‘Strong opinions, weakly held’: How humility, execution and iteration power a world-class sales function
The story of Definely is one of the great UK tech industry triumphs of the decade (so far). Founded in 2017 by Magic Circle lawyers, Nnamdi Emelifeonwu and Feargus MacDaeid, the business set out to leverage cutting-edge technology to solve a key pain point for Feargus, who is registered blind.
Through boosting the accessibility of legal documents for people with visual impairments, they uncovered a far wider use-case. Today, Definely’s solution is in high demand with legal practices on both sides of the Atlantic. We led their Series A last year and, earlier this summer, they raised a remarkable $30 million Series B, let by Revaia.
Rhys Hodkinson, Definely’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), is a founding member of the team. From a background in M&A law, he pivoted to the world of B2B SaaS, building the sales function (amongst many other things) that has powered the company’s extraordinary ascent.
Rhys was kind enough to sit down with us and share some of the things he’s learned over the course of Definely’s rapid five-year growth from zero to industry-leading legal tech supremo. Here are some of his key lessons:
Be humble, but move with conviction
There’s a weird balance in the early stages of a start-up: you need to be humble, but you also need to have conviction. If you’re too confident in your vision, and too rigid in where, exactly, you see the company ending up, you can find yourself in trouble. It’s never going to follow the path you think, and it’s never going to be exactly how you visualise it in five years. Holding too tightly to that original vision risks compromising your ability to reach it.
There’s a weird balance in the early stages of a start-up: you need to be humble, but you also need to have conviction. If you’re too confident in your vision, and too rigid in where, exactly, you see the company ending up, you can find yourself in trouble. It’s never going to follow the path you think, and it’s never going to be exactly how you visualise it in five years. Holding too tightly to that original vision risks compromising your ability to reach it.
Having humility, being able to take on new ideas, ask for help, and learn from people who’ve made the journey before you are crucial. But on the other hand, when you’ve taken that information onboard and decided to act, you need to act with conviction.
We’ve always put ourselves behind those decisions, put our resources behind them. The way I think of it is as ‘strong opinions, weakly held.’
Communication is key
When we launched Definely, the founding team was evenly split between trained lawyers and engineers. In the beginning, it was easy to make the assumption that simply having said something meant having communicated, but as we got to know one another better, and started introducing people from different backgrounds, it became clear this wasn’t the case.
The point is there’s a difference between communication and effective communication. It’s easy to assume meaning and comprehension has been shared, but I learned that it’s not only important to communicate something, but to ensure that the way your communication has been interpreted and understood really is what you intended. It means adding depth to the communication, following up, reviewing mock-ups and ensuring that everyone is aligned.
Strategy is nothing without execution
It’s easy to conflate goals with strategy, but the two things aren’t the same. Goals are like a lofty call; strategy is a clear, actionable series of steps about how you’re going to execute, taking into account everything from market conditions to resource limitations and the behaviour of your competition.
The best companies win in execution, not strategy. We got to our growth stage through relentless execution. Strategy might help, but unless you can break it down into clear steps, thinking carefully about implementation, it’s not much use.
Fail for success
There are common challenges every founder faces, but when you actually talk to them you learn that everyone has taken their own, weird, zigzag path to success. What’s important is that you set up for failure from the outset.
Failure is inevitable. You’re going to make mistakes. Acknowledging that, and building it into your process, is a key to success. There’s a saying in the start-up world, ‘do things that don’t scale,’ and it’s true. Very early on, don’t try to build for scale – instead, keep close to your customer. Try things out and see how they react. If you have an idea about something, or a hypothesis – test it. We describe it as having a ‘bias to action’.
With every single one of our processes – from ensuring that deals close on time to engaging with different stakeholders – I can point to a specific instance or anecdote that explains why we do it the way we do. We don’t have any processes that aren’t a result of a mistake or failure – the trick is to keep them small and learn from them.
All our processes that appear seamless today are the result of real friction in the past. Accept it, fail fast and fail in a way that doesn’t blow up the business.
Hiring is underrated
There’s no two ways about it – the ability to attract the right talent is a skill. Learning how to test for aptitude and attitude, finding a reliable way to ensure someone is a good cultural fit, is essential.
When you’re a tiny team, two people who don’t gel with others can have a strong, negative cultural impact on the company – a potentially catastrophic problem when everyone needs to be united under a single banner and motivated by the mission.
It’s important to hire slow. Don’t just do one interview and go off someone’s technical qualifications: follow up, meet them in person. Get to know what motivates them and why they want to work for a start-up; check their references. And if you need to, ask someone else to do an interview, too (such as a backer like Octopus Ventures).
Those early hires define your culture, they interact with your prospects and if they’re not right, they can do a lot of damage which is hard to undo. Reputation is critical for a start-up, so take hiring seriously.
You’re almost certainly not charging enough
When you’re starting out, you’re so desperate for logos that you’ll offer your solution at almost any price. But don’t. Focus on the value you’re bringing to the customer, not just your product and its features. What actual value do you unlock for the business? What does your product mean for their outcomes?
Focus on customer outcomes and price accordingly. The first price points you get with a customer become extremely hard to move away from: you can go from high to low, but the other way around is next to impossible. If you’ve undercharged someone to bring them onboard, they still won’t be paying what they should be three or four years down the line.
Take the time to think about pricing and the value your product brings customers.
Obey Goodhart’s Law
This states that as soon as a metric becomes a target, it stops being a useful metric. People get these two things muddled up. Take revenue.
Everyone treats revenue like a target, but really, it’s a metric. The inputs are, ‘am I consistently delivering a product that drives value to my customers? Does my sales process uncover champions in the organisation? If I’m able to sell the product to customers, am I onboarding them well? Am I helping them power uptake to ensure the value of the product is justified?’
Getting all those things right, incentivising people to pursue the right targets and building a really select sales process, building up business cases to support every assertion you’ve provided the customer regarding the product’s value, leads to revenue.
The revenue, then, is the metric of you, hitting those targets. If you make revenue itself the target, you risk losing sight of the things that underpin a sustainable business.
There are a lot of reasons companies make it to Seed but not Series A – or Series A but not Series B. But often, the underlying reason is because they’ve prioritised the wrong things. They’ve tried to sell a product to anyone who’ll buy it to hit the target of 1 million in revenue, but because they haven’t focussed on the right things to get there, the business isn’t sustainable.
Separating target from metric helps keep the business sustainable.
Don’t get distracted
At the beginning, I wrote about conviction. This means knowing what you’re doing – and why you’re doing it. Lots of people, including customers, will encourage you to build add-ons that reflect something they’ve seen elsewhere in the market, or leverage a new technology for its own sake.
But you shouldn’t. Do those things if, and only if, it ties into your original strategy, vision and conviction. Of course, you should always be solving for problems. But if you find yourself a jack of all trades, you’re likely a master of none – and that puts you in a vulnerable position. In the start-up world, you don’t want to be the General Store. Start-ups solve for depth, they get into niches that aren’t covered elsewhere in the market. Keep that original mission in mind, and don’t get distracted by everyone telling you to be something else.
There’s a big graveyard, full of companies that tried to be everything and found, very quickly, that they had in fact become nothing to everyone.
Back yourself
I started my career as a lawyer – a far cry from Chief Revenue Officer at a B2B SaaS start-up. One of the things I learned? Back yourself. Anyone who’s made a career change has, at some point, felt out of their depth. It’s normal.
Just remember that many of the soft skills you’ve acquired along the way are transferable. Things you’ve done in previous roles will have applications in your new one, even if there’s no direct link. Take law: I used to draft complex share purchase agreements. That meant taking down different data points, listening to client wishes and market conditions, trying to distil things down into very clear messaging. I’d take ambiguity and try to make it simple and easily understood.
All those things have set me up in a very different world, where I have to explain technical things to people without an understanding of them, in a clear and packaged way.
We all sell in some way, even if it’s selling internally, to get a promotion, or selling a new initiative to the business for them to put resource behind. Well, it’s the same skill set: you’re just shifting to sell something to a different end customer.
And remember, no matter how novel your specific solution might be – scaling companies, building sales engines – it’s all been done before. Read deeply and read widely, try things out and if they work, double-down. If they don’t, move on. Octopus Ventures has some great resources; I’m a podcast enthusiast. Be curious and learn the recipe, then adapt it to your specific circumstances.
Ask for help
If you can’t find an answer: ask for it. People have been very good to us on our journey, and now at this stage we try to be as open as we can. People like to help. They know how tough it is, and they can offer feedback. It’s one of the benefits of membership in a community.
Octopus Ventures was very useful, here. Their investors have visibility on a vast range of start-ups, and the challenges they’ve encountered. They’re almost a system of record for all the issues start-ups typically encounter. We could go to them with specific questions: ‘we need to move from a transactional sales engine to a consultative sales engine,’ for example. Chances are, they’d seen it before and could offer great advice, rooted in experience, for how to do it.
The analogy I use for a scaling company is that you enter your Series A like a pirate ship. As you approach your Series B, you need to look like a navy. It’s a complex transformation, and Octopus Ventures helped enormously: they know how to professionalise start-ups.
