overpaid sales and marketing team until you've absolutely validated your product and you've got genuine product pain fit.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:57.769)
Yeah, that's a well said. And I think that, uh, your comments around, uh, hiring a sales person or a sales team too early, uh, make a lot of sense just because you're probably not doing it for the right reasons. The same thing, why you might, uh, get rid of 20 % of your sales team or hire a marketing person or get rid of the full marketing team or get rid of your customer experience team, whatever the ebb and flow is as far as hiring or getting rid of, uh, sales marketing and support systems, it's probably for the wrong reasons.

like you said, it starts at the top, think. And that's also why I keep looking back at page three, as far as the hierarchy of a startup is that, you know, what are we trying to achieve? What are, how are we going to measure that? And all those things that go back to the foundation of the business, I think, you know, and probably this is the same way with outer led businesses is that you get far along and then you forgot what we are in it for, who are we trying to, to help, what problems are we solving? And I think, as you said already, I mean, how often should those conversations be had, whether you're.

year one, year five, or year 10, how often should you revisit these sorts of just foundational strategies in a business, whether you're 10 people or 100,000 people?

Richard Blundell (29:05.004)
Well, at the very latest, quarterly. I mean, if you can do it monthly, do it monthly. But it's amazing when we go on and start our mentorship programs with the founders and the businesses that we work with. And we work with early stage founders. But I think our real value comes in that sort of plateauing north of a million dollars of ARR through and above. work with Motorway, are a car.

company, a car auction site in the UK, a genuine unicorn in the UK. But to answer your question, courtly, mean, one of the questions we always say to the founders is when did you decide to be shaped and molded by your customers, not by your original vision? What was the original vision? And they'll say it was this, this and this. And you say, well, why are you now over here doing what your customer wants? Because your customer will want to bend what you do.

to suit their needs, not to suit your needs, because at the end of the day, they're the ones paying. And remember, you know, the buying persona is doing this because they want their life to be better and they want, you know, people to recognize the risk they took and the change they brought to their organization. And it's incredibly common that people wander off the reservation, you know, at times and start being something different than they originally wanted to do. And that's why you need to write it down at the start of your journey.

Ritz Carlton's mission statement is, ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. One of the greatest mission statements of all time, because what they're saying is, we expect nice people to come to our hotels. We are for that mid to top market range. It says it straight out the gate. You have to be a lady or a gentleman to come. we will be, our service will be fantastic. So anything that doesn't fall into that route, shall we sell cheap rooms? No. Shall we hire?

just anybody with no experience to work in customer services. No, because our mission statement is to be ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen. So, you know, every quarter just check in and say, guys, are we going the way that we wanted to do? And so often when we unpack their value problem, we unpack their story. And I'm sure you do this with the companies you work with. You'll say, what? Why have you not done this, this and this? And they'll say to you, you know, we used to do that. That's that was the original idea, actually.

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:20.144)
You

Richard Blundell (31:20.622)
You did it for a bit and then it didn't work. And actually we had three customers who asked us to do this and now we're doing this, even though it only works for those three customers, not the 300 customers that your original idea worked for. So there's a gravitational pull that customers will take you on. They'll ask you to build more product, more service, more stuff that's only for them. Build it once, sell it many times. You build and configure. You don't write 18 versions of your product.

one for each each company. It's that's our product. It does that today. Does it do this? No, it does that, that and that. Will it do this? It might do down the line, but we need more than you as a customer to tell us to do that. we'd like to help pay and design that. Great. But today this is what it does and this is what we will put on the earth to do.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:09.147)
How important do you think in this process is differentiation and identifying what that looks like for your product, your service, the people as compared to everyone else that's in the market? Obviously there's probably a lot of similar products or whatever it is. How do you frame differentiation in your discussions?

Richard Blundell (32:28.686)
It's critically important, particularly in my world, because obviously AI has emerged in the last 18 months, two years. It's been around longer than that. But in most people's minds, I mean, there probably aren't many people in the world that don't have ChatGPT on their mobile now as an app, probably on the home page, the home screen of their phone. everybody, I mean, this is a bigger bow wave than the original dot com boom. And that was ridiculous.

you know, when you had a situation where AOL was worth more than British Airways, you know, with no assets, no customers, no, you know, and I remember thinking back there and the dot-com bubble that burst 18 months, 24 months after it all went mad. And we're seeing the same again with AI. And, you know, this is a world that we are all still trying to figure out where it begins, where's the middle and where's the end.

and what role do humans have in AI if AI is doing so much. And sadly, it's very difficult to differentiate in AI because I go on calls with people with, did one this morning, you with a deck and they're really excited and they know it all and they're going to conquer the world and they're going to do 3 million of ARR in their first 12 months. And, you know, I don't want to be the one to sort of pop the balloon, but

Lots of other people are doing it the same and they're better funded and they raised a billion quid. It's very common in my world to hear founders say, yeah, but my competitors raised 100 million at five billion valuation. Why can't I? Well, because they got there first, because they got there quicker. But I tell you what they did do, and this is what all winners do, is they keep it incredibly simple. And messaging is simple.

They are not a Swiss Army knife. I don't know if you have those in America, but these sort of utility knives where, know, one minute you're a knife for the next minute, you're a magnifying glass and then you're tweezers and then you're the tool that gets stones out of a horse's hoof. And then you're a nail file and then you're a saw and you end up with this hodgepodge of products that no one really knows what you are. The winners said, I'm a knife. You know, that's what and I'm only a knife and I don't do anything else.

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:23.781)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (34:50.03)
And so if you want to differentiate, I would start with your message. I would start with passing your website to your 12 year old niece or nephew and asking them to explain back to you what it is your business does. And if they can't, you've got a problem. And if they can, because the Instagram age, the TikTok age means, I mean, it used to have like 38 seconds, the luxury of 38 seconds for someone. People used to go to websites and have a look, you know,

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:05.733)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (35:19.726)
they'd have a mosey around and they'd hit those little landing pages and all that little hamburger, know, gone, right? Instagram, boom, bang, bang, bang, bang. And you get, think probably seven seconds or something like that. A goldfish has a memory span of eight seconds. So humans have now become goldfish. So if you want to differentiate and you want people to stop and stare, you have to say something

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:25.623)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:39.013)
Mm-hmm. Goldfish.

Richard Blundell (35:48.834)
that makes the person you're trying to attract go, that's me, I've got that problem. And they're brilliant at it in business to consumer. How much money is spent on business to consumer marketing and messaging? Billions and billions of pounds. For whatever reason, business to business has fallen way behind the curve on this. I don't know if it's a lack of money or lack of inspiration.

or lack of creativity. But if I wanted to sell a teeth whitening service or a teeth straightening service, I would have a photograph of Tom Cruise's teeth before he had his teeth done and a picture of Tom Cruise smiling now. And I would need to say nothing else. If I want to sell weight training, gym memberships or weight loss programs, I have a fat man and I have a thin man and it's before and after.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:34.276)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (36:44.374)
And that picture paints a thousand words. Now, if I'm a fat man, I'm going to stop and go, that's me. I want to be a thin man. It's more complex than that because I suggest the messaging you've got for fat to, you know, okay, is a different set of messaging than you've got from okay to 3 % fat. And that's where it's clever, right? You need a different message set. But why this is the challenge with business to business sales and marketing. We need to adopt the pain visualization.

We need a picture that paints a thousand words of what is broken and what is not working in their organization. So you don't have to use a thousand words. So when someone lands on your website, it's words of one syllable. This is who we're for. This is what we do. And down here are a bunch of people who are just like you, who've done what you did and have had these results. And you're like, that's exactly what I want to do.

I want to find out more. And then they'll stop and they'll hit the learn more button or the whatever. If they're on a mobile or they'll click on the call me. So I think your original question was about differentiated differentiation. think I probably won't wandered off. But if you want to differentiate, my thesis is the simplest, the simple people will win. The people who keep it very, very simple will win.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:03.606)
Exactly. And, I imagine the same has to translate to like your pitch decks, your PowerPoints and in the same mentality, as far as just the first slide or two, they better be spot on just like your website or your landing page. So people get it and they don't start, you know, drifting off to their phone and, know, seeing what's on Instagram.

Richard Blundell (38:19.308)
Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? That's a really good point, Mark, which is you were talking about meetings earlier and bringing your team in. Don't fall into the trap of getting technical in the meeting when you've got the buying persona in the room. They couldn't give a monkey's they don't really care how it works. Actually, they don't care how you do it. You know, imagine them as walking into a car showroom. You know, they want to see how it looks, how it makes them feel.

how they feel driving it, what their neighbors are gonna say, what their peers are gonna say, how jealous other people in their company are gonna be that now they've got this new Wizzo solution and how long as it's affordable and it installs quickly and it's fast to value, they're the ones that gonna get the credit and get promoted. If you end up drifting off into the technology that sits behind it or the machine that drives the machine that drives the thing, you've lost that buying persona. They don't care.

They're probably full of what we call red energy, which is be bright, be brief and be gone. That is what should be running through your head. All they care about is what's in it for me and what's in it for my team and what's in it for my company. If you want to have the technical meeting, and you must because you've got to bring in the CTO along the way or anybody technical on the way, that is a meeting for a different room and a different time. And you can let them out geek each other on terminology.

but get the right, and by the way, if you're in a investor meeting or you're in a sales meeting and they're looking at anybody else but you, and particularly if they're looking at their mobile phone, don't forget to pick up your wooden spoon on the way out because that's what you're going home with. Find out from publishers how much they spend on the front cover of a book and the blurb on the back. It's millions.

millions, they'd say months doing it because they know that is what drags you in. How long do shopkeepers spend getting the front of their shops looking incredible to pull you in and their messaging? You have one slide in a pitch deck. It's the front slide. That's it. They're seeing hundreds of these and unless you say this is the boat, this is lovable, this is the boat you have to be on, we're going to get 100 million and this is how we're going to do it.

Richard Blundell (40:39.394)
and people think the market's big enough, it goes over their shoulder and into the bin. Exactly the same with PowerPoints. Hello, this is our company and this is your company and this is your logo and this is who's in the room and this is where they went to school and this is what, just why am I here? Be bright, be brief, be wrong. You are not getting your products to market fast enough and here is why. And here's how I can help you. And here's three of your competitors who already bought my software who are getting it to market.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:52.578)
you

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:56.864)
Mm.

Richard Blundell (41:08.446)
three weeks quicker than you are and they're making this much profit and the person that bought it just got promoted and is now in his yacht in Hawaii having a lovely time. Bang, you know, that simple.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:19.266)
That's awesome. And that's how every pitch should go. And people who are listening to this, if you're developing a PowerPoint presentation for whoever, whatever business, just replay that and think about, uh, you know, what the, what the slider developing right now means to the person that's going to be listening to it. Um, let's pivot to our next segment called burn it or build it, which is our rapid fire lightning round. And so I'm going to ask you about 10 questions. Just tell me, uh, burn it or build it and give me a brief reason why, but these are like typically hot.

takes in sales and marketing. So we'll start with the first one that AI replaces all cold outreach.

Richard Blundell (42:02.552)
Build it. Well, I think cold outreach doesn't work anymore. So that's burn it. People don't read emails, know, so it's burn it. If AI can help you navigate through the complex forest of your defined target customers, which is also in the book, we should look at that and get you to them quicker and help you with research, then great. But I don't think cold outreach works, Paul, so anymore.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:08.343)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Blundell (42:30.648)
I mean, when was the last time you answered an email? Did you answer a LinkedIn in-mail? I mean, only if it's incredibly relevant and you feel the person has researched you and known you and taken the time to understand you, might you do that. If I was to do it, I'd hand write them a letter and post it to them because you take the time to understand them. So AI, build it because it's coming and there's some amazing tools out there. Cold Outreach.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:50.252)
Yes.

Richard Blundell (42:59.42)
I'm not sure that works anymore.

Digital Rebels Consulting (43:01.91)
I agree. So kind of it depends. So, but learn it, but don't overuse it potentially. Number two, churn is the most important metric that you should monitor.

Richard Blundell (43:04.066)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Richard Blundell (43:14.35)
Correct. Probably the most important one, closely followed by customer acquisition cost. How much is it costing you per customer? Closely followed by lifetime value. So how much are you spending on your sales team, your marketing team, your marketing budget? How much does it cost you to get in? In our world, it's often a monthly recurring revenue number or it's paid annually. But you sold a 20,000 pound piece of software.

or 50,000 pounds piece of software to a customer, but it's cost you 80,000 pounds to acquire that software, you aren't going to be, acquire that customer, you aren't going to be around very long. But to go back to the question, churn is the most important metric because if people are buying your product and they are bidding it, or they ghost you after three months, six months, nine months, then you've got real problems like a bucket of water with holes in it. And that's why the first person I would hire would never be a salesperson in my business.

the first person I would hire would be a CS person, customer services person, because I want them to get intimate with those customers, make sure they're using it, make sure they're finding it valuable, make sure it works, the integration works. It's all working seamlessly because we cannot have churn. It's the biggest killer of businesses of where they're at. That CS person will then go back to marketing with some great messages, because they've heard it from the horse's mouth about what works and what doesn't.

and tell the sales team, it like this or explain it like this, because this is how they understand it. So yes, churn is the most important metric. Build it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (44:48.544)
To add on to that is some churn good churn

Richard Blundell (44:52.758)
Yes, particularly when you get to that point after 12 or 18 months. mean, a lot of the greatest companies in the world get rid of the bottom 20 % of their clients at the end of a year, end of two years. know, companies when they're scaling end up with this long tail of customers that aren't paying them very much, but expect absolute volumes out of the customer services team and support team. And I think there does come a time when you have to say, look, whilst you were

I mean, you obviously don't say this to the customer, but while you were a great customer when we first started, you we can't support you anymore. And what you'll do is you'll put the prices up or the support costs up and they may well go elsewhere. So there is a point where churn is valuable, but it certainly isn't in the first 12 months of your life as a business, first couple of years. And if they do churn, you have to find out why. You really do. It doesn't work. It didn't integrate. It didn't do the job that we did because...

It'll very often happen when you have 10 different customers with 10 different use cases, because it'll work for seven of them and it won't work for three. You know, it's good learning. Take it on the chin. You failed. You didn't support them. It didn't do what you promised them in that sales call. Learn from it. You know, change your value prop, change your business and move on.

Digital Rebels Consulting (46:08.17)
Pay attention to turn is the lesson of the day. building go to market for AI. So that could be a variety of different meanings. But, what are your thoughts on that? Just as far as.

Richard Blundell (46:09.496)
Yep. Yep.

Richard Blundell (46:18.958)
100 % build it, 100 % build it. There are too many AI founders out there. don't know, similar war stories who believe that product will sell itself, who believe they're so clever that actually all a customer needs to do is to see their product and reach for their credit card. The reality is that's nonsense. You know, I keep hearing that song. Everybody's talking at me. I can't hear a word they're saying because I just see so much AI doing so many different things.

And if you think your customers aren't bored of hearing it, number two, scared of it, genuinely scared of AI and resistant to potentially resistant to doing it. Number three, remember anybody you're selling AI to is sitting there in that meeting thinking, does this going to replace me and my job? You know, am I out of a job now? Number four, will I get it through particularly in the US? Will I get it through my ethics team? So you have to with AI double, triple, quadruple down

on your go-to-market messaging and make sure that it obsesses about the 3 a.m. visceral customer pain that we talked about at the start of the podcast. You've got eight seconds, so come up with 10 words that's gonna make your buyer stop and go, I've got that problem, I wanna find out more. So yeah, please, please, please don't build anything in any business and expect it to fly off the shelves. It doesn't happen. Read Steve Jobs' book, read...

Bill Gates's book, read all of them. They they prototyped dozens of times and failed and failed again. It's no surprise. We only started writing two books after we had failed so spectacularly on the business. That's where we did our learning. It's very easy to captain a winning team. It's very difficult to do this when things aren't going right. So just spend money, find consultants that can help you with how to build an effective go to market strategy. It's vital.

It's the ball game. It's the whole ball game. Without it, you're done.

Digital Rebels Consulting (48:18.537)
Sometimes the best product doesn't always win.

Richard Blundell (48:20.493)
Yes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (48:22.143)
buyer intent metrics. see this a lot on, LinkedIn and a variety of other platforms that are out there, um, burning or build it.

Richard Blundell (48:30.094)
I'd say building because I still think it has its place. mean, any insight is better than none. you know, buyer intent, any, you know, I for fear of repeating myself, it always amazes me how little research we do on our target customers and how we expect to, know, if you happen to have gone to the same university or the same school or live in the same town or sports, same football team or, or do anything that is gold. When you're in a meeting, you've got some way of IDing with the person, particularly if you're kind of

extroverted in this sense but introverted you know in the rest of your life. So anything that gives you any help in finding out what's going through that customer's mind in terms of buyer intent. Has it been done to death a little bit? Do we still believe it? I'm not sure. I think my point would be anything that gives you insight. You know is it is it too spooky to go on the Instagram profile of your buyer persona? Is it too spooky to go on the Facebook profile?

Now, on one hand, yeah, right? But on the other hand, no. If they've got two kids and they like hiking and they've got pictures of them up the Appalachians and that's what you like, you know, bring in a map of the top 10 Appalachian trails as a gift and just say, don't know, you know, I know you like hiking. I thought you might like this. Bring them a gift that's relevant to them. You know, have something to say, have something that crosses that chasm of awkwardness from, hello, how are you? How's the weather? You know, it's even harder in Britain, right? Because we say reserve.

Digital Rebels Consulting (49:57.448)
Mm.

Richard Blundell (49:58.2)
to actually having a conversation. yeah, yeah. It's very slow.

Digital Rebels Consulting (50:03.038)
Yeah, it helps just to show them that you took a little bit of time, that you know them a little bit. Like you said, it brings that gap. Number five, and I'm gonna let you take this however you want to, LinkedIn, burn it or build it.

Richard Blundell (50:16.93)
I'm very worried about LinkedIn. Yeah, they keep changing their algorithms. They keep changing and thinking, I don't know where you found them, but they keep, they need to go and read page three of the book and remember what they were there for. Now, if they're going to be a recruitment company, cool, go and be a recruitment company and a place to put your CVs and that's what you're going to be, right? If you are going to reward people who truly engage, LinkedIn is a social network.

Right. So it's no different from Facebook or Instagram. It's the social network of business. Therefore, their algorithm responds positively to individuals saying stuff on on LinkedIn that used to be educational, interesting, you know, informative, valuable. Now, I don't know, because I don't even get the post of someone whose posts I like every day and comment on every day anymore. Just no longer ranks me as that.

So, let me put it this way, if you're going all in on your go-to-market on LinkedIn, you've got a really big problem because it's a moving ship, it's a moving goalpost that keep moving. And I think people are starting to get very frustrated with it. And I think it's open to disruption and I can't wait for someone to come in and disrupt it. I think they've had it their own way for too long. Now, just for saying this,

And because you're quite right, it will post this on LinkedIn or wherever. I may well have my account suspended. It happened. we have had our accounts suspended for liking too many posts. Surely that's the point of a social network. But yeah, I'm very worried about LinkedIn. Would I burn it? No. Would I build my business on it? No, not now. Not at the moment.

Digital Rebels Consulting (51:46.109)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (51:50.523)
Really?

Digital Rebels Consulting (51:56.197)
Interesting.

Digital Rebels Consulting (52:07.869)
Okay, good thoughts, good comments there. like that. Somewhere in between. I'm a little concerned myself. Gated content, this applies typically I think to websites, but a variety of other places. You gotta put an email address and some information before you get the information. Burn that or build it.

Richard Blundell (52:12.782)
Yeah.

Richard Blundell (52:26.39)
I burn it. And I know that's not popular. I think that's a 10 year old strategy. I think people expect information quicker than that. There's not a lot they can't learn on chat GPT. You can put it, they can put your website in. If your website's rubbish, by the way, and it hasn't got any information on it, and no one can learn anything, guess what? When it comes into chat GPT, they're not going to learn anything. So fill it for the stuff that you can learn it. Stopping people getting to your genius.

in any way I don't like personally. I've got a business partner who loves it. I hate it. now that Google uses a GPT rather than Google, No one looks down the page anymore, right? So the Google model is gone. All you look at are the words at the top, right? It's a summary. So now that's happened, why would you stop anybody getting to your genius? I would rather, if your content is great and it's eye-catching and people come to it,

Digital Rebels Consulting (53:07.004)
Right

Richard Blundell (53:23.234)
Why would you stop anybody getting to it? I would make it as open. I want chat GBG to pick me up. I want them to find my genius and come to me and say, you know, I want to find out more. So I'm burn it, I'm afraid.

Digital Rebels Consulting (53:34.396)
agreed, burn it. Fake it till you make it as a founder strategy.

Richard Blundell (53:39.96)
Burn it. Absolutely burn it. mean, fake it till you make it. You know, you've got to be genuine. If that's what fake it till you make it means. If fake it means mislead people, over promise, flag it, spin it, lie to people. You know, you've got to be authentic. You've got to be real. You know, they will be able to smell it on you if you're authentic. Your customers...

This is why founders hiring sales teams too early or any business been hiring a sales team too early is often fatal because your customers want to see your vision. They want, you know, they're buying off you actually. It's your vision, your idea. How can you possibly commute that onto somebody else? It's very, very different. Be authentic. If you haven't got something that's going to leave a dent in the universe, don't fake it. Build something that's going to leave a dent in the universe. Message it brilliantly.

Be genuine, be authentic, be the real deal and I think you'll get the returns in spades.

Digital Rebels Consulting (54:43.996)
And the last one kind of a wild card business cards in 2025.

Richard Blundell (54:50.734)
That's brilliant. I haven't seen one. I haven't got one. I've never seen one. Then probably in the bottom of your email. By the way, spam blockers are now so effective that most of what you send on cold outreach and email will go to spam. They're just really clever and they do it for a reason. Most serious executives don't even open their own email at work anymore. They'll have somebody else opening it. That's probably where the business card sits. I don't think people care who you are.

Digital Rebels Consulting (54:54.118)
See you soon.

Digital Rebels Consulting (55:02.844)
Mm.

Richard Blundell (55:19.918)
until you can convince them that you can help change their life and make them a better business, but in a better person. So yeah, burn it sadly. mean, keep your LinkedIn profile. If you're serious about business, make sure your Instagram and your Facebook profiles match your LinkedIn profile. So it's not about putting pictures of granny on there. can just do, you can use WhatsApp for that, right? You don't need Facebook anymore. If you want to send pictures of granny, send it on WhatsApp, you know. But yeah, it doesn't have a place in the modern world that I can see.

Digital Rebels Consulting (55:49.412)
Gotcha. Okay. Let's finish up with one final thought. Leave listeners who lead a sales and marketing team, founders, CEOs with one actionable tip that they can implement straight away to make an impact this week.

Richard Blundell (56:04.866)
Book three appointments for the next three days with your target customers and go and spend those three days with them, with their team in particular. Find the champion, find the aggravator who's tired of this broken process and wants it fixed and wants it changed. Sorry, you can probably hear the church bells in the background. That's very English for you, isn't it? And empathize and...

deeply understand the world of your customer, not your world. People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. And the reason why that's a brilliant tip is that none of your competitors will be doing it. None of them. So if you do it, they will sit around and say, wow, do you know what? That guy got off his backside, came down to see us, spent some time with us. I'd like to spend some time with him now in return.

Digital Rebels Consulting (56:49.934)
That is a fantastic tip.

Digital Rebels Consulting (57:02.116)
Perfect. Love that tip. And the church bells is our indication that we are at the end of the Burn It or Build It segment and Burn the Playbook podcast. Thank you, Richard, for joining us. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Richard Blundell (57:14.478)
Very welcome. Thanks for having me on.

Digital Rebels Consulting (57:16.858)
Cheers.