Selling by Email Thread

Going deep on selling by email, in a detailed example. Finding out how negotiations worked — at the beginning. Closing deals, baby.

Is the idea of selling by email a bit strange? Like, finding that writing emails with customers could turn into a $10-million business in about 6 months after launching Slack’s paid product? Yeah, looking back, it does sound a bit strange. But at the time it felt perfectly natural. Easy as pie.

Slack Stats Time on an in-office screen, somewhere around February, 2014.

Below is a full thread of the type of email selling we were doing at the time. For this specific thread, that time means between April 14, 2014 and May 2, 2014. So, about a 2 week period when I was in touch with a customer, writing emails to help them upgrade on Slack.

I’m going deep on this topic of selling by email for two reasons. First, because I’ve been asked lots of times for specifics on how we sold Slack and showing an example is just way better than talking about abstract concepts. Second, I see so many examples of selling by email done poorly, and I hope that can improve. So the deep dive is to try to help with both those situations.

But before you click away to something else, perhaps muttering to yourself, “Lucky I don’t have to sell anyone anything by email.” Just reconsider for a second. Do you have to convince people to do anything by email? Perhaps meet you, or donate to a cause, or consider your attachment, or send you some information, or simply reply? Then I’d say you have to do some selling.

And I think the tactics in this post can help. We’re pretty much all selling by email sometimes. So I hope this can prove useful to you!

Context and First Inquiry

The first note in the thread arrived as an inbound inquiry from someone we’ll call “Gordon” who worked as an IT Manager at a midsized technology company. Let’s call the company Oh Goodness. Gordon had been tasked with figuring out Slack for the Oh Goodness team. It was his job.

I’ve included below as many of the relevant details as felt comfortable to include, while also respecting Slack’s intellectual property and Gordon’s privacy. I’ve added in commentary between messages to try to tease out the things happening around the text of the emails. Okay, onwards: to the first inbound message.

Apr 14 13:32

Hello!

I would like to speak with someone in Sales about our account -- we are in the middle of doing a POC, and are ready to move forward with a larger scale deployment. We're looking at 500-1000 users, and have some questions about pricing/features.

Thanks!

-Gordon

Let’s just start out with a bit of honesty: buyers are liars, as the saying goes. Did Gordon have 500-1000 users? Maybe. Eventually. I looked him up on LinkedIn and he was a Director of IT and had been for 5+ years.

First Reply and Call Scheduling

My guess at this stage was that Gordon had purchased software many times before and wanted to fluff his user numbers to see about getting a great price based on volume discounts. We’ll see!

Apr 14 16:27

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for writing in and asking to get the ball rolling on a pricing and features conversation.

To get us started, let me suggest the following 3 times that work for me (all listed in PST):

• Tue, Apr 15 at 11:30 am
• Tue, Apr 15 at 12:30 pm
• Tue, Apr 15 at 4 pm

If none of those work for you, please suggest a time and we'll make it happen. If you have specific feature questions to send along I can also make sure that I have answers on the call. If not, we'll do our best to answer them and can tackle any remaining items with follow up.

Looking forward to connecting and digging into the details!

Best,
James

Here’s how I approached every reply. Sentence 1 is always a thank you to acknowledge them, their continued engagement and anything they may have offered. Anything! If they griped, thank them for their feedback and perspective. If I was slow getting back to them, thank them for their patience. The easiest thing for them to do was nothing. I appreciated them writing to me, so I wanted to call that out.

Then, when trying to get a call scheduled, I always suggested 3 times, with time zones included. I’d research the person writing to me and find what time zone they lived in and quote the adjusted number for them as well if needed. In this case, we were both Pacific, so no need.

I liked to offer 3 options, almost always at different times of different days for flexibility. The key thing though about offering specific times is that it changed their decision from ‘do I want to do this call?’ to ‘what option of these 3 works best for me?’ 95% of the time people chose one of the three times instead of suggesting an alternative.

I used bullets for ease of scanning. I used the minimal number of characters in my abbreviations for day and month to save space but ensure clarity.

I asked for details if Gordon wanted to share them on specific features, with a connection to the benefit to him for sharing them. I asked about features because those are easy for IT folks to talk about. Okay, so how did that work?

Apr 14 17:00

4pm PST works for me.

There are a couple of features we are looking into, mainly relating to SSO/SAML compatibility, and user provisioning/deprovisioning workflows/auditing. Also pricing structures and related features.

Thanks!

Right on! I can learn more about what he’s seeking in terms of features, how he wants to manage his users (costs) and then we get the meat of the call, pricing.

Apr 15 11:32

Hi Gordon,

Excellent. Thanks for sending along the items you wanted to discuss. We'll be sure to cover those and anything else you'd like to cover. I'll send you a calendar invite after this reply.

What's the best phone number or Skype handle to reach you on? I'll be calling from XXX-XXX-XXXX / <username>.

Looking forward to talking!

Best,
James

In my calendar invite I always copied and pasted in the text of the email thread I’d been having with the customer so we could both review the context. I also wanted to share what number I’d be calling from so when he saw it presented it might be familiar.

Times have changed now and I’d do less 1-on-1 calling now and offer up a video conference link, but that’s a subtle change of call mechanics. No big deal.

But wait, this is a problem: Gordon’s a surprise no show!

Apr 15 16:22

Hey Gordon,

It's 4:18 now and we haven't been able to connect for our call – and that's no big deal. Let's reschedule!

I have the following times available:

• Wed, Apr 16 at 11:30 am PST
• Wed, Apr 16 at 1 pm PST
• Wed, Apr 16 at 4 pm PST

If none of those times work for you please suggest a time and we'll sync up. I can call you if you prefer or you can call me on XXX-XXX-XXXX.

Looking forward to talking and getting your proof of concept moving ahead.

Best,
James

I’d always give folks ~15 minutes to be late for a call, then I’d email them to follow up so they could see the time the email was sent. No shows were surprisingly common, maybe 25% of them early on in conversations and much lower on following calls. I had to make sure not to make any assumptions and just keep assuming good intentions from my counterpart. Things happen!

In each case I almost always offered to reschedule with 3 new options that worked for me. I also offered Gordon an option to just call me directly, though I didn’t really want that to happen. So what did happened?

Apr 15 16:25

Hi James,

I'm so sorry! I got pulled away to fight a fire with our Google Docs. Wednesday at 11:30 will work.

Apologies again.

-Gordon

Apr 15 16:30

Hey Gordon,

No problems at all and no need to apologize.

I'll update the calendar invite for tomorrow (Weds) at 11:30 am PST and I'll be available on XXX-XXX-XXXX.

Best,
James

Right, good. We’re on. Let’s do it. He hasn’t specified his Skype username or a number he wants to be called on so I’m offering up my number as the way we’ll connect. I hope he figures that out. And yes, he does.

Call Follow Ups

Just like when I was first Talking with Customers with Stewart, before we had launched a product and were seeking any kind of insight from interviews, I took lots of notes on calls (and, if I’m honest, right after calls finished when the conversation still freshly lingered in my mind).

Those notes proved really fruitful because they formed the basis for call follow ups and created momentum and accountability in our sales process. Like this.

Apr 18 11:50

Hi Gordon,

Nice to talk with you this week and to learn more about how Oh Goodness are using Slack for team communication. I appreciated the time you spent with me and your help to understand the current situation.

From our conversation I had follow ups for you about SSO / SAML for user provisioning / deprovisioning as well as details on a how we can make pricing work for your 850 - 1000 users at the combined Oh Goodness-NewCo team.

SSO / SAML

Rolling our a SAML-compatible SSO feature is one of the top priorities right now for Slack development and our team is working hard on it. That said, I don't have a specific date for its delivery and, as a rule, we don't provide specific ETAs on features because it inevitably leads to heartache.

In the meantime, for provisioning new accounts, you have already enabled email signup in your Slack team admin settings so anyone with an @OhGoodness.com or @newco.com email address can create an account.

I'm sorry this is a less than ideal solution and doesn't cover deprovisioning, but we're working hard to roll out the SAML-compatible SSO feature so it's a temporary fix. I also mentioned we have a more advanced suite of user management features coming, and here's a sneak preview of the User API spec, if you're interested.

Pricing

As I heard you say on the call, Oh Goodness are interested in pricing for Slack's Standard plan on an annual agreement. You're currently using a combination of Hipchat and Skype and you want to bring everyone onto Slack as a common platform.

It's a good time to do this because your new organization is going through a lot of change. Harmonizing on a common platform for team communication makes sense right now. So let's see if we can make this work.

Slack's starting price for the Standard plan on an annual agreement is $80 / user / year. So with your 850 users the math looks like this:

• 850 users * $80 / user = $68,000 / year (or $6.67 / user / month)

We understand the need to ramp up your Slack usage and to help you get started, so I propose we add $12,000 of credits to your Slack account. Then the math for an annual agreement for Slack's Standard plan looks like this:

• 850 users * $80 / user - $12,000 = $56,000 (or $5.49 / user / month)

You also mentioned that you would be adding users throughout the year covered by the annual agreement. So I want also propose that if you get to 1,000 users during the annual agreement, we'll add an additional $2,000 to your account as a thank you for using Slack and to help make the growth easier to manage.

Lastly, I want to point out that as the number of active users in your account changes over time, Slack will regularly check, recalculate, then credit or charge your account (on a pro-rated basis) so you're always only paying for active users. (This is often for the finance folks who you give an account to but don't use it — we won't charge you for them.)

When you upgrade to a paid tier, you’ll only be charged for accounts that are currently active. Any changes to the number of active users during your billing cycle will be result in a pro-rated credit or charge, just as they to if the accounts were manually added or disabled by an administrator (described in the previous two questions). The only difference is: you don’t have to lift a finger.

For customers on an annual agreement with large changes in active users during the course of their agreement, we reconcile those differences on a quarterly basis – crediting your account for inactive users, rolling forward charges for new active users.

This is a bit different than most software agreements, so let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to walk through it with you. Our goal is to provide fair billing for the users actually using and getting value from Slack. As a benefit for you, it means you don't have to pay for (or stress over managing) inactive users.

I hope that provides you the details and pricing to move ahead with Slack. I've also included below some additional details on how we priced Slack, if you're interested. I look forward to hearing back from you and helping with anything else you need.

Best,
James

On Slack Pricing

We definitely understand price will be a factor in some team's decision about whether or not to use Slack. The bottom line is we don't think it is feasible for us to try to compete on price while meeting the standard of quality we aim for across all aspects of the service. And we believe our customers' communication tools deserve the highest standard of quality. As you say, everyone on your team likes Slack and they're not alone. Here's real-time feedback from Slack customers.

In short, we are not trying to be the cheapest: we are trying to be the best. If that means we have a smaller number of (happy) customers in the end, that's okay with us: we'd rather end up there than with a larger number of potentially frustrated customers.

Even though the annual total for a large-ish group of people (like Oh Goodness) might appear high at first, for the intended audience of technology workers, Slack's per-person cost for the standard tier comes out to much less than one-one thousandth of the total cost of employment. At $0.22/each per day, it takes a very tiny number of hours saved across the whole team to pay for Slack for a year.

Given how important communication is to all aspects of a team's operation — productivity, morale, capabilities — and especially given the value of search across all of an organization's data, no matter where it came from, we think the value is very, very good. The desk, chair and laptop that you buy for a new employee is about the same cost as 30 years of Slack.

Having said all that, we know there are cheaper alternatives out there. For some teams, those alternatives will be good enough. Those teams should take the cheaper option. That's ok with us — it's the way business works!

But, we'd hope someone like you who has already been using Slack for some time and has built up a small archive (your team does about 1,200 messages/day) would see that value for themselves. If you don't, we're probably not surfacing it well enough for you yet. We'll work on that: there's a lot more coming!

Now we’re well and truly into the sales motion we used at the time, and how we used writing as a compliment to our calls. Again, start the message with appreciation. No one has to work with us so it’s always good of them to do so.

Then transition to the meat of the conversation, reflecting back to what we heard on the call based on notes, with some organization and subheads for structure and to keep the various threads of the conversation distinct.

For the SSO / SAML, my answer is pretty standard for the time and based on how we approached product and feature conversations. We didn’t give timing promises but we did offer some guidance. We did do the work to check how they were set up, and then pointed to some adjacent ways of solving their own problem.

Pricing

For the Pricing part of my reply, I always liked to restate their business problem back to them. Sometimes they articulated their problem, sometimes I listened and stated it back to them. In this example, Oh Goodness had a fragmented communication toolset and wanted to consolidate it. It was a good time for them to make the change because of larger organizational changes also happening concurrently (adding an acquisition I’ve called NewCo). Great!

When I got to quoting pricing, I always started with our list pricing to anchor their perceptions before offering credits to highlight the difference. I used bullets for the numbers so it was available for scanning and comparison I unpacked the math to make it transparent and easier to compare.

Many customers I worked with also needed to share the Pricing numbers internally, and the easier I made this for them the faster they could get approval. I always thought it also made it easier for them to be the hero of the story internally, having battled hard to get the better pricing.

Moving from the numbers to how they will change over time and how our dynamic billing worked, served to highlight how our pricing worked for customers. Remember the Fair Billing Policy made the upgrade easier to swallow.

Lastly, the tail of the message after my sign off, On Slack Pricing, was a bit of copy we added often at this stage. Did people read it? Sometimes. If they did, they often responded. We tried to fit our arguments on why they should upgrade into this section, to keep the body more utilitarian. People sometimes quoted our reasons back to us, particularly if they weren’t really happy with the numbers we proposed.

Negotiation by Email

Okay, sure sure. But how did it work in this case?

Apr 22 14:22

Hi James,

Thanks for the detailed quote. After some internal discussion, it looks like we are going to stick with the free model for the time being.

Thanks again!

-Gordon

Hunh! Not so great.

But, here’s where the conversation got a bit unfair, because I’ve had this same conversation by now hundreds of times, and Gordon only gets to have it this once.

So what do I know that he doesn’t? I know this isn’t the end.

They’re still using Slack internally. They’ve got a core group of technologists who have been using Slack for months and have invested in setting it up just how they want. Let’s let it run for a bit and see what happens. Here’s that reply.

Apr 23 15:44

Hi Gordon,

Thanks much for the note and sharing your decision to stick with Slack's free (Lite) plan. We're happy to have you on Slack!

If you need anything else, please let me know and I'll be happy to get on it. And let me know if you change your mind about the right Slack plan for your team.

If I don't hear from you I'll be in touch once we have SSO / SAML ready for your team to review. It will be a feature of the Slack Standard plan (not available on the free Lite plan), so we may rekindle our conversation at that stage. Looking forward to seeing your team succeed!

Best,
James

Gosh, we’re just happy to have them using Slack. Keep going, friends!

And not just that, we’ll also let them know when the feature they’re seeking becomes available. I mean, it’ll be a paid feature when it arrives, but do carry on.

Apr 25 14:36

Hi James,

There's been quite bit on internal discussion since the decision was made to stick with the free pricing model -- there is a contingent that would like to stick with the free model due to pricing, and there is another that wants the enterprise features. (I'm sure you've seen quite a few people reaching out trying to get new pricing.) Would either of the following options work? I'm hoping one of these will satisfy all parties:

Option 1: Would it be possible to get a sub $5.49/user/mo price on the 850 commitment? Even something like $4.99/user I think I can push through.

Option 2: Would it be possible to bring down the commitment to 400 users with the $5.49/user/mo price point? I have a soft verbal approval from one of our VPs if this could be done.

Let me know!

Thanks,

Gordon

Oh, hello again. Right. Two days it took for the follow up.

I don’t want to sound cocky about this outcome, but like I said, I’d had hundreds of versions of this conversation by then.

I’d also had a few other folks from their company getting in touch, trying to go around Gordon to get the upgrade done. That happened from time to time, and I found we had to respond to each inquiry and at the same time just rope those conversations all together. We helped folks but we didn’t help them go rogue on their own IT teams. We wanted to play the long game and that meant earning the IT team’s trust.

So now, we have everyone on the same page: onwards. Start with a thank you.

Apr 29 12:04

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for your note and update. You're right! There have been a few folks from Oh Goodness reaching out to us to get pricing. It's a pleasure to get all the inquiries and to work with your team to find an agreement that works.

Thanks too for putting together the 2 options below. I think the best option for all concerned is the first one – getting your effective / user / month rate a little lower for an annual agreement. So I'll summarize the numbers of our conversation.

Here's our standard pricing:

• 850 users * $80 / user = $68,000 (or $6.67 / user / month)

Here's the proposed pricing from my earlier note:

• 850 users * $80 / user - $12,000 = $56,000 (or $5.49 / user / month)

Here's that proposed pricing revised to get your effective / user / month rate to $4.99 for 850 users on an annual agreement.

• 850 users * $80 / user - $17,100 = $50,900 (or $4.99 / user / month)

Please confirm that will work for you and I can get started with the execution details to have your team upgraded.

And if I can help with any other details or questions, please let me know.

Best,
James

Could I have negotiated harder? Probably.

I could have ground them down for another few thousand dollars on that first annual contract. Or I could have gotten the deal terms done and moved on to the next email thread in my inbox that held a very similar conversation.

I needed to optimize for speed of getting deals done and not the yield of dollars in each deal. Plus, I felt there was a huge chance this deal would renew after a year at the full per-user price.

Apr 29 12:07

Looks good! Can you send along the final agreement for our execs/legal to review?

Yes, well, right. I’d love to. Except we’re not really that kind of grown up software company just yet. In the theme of Saying No Nicely, We didn’t do any custom Terms of Service.

Apr 29 12:16

Hi Gordon,

To simplify the agreement process, all of our documents are online and available to you.

We use the Slack Terms of Service as our contract and your team might also be interested in Slack Security & Confidentiality.

Since this is more similar to SAAS services that enterprise software, if you require anything else please just let me know – I'm happy to prepare the documents. Looking forward to keeping us moving ahead!

Best,
James

Perhaps we had a problem?

May 01 09:02

Sorry for taking so long to respond to your last message -- Google flagged it as dangerous and it skipped my inbox. See attached image for reference.

I'm having trouble finding the documents you mentioned -- do you have URLs you could point me to? The main splash page just seems to drop me into my existing brewer chat client.

What would be the next steps for this pricing/seat commitment? I assume we would need to sign something?

Well, that’s all a good sign. We’re working in good faith. We both want to get this done. Nice!

May 01 11:03

Hi Gordon,

No problems at all. It's strange what gets flagged. After a long thread that one message gets dangerous – odd!

Sorry if the URLs I referenced weren't clear. The text is links and I'll put in the full paths here as well:

• Slack Terms of Service – https://my.slack.com/terms-of-service
• Slack Security & Confidentiality – https://my.slack.com/security

Next steps for this pricing / seat commitment is we'll upgrade your Slack account for 850 users and I will invoice you.

Regarding paperwork, for our upgrade process there's no need to sign anything additional. If there anything you need, please let me know and I'll be happy to provide it.

To get the invoice prepared I need the following details:

• official company name (if different from Oh Goodness)
• billing contact name (if different than you)
• billing contact email (if different than yours)
• street address
• phone number

That's it. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help with and I'll be happy to get it done.

Best,
James

Pretty standard and simple stuff here. Yes, this super basic way is how we closed deals. Keep in mind we’d launched our paid product less than 3 months prior to this thread.

Closing Deals, Maybe?

One excellent little technical bit of wizardry someone like Cal or Myles had implemented at Slack was resolving my.slack.com links to the specific workspace for each of our customers. So I could reference my.slack.com/security and when the Oh Goodness team hit that link it did an instant little redirect to oh-goodness.slack.com/security and if we needed to do anything specific for just that team we could do it.

Are we close to a closed deal now? Maybe.

I’ll speed up now with my commentary, though I’ll keep all the message segments in here to show how many niggles cropped up in what seems like a straightforward negotiation process.

May 01 11:06

Hmm. I suspect Google stripped the "dangerous" links from the email.

I'll forward these links along to legal/finance, along with a summary of the pricing. Thanks!

May 01 11:19

Thank you. Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

Best,
James

May 02 11:35

Hey Gordon,

I just got a note from Simon XXX from Oh Goodness asking me to get in touch with you with some revised (and best!) pricing for fewer users and a quick decision. Here’s that note:

---

Hi James,
I see you're talking to Gordon now, but we really need to make a decision very quickly. I understand that Gordon may have given you the wrong impression of our total user count initially. We're at around 300 now and will likely grow to 500 active users. Can you please send your best pricing to Gordon ASAP?

---

So let’s see what we can do. You've got 350 active users today in your Slack instance right now, so let's do another revision on the pricing that we've been working on for 500 because it seems like that will come quite soon. Here's the basic pricing:

• 500 users * $80 / user = $40,000 (or $6.67 / user / month)

And I propose adding $8,000 of credit to your account because we want to get you going:

• 500 users * $80 / user - $8,000 = $32,000 (or $5.33 / user / month)

Also, for your reference, we have a fair billing policy. So if the number of active users in your account is below the number of users in your agreement, we'll credit your account on a pro-rated basis. It's all part of how Slack only ever charges you for active users.

When you upgrade to a paid tier, you’ll only be charged for accounts that are currently active. Any changes to the number of active users during your billing cycle will be result in a pro-rated credit or charge, just as they to if the accounts were manually added or disabled by an administrator (described in the previous two questions). The only difference is: you don’t have to lift a finger.

So you don't have to sweat signing up for 500 users and not having 500 active users. Our system will add credits if you're below the number of users in your annual agreement. If your number of active users is above your agreement, we'll roll charges forward and reconcile them on a quarterly basis. Again, it's our goal to provide you with fair billing.

Please let me know what else I can help with and I'll be glad to help out. We could also set up a call if it's easier for you, or continue by email – whichever works best for you.

Best,
James

Wait, what? Simon? Yes. Someone inside Oh Goodness is trying an end run on Gordon. If this was rare I’d let you know. It was not rare. It was pretty common.

I was learning that a big part of selling to larger organizations ended up just streamlining all their various needs and departments into a coherent process. We needed to teach them how to buy our product.

My sense is that long term Gordon is my man so I’ve kept him apprised. And he definitely wants to be apprised. Less than an hour later he replies.

May 02 12:28

Hi James,

Thanks for the quick quote. Can we schedule a call to discuss?

Thanks!

-Gordon

He wants to talk, pronto. So the times I suggest reflect that urgency.

May 02 12:30

Hi Gordon,

Sure thing. How about any of these times today:

• Fri, May 2 at 12:30 pm PST
• Fri, May 2 at 2 pm PST
• Fri, May 2 at 3 pm PST

If none of those times work for you, please send along one that does and we'll make it happen.

Please also send the best number to reach you on. Looking forward to connecting!

Best,
James

May 02 12:37

12:30pm (right now) works -- if thats too late, then 2pm will also work. Here's my direct line:
XXX-XXX-XXXX

It’s hardly ever a straight line to close a deal but we can get there eventually. Throughout, I felt like I needed to be building trust and credibility. We wanted them to be long term successful customers. We progressively had moved through the process and gotten closer. Now we were almost there. I called him on his direct line.

May 02 12:58

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for the quick call just now to get aligned on a plan that's going to be successful for you.

As we talked about, you've got 350 active users today in your Slack instance. With Slack's basic pricing that looks like this:

• 350 users * $80 / user = $28,000 (or $6.67 / user / month)

I propose adding $4,000 of credit to your account because we want to see your team succeed right now:

• 350 users * $80 / user - $4,000 = $24,000 (or $5.71 / user / month)

Also, as we talked about, we have a fair billing policy. What this means is that if the number of active users in your account is below the number of users in your agreement, we'll credit your account on a pro-rated basis. Conversely, if the number of active users in your account is above the number of users in your agreement, we'll credit your account on a pro-rated basis. It's all part of how Slack only ever charges you for active users.

When you upgrade to a paid tier, you’ll only be charged for accounts that are currently active. Any changes to the number of active users during your billing cycle will be result in a pro-rated credit or charge, just as they to if the accounts were manually added or disabled by an administrator (described in the previous two questions). The only difference is: you don’t have to lift a finger.

For times when your number of active users exceeds the number of users in your agreement, we reconcile charges on a quarterly basis, when required (for small amounts, we just keep rolling the charges forward). So if your team grows we'll continue to deliver Slack to them and we'll make the billing work out, adding credits to your account to keep us roughly aligned with the effective $5.71 / user / month rate.

Hope that helps you with your internal discussions and makes it possible to get our agreement advanced. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help with and I'll be glad to do it. My direct number is XXX-XXX-XXXX.

Best,
James

Pull out the essential details from his message. Keep the pricing quotes coherent as their prospective number of users has sized up and down. It seems like we’re getting closer.

Internally, I get the sense they have a conflicting dynamic happening. On one side, they want to suppressing user numbers to keep total costs down. On the other side, they want to inflate user numbers to get a lower per-user cost.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, my experience having this conversation many times means that none of it is new. The key thing I felt I needed to do was focus on getting them upgraded and getting them successful with the product. If I could do that well then I had really strong faith that the user numbers would take care of themselves.

Actually Closing

May 02 13:02

Thanks James! I think this will work -- what do we need to provide you to make it official?

May 02 14:35

Hey Gordon,

Great to hear we're getting there!

Regarding paperwork, for our upgrade process there's no need to sign anything additional. I just need the following details to get the invoice prepared:

• official company name (if different from Oh Goodness)
• billing contact name (if different than you)
• billing contact email (if different than yours)
• street address
• phone number
• copy you on invoice?

That's it. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help with and I'll be happy to get it done.

Best,
James

After all that we sent them an invoice for 350 users. Within a month they had 500+ users on Slack. Within 2 months they had the whole organization of 1,000+ on Slack and were seeking ways to also work with freelancers and contractors in Slack as well.

This exchange and process and outcome all were fairly typical of the time. We did many more smaller deals similarly, and we did a few larger deals.

They all required some work and they required some diligence but the spirit of them all reflected this one — collegial, polite and friendly. Nothing like when I got shelled by The Cannon.

For the 7 months following our February 12, 2014 launch, I did these deals, pretty much just like this. We got to October, 2014 and I started to dig a bit deeper into the numbers to see that they amounted to just north of $3-million.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There we more deals to do and I needed help.

More on how I got that help and how I needed to change in the next chapter.

Up next: Finding the Bigs and Small – Growing catches up to us all. Following my curiosity to segment our customers. Seeking help to sit next to the money. Inventing new roles at Slack.