Hey folks!

My name is Chris Kranz, and I’ve recently joined The Grafter as Chief Technology Officer. If you’ve been following the story so far, last time we covered a bit about my journey so far and what’s brought me to this point in my career. So let me now explain why I chose to join The Grafter (after they kindly offered for me to join!).

Through-out my career I’ve experienced many of the challenges that are typically faced in growing a start-up:

• General technology adoption and modernisation

• Translating technical features into things people care about

• Building sales plays and strategies that focus on customer value

• Coaching sales teams to focus on the customer and their definition of value

… and many more!

What Rachel and Rhys were already doing for their clients was enviable, but after talking with them I could see where my place could be in the business. Across their clients there is often a need to improve their sales, and a lot of this revolves around the messaging and understanding more about what their customers care about. On top of this was the need for technical leadership and being a trusted advisor. Digital transformation is a bit of a dirty word, but a lot of companies are going through some sort of change that involves technology, however big or small. Sometimes this is simply adopting a particular cloud technology, or some DevOps style automation, or simply streamlining things and making better use of available resources & technology, but sometimes it's also something much bigger.

But just as importantly, this is a great opportunity for me. I get to work with folks that are dedicating themselves to building amazing businesses, and I get to learn a lot along the way. I can recentre myself around the UK start-up community and I’m looking forward to giving back. Rachel is also keenly focused on building a remote first company, and that’s really welcoming to me with a young family that loves to adventure (no doubt you’ll see more of that from me in time!).

Some of the things I’m really looking forward to bringing to The Grafter clients, and the community in general:

Ethical Sales: Less ‘ick’ more human connection

I’m a big supporter of this, but what does it mean beyond some virtue signalling words? In my time working with sales teams, I often came across (often very popular) techniques that revolve around convincing someone to buy something, often to the point of manipulation. Pushing people to buy against our timelines, not theirs (why should someone care about your end of quarter other than that’s when your prices are lowest?). And a few other techniques that when you step back, they give most people the ick! Ethical sales is much more about having a human connection with someone, and the data shows it creates long lasting, meaningful relationships. Sales has a pretty bad reputation, and I want to change that. Sales is essential for the world economy, but also for almost every company out there! At some point we seem to have moved into psychological manipulation and away from just being humans and finding out what people actually need. I think empathy is massively overlooked in relation to this, but that’s probably a whole other topic that I could talk about for hours!

Technology: No need for overwhelm

It’s a big one for me, but then I am the CTO! Technology means different things to different people. Some founders have a great idea, but they aren’t technical and so need some guidelines around the art of the possible, without getting overwhelmed with TLAs and buzzwords. Some founders are deeply technical and they build amazing things, but they struggle to explain what it is their thing actually does beyond the technical widgets and features.

Even though we’re in the midst of an AI buzz (at time of writing anyway), not everything has to be about technology! Some start-ups are all about great consultancy and service offerings, with no technology or SaaS product in sight! Technology might be able to help, but it doesn’t have to be front and centre.

Sales Frameworks: Helping you sustain your good days

One of the big challenges we’ve all experienced is getting new customers. I see this as 2 fold:

First, you’ve got to optimise for what works best. This might be dialling in on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), or refining the discovery questions, or optimising your demos. It all needs to be relevant to your customers, and what they care about.

Closely attached to that is bringing on board new sales people. One of the biggest struggles for sales leaders is the ramp time of new reps. I’ve seen this be as long as 18 months before they are fully ramped and hitting quota, but I’ve also seen this rushed so much that reps left before they got the chance to ramp because the pressure was too high. Having a good solid sales bible and onboarding process is going to help accelerate bringing new people on board, and help optimise your existing reps!

Frameworks sometimes get a bad rep, but really it’s a set of guidelines to help you focus on being the best. Everyone has good days and bad days, and sometimes people just need a gentle nudge in the right direction to get them on track to deliver excellent customer outcomes. This usually fails on an international audience, but I always think of the sales frameworks as the Berocca adverts “You, but on a really good day”.

Transformations: It’s a buzzword in its self

This is one piece of work I’ve been doing for nearly 20 years. I feel like this started with my journey with VMware many moons ago, helping organisations transform their data centres into virtualised powerhouses, and this started that boom into cloud and cloud native computing. Over the years I’ve worked with and helped many organisations adopt virtualisation and cloud, and I’m really happy to be working with clients on this once again. This isn’t just about just moving stuff across (lift and shift), but about properly looking at the estate and driving efficient transformations that are fit for purpose. There’s too many buzzwords (I’ve feel like I’ve overused a few!) and hot air that goes into a lot of this sort of consultancy, but a core part of The Grafter model is working with clients through-out their journey, so we’re not about delivering short term highlights at the cost of long term growth!

Storytelling

I love a good, proper story! But I think a lot of people misunderstand the idea of storytelling in business. Everyone knows a good anecdote, and everyone can share a white paper or case study with you, but not many people can tell a good story. “Good” varies depending on the circumstances and audience, but storytelling really is a game changer for organisations. This is something I want to grow on and I’ve got some fun ideas in this area! One of my first personal initiatives is to start writing some stories for The Grafter website, fictionalised but based on and inspired by real events. Watch this space!

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I’d love to have you follow me on my journey with The Grafter, I’ll continue sharing content on LinkedIn and I hope to be contributing regularly here too. I’d love to hear from you, what sort of things do you want to hear about or learn? What questions have you got, or challenges are you trying to overcome? Feel free to reach out!

Written by Chris Kranz, CTO

Missed part 1 of Chris Kanz joining The Grafter? Head on over to catch up!