What F1 the movie taught me about B2B SaaS

Tinker, break rules, be a team player, and always have an opinion.

Yeah, yeah I know the title is a meme now. I’m being cheeky on purpose. You’re reading it now so it worked okay? Also, spoiler alert.

The movie’s portrayal of what makes for a great F1 driver (Sonny Hayes) versus an amateur driver (Joshua Pearce) and the role of an individual contributor in a team sport is fantastic. I think there are many parallels that can be drawn to those working less glamorous jobs (in my case, in B2B SaaS).

tinkering is everything: in between races, Sonny would spend hours in the car simulator trying different tire pressures and observing its impact on speed, and controllability. This is exactly how an AE or a marketer should think about her job - tinkering with messaging, positioning, signals, account scoring and varying a hundred other variables that could influence sales. The best salespeople maniacally review their activities and conversion metrics and try to find patterns.

describe reality in high fidelity: when Sonny first tries out for the lead driver role, his times aren’t as good as the incumbent. But it becomes very clear that he has high potential through his ability to describe his challenges with great precision. For example, when the movie shows how the two drivers give feedback on what they feel is wrong with the car to the designer, the amateur says “it understeers and oversteers sometimes”. Sonny says “it’s snappy in the high speed corners but unpredictable in the lows. Had trouble with rears in turns 14 and 16.” A great AE doesn’t just say the leads are bad. They say “our BDRs are probably cold-calling the wrong persona. We need to reach out to HR Directors instead of HR Managers. And avoid companies that have a more corporate suit and tie culture. They take forever to close.”

individual games are also team sports: Sonny built relationships with his teammates across the board. He would take the pit crew and the chief mechanic along for his daily run. He sat down with the car designer and tried to understand how she models air flow around the car. He asked for different designs that could help overtake other cars. Similarly, great performers build relationships with team members around them. For example, in a SaaS sales organization, a great AE is often talking to SDRs and BDRs on the type of customers that are good ICP fits (upstream connections), and chatting with customer success colleagues about what is the experience of customers that he sold to (downstream connections), and grabbing lunch with a Product Marketer riffing on some ideas for creating new vertical focused positioning.

(some) rules are meant to be broken: in intensely competitive games, sometimes alpha lies in thinking out of the (rules) box. Sonny Hayes frequently skirts the rules of the game and finds edges. One scene shows him intentionally slowing on the formation lap letting him start the race with better tire temperatures and a more aggressive angle into Turn 1. Applies to the SaaS world too. David Fallarme, VP of Marketing at Owner, in his advice for marketers, puts it nicely: “Remember that regardless of your constraints -- you own the outcome. Legal says no, you can’t do that campaign. Product says you can't announce that feature. Finance says you don't have the budget. Know which rules to follow, bend, break, ignore. Yeah, this will annoy some of your colleagues. But as long as you get outcomes, they will respect you. Your job is to be an effective marketer, not an excellent bureaucrat.”

don’t be opinionated, but always have an opinion: during race strategy sessions, Sonny didn’t just sit quietly while the senior members of the team, each with years of experience in F1, came up with Plan A and Plan B for race day. No, he would always have his own hypotheses, a Plan C, that he would articulate. For the typical knowledge worker, a lesson here is that you must be thinking of the bigger picture and always have an assertion about what you think is a better strategy. Don’t be opinionated, but always have an opinion. Over time, if your strategies match reality, people will trust you and follow you.

Thanks to Yash Mehta and Prashant Balaji for reviewing drafts of this essay