🤘🤘 How Aptera Gets More Funding Investments on Auto-Pilot

Howdy!

In this week’s newsletter, I am looking into:

• How Aptera found a way to get more investments (after failing to do so before)

• Biggest acquisitions this past month

• 6 questions you should be asking your sales people before you start putting together your competitive enablement program

Lezzgo!

Dejan - @dgajsek

Looking for More Investments - Make a Public Leaderboard

I love small and simple solutions that create a big impact.

Aptera, a solar vehicle company struggled with getting investments for their project - the first production-ready solar-powered vehicle. In fact, they already went under once because they ran out of money. The company has been around since 2005, and back then the Cleantech industry wasn’t as alluring (and relevant) as it is today.

In 2011, Aptera had to close its doors because they weren’t able to secure new funding. U.S. Department of Energy offered a $150 million loan but with one condition — they had to secure the $80 million in private investment needed to close that financing.

They failed to do so.

So they had to come up with a better and more sustainable solution for getting investors in.

Their idea — a public investment leaderboard where investors compete who has given the most funding for a neat little innovative project.

Of course, there’s no way to know how many investors were impacted but I’m betting my left kneecap that at least a couple of investors are showing this page to colleagues on a golf court and bragging about how they are crafting the future of vehicular transportation.

The leaderboard is embedded through Microsoft’s PowerBI — the business data visualization tool that adds credibility and signals that the data is collected in real time.

And that’s not all. You’ll notice other FOMO-inducing techniques on their page such as of the big psychological levers → scarcity.

On the top of the page, the Aptera is showing the number of remaining vehicles left to order (564 at the time of writing - how many do you see?)

This CRO tactic is usually reserved for e-commerce items with a smaller price point but in this case, if someone drops a casual milli or few hundred thousand $, they might as well order it and show it off when they take a ride from Palo Alto to the neighborhood’s country club.

Best Way to Beat Competition - Buy It

Big fish eat the small fish. The big fish gets bigger and starts eating bigger fish.

The playbook of acquisitions has been the most effective lever for growth although reserved for big corpos. But that’s the name of the game - flat-out buy your competitor, eat up their market share, adopt the talent, and dominate the market.

This past month there have been a few major acquisitions (ranked by my spiciness rating of 🌶️ to 🌶️🌶️🌶️)

• Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard for $69B - staking their ground in the gaming world. Microsoft already owns the XBox console which hasn’t seen a new iteration of the console for years.
  
  Activision has been losing its brand reputation almost as fast as Disney in the movie section. The culture of Saas-ifying games and milking out fractional improvements came to a point where gamers started abandoning big franchise names like Diablo and Call of Duty.
  I’m not sure what Microsoft is going to do about it but, I’m excited to see a change of leadership.
  
  Spice score — 🌶️🌶️🌶️
  

• Atlassian buys Loom for $978M — Loom is the most widely used short video web application, and even as itself it carries as one of the best solutions in the sea of competition.
  
  And Atlassian has a specter of products that is perfect for integrated video instructions - Jira, Confluence, or Atlas are the first that comes to mind. I don’t think it’s the level of Adobe buying Figma earth-shattering (that was a genius move by Adobe) but it’s an interesting acquisition.
  
  Spice score — 🌶️ 🌶️
  

• Broadcom buys VMware for $61B — By joining forces, Broadcom is flexing on the software side. The global semiconductor supplier already rakes in half of total revenue in software sales. By acquiring VMware they’ll increase their market share even further.
  
  Spice score — 🌶️ 🌶️
  

  

If you take a look into the growth playbook, acquisitions are the biggest levers companies pull to get market share, access to technology, access to talent, and distance themselves (or catch up) in a global market.

12 Questions to Ask Your Sales Reps

If you’re looking to get clarity on how to compete against your biggest competitors, the first place to look is in your organization.

Sounds ironic, but some companies rarely stop and ask their own salespeople for reasons of losing deals.

The solution - sit down with them in a safe space (virtual or even better - in-person) and ask them these questions.

• Q1: Which competitors do you encounter most frequently in deals?
  This identifies primary competitors and refines focus.
  

• Q2: What are the top objections or pushbacks you hear related to our competitors?
  Helps in crafting precise battlecards to counter objections.

• Q3: What information about competitors do you wish you had during sales conversations?
  It shows exactly the gaping knowledge holes in the current situation.

• Q4: Do you feel our current competitive intelligence is accurate and up-to-date?
  You’re asking them to check the pain temperature of current conditions. If there are no programs yet, this is a good way to collect the ideas and wishes before building the program.

• Q5: What type of content format do you prefer for competitive insights? (e.g., cheat sheets, slide decks, videos)
  Ensures delivery of competitive intelligence in easily digestible formats.

• Q6: Can you share a time when a deal was won or lost because of competitive positioning?
  Gives you a look into real-world examples to base enablement materials on. You should also attend the sales meetings or listen to the recordings yourself.

I’ve listed 6 more questions on our website here.

Have a wonderful week!

🤘🤘

d.

Lay it On Me

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