- Point of View
- Audience Advocacy
- What's In It For You
- Quantify the “You”
- The “You” Rule
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
▪ Quantify the “You” ▪
A participant (let’s call him Mark) in one of our programs was the CEO of a company that manufactured instruments for endodontic procedures. Mark’s prior experience had been as a top salesperson for another dental instrument company. Now, as a CEO, Mark was preparing to take his new company public. I coached him through a rehearsal of his IPO roadshow as I usually do, by assuming the role of an influential fund manager at Fidelity.
Mark articulated the strengths of his company effectively, focusing on the high quality of their products. As an example, he described the features of his company’s newest endodontic instrument. Mark held up the actual device, looked at me, and said, “With this instrument, you can do better root canals, more quickly and with less pain.”
I held up my hand to stop Mark. “I don’t do root canals!”
“Hmm,” he said, smiling. He thought for a moment, then held up the instrument again and said, “So you can see that the tens of thousands of endodontists across this country and thousands more around the world who want to do better root canals will have to buy this superior instrument from us!”
Mark quantified the “you.”
Another life sciences firm named—appropriately for our purposes—Quantum-Si, quantified the “you” exponentially. The company, which offers Next Generation Protein Sequencing (NGS) that makes diagnostics digital, sells their initial product to tens of thousands of commercial diagnostic laboratories around the world. In their IPO roadshow, CEO John Stark described Atto, a home version of their technology that they intend to sell to billions of consumers around the world.
Consumer volume is the perfect force multiplier to quantify the “you.”
Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix, now the successful content platform and production company, took the company public in the spring of 2002. I had worked with Reed in 1996, when he headed another company, called Pure/Atria Software. When Reed emailed me the draft of the Netflix roadshow deck, one of the first slides described the company’s original business as an online DVD subscription company (see Figure 2.3).
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Figure 2-3 Netflix IPO Roadshow Slide
When Reed arrived for our coaching session, I assumed my usual role as a potential investor in Netflix’s stock offering. I said, “Reed, this presentation makes me really eager to sign up and become a loyal subscriber of Netflix, but you didn’t come here today to get me to subscribe. I can sign up online. Treat me as an investor.”
Reed smiled and said, “What do you suggest?”
“I suggest that you quantify the ‘you,’” and revised Reed’s slide as Figure 2.4.
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Figure 2-4 Revised Netflix IPO Roadshow Slide
Suddenly, the entire frame of reference changed from the attractiveness of Netflix’s consumer offering to how large the market opportunity was—a much more important consideration for Reed’s potential investor audience.
Reed smiled broadly and said, “How about tens of millions of movie lovers?”10
“Great!” I concurred. “How about, ‘tens of millions—in the U.S. alone?’”
Reed accepted the revision, polished his presentation, and then left to begin the roadshow. One month later, when Netflix went public, the company offered 5.5 million shares for sale. They received orders for 50 million shares: oversubscribed by nearly 10 times. Today, Netflix has moved far beyond DVDs and has become a major producer and distributor of films and television series.