They're bite-sized sales videos from a partner over there, I found a lot of value out of them.
For a sales strategy and organizational perspective, "Predictable Revenue" is a useful book.
The hardest thing for me to get right was empathizing with my prospects and their challenges. Putting yourselves into their day-to-day problems can be incredibly difficult to do correctly, but improving that skill really helped me in all aspects of the sales process.
Instead of trying to fight your analytical tech brain, reframe the sales process as a technical optimization problem.
That comes down to looking for bugs that “crash” the sales process(objections) and optimizing performance of the sales cycle by decreasing the time it takes to close.
After every sales call, log objections as well as ideas the prospect seemed to respond to positively in a spreadsheet or CRM. Over time, patterns will emerge and you will naturally optimize for being better at sales.
Think less about pushing your product, and more about aligning your product to a stated need.
Instead of "how do I get Product X into Company Y," ask "how can I help Company Y accomplish their mission with my product in a way they are currently unable to do?" The flipside of this question is "if I were CEO of Company Y, why should I want to buy Product X?"
Instead of "how do I convince Buyer Z to go with Product X," ask yourself "what are Buyer Z's incentives? Do they need to lower costs/increase their revenue/help their team communicate/etc?" Buyer Z has incentives - some of them corporate-wide, some of them specific to her/his day job, some of them very personal. Try to learn what those are.
Also remember that sometimes it's not a good fit, and that's okay. Preserve relationships. Sometimes you catch Buyer Z working for Company Y, and she says "right now, we're really not focused on $THINGYOUDO, and your price would be prohibitive anyway." Fast forward three months and she might have changed jobs into something that is very much $THINGYOUDO, and she now has a vastly increased budget. Much better for both of you if you have preserved the relationship.
Sales becomes a much easier road to walk if you remember "this person is a person just like me, and they've got things they're trying to accomplish in their day job. Let's see if I can help them out."
Along this note, one of the best quick tips I've heard about sales conversations is that you should be doing much more listening than talking, and always start not by talking about your product, but by asking good probing questions about their experience. In many cases, you'll catch something that will directly let you say "oh you have problem X and $THINGYOUDO makes that so much easier by..."
Think about unstated needs too. There isn't just a single relationship that matters and the person you're talking to usually has different goals than the business you're selling to.
This is really good advice, early sales for founders looks more like a combination of problem diagnosis (often of your own feature set or assumptions which makes premature "objection handling" very dangerous as it cuts off learning) and project management.
Jerry Weissman's "Understand-Believe-Act" sales model is also a very good fault tree to use in diagnosing where your efforts may be stalled:
Understand: do prospects understand what it is you can do for them (here vision generation and simple explainer demos can help as well as basic case studies with clear examples).
Believe do prospects believe that you can deliver the results you promise (here technical proof demonstrations, benchmarks, case studies, references can all help).
Act: Do they have a reason to act. Are you addressing a critical business issue or a nice to have. What is the total cost of implementing your product (not just your price but any changes in workflow or practice or infrastructure that will be required). How does this compare to value. Is there a critical event or date that offers a strong reason to act.
> Also remember that sometimes it's not a good fit, and that's okay
One can go beyond and suggest alternatives to their own product that might be a better fit. Remember to keep customer's best interest at heart.
I'm in dev tooling market and have suggested open source tools as alternative to my own products numerous times. The kind of trust I gained through it is immense.
Changing my mindset about sales to advisor has been immensely useful for earning trust. In the enterprise space, we’ve been able to secure demos with folks we would not have reached had we tried hard sales.
The first goal is to start a conversation and the 2nd is to get a callback for a 2nd conversation.
I'm a big fan of Jeff Thull's approach to sales, as laid out in his books Mastering The Complex Sale, Exceptional Selling, and The Prime Solution. It really goes against the grain of the old school "grab 'em by the throat and don't let go until they buy" mentality. He rejects the kind of stuff you might associate with the sales guys in "Glengarry Glenn Ross" and advocates a much more respectful and honest approach, where the goal is to serve a role closer to that of a doctor or a private detective, than the stereotypical "used car salesman" type.
I couldn't do it justice trying to explain it here, but if this all sounds interesting, I really recommend reading at least Mastering The Complex Sale to get the idea straight from the source.
I also recommend reading How To Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. It has nothing to do with sales, at least on the surface. But in terms of understanding customer problems, I think the approach Hubbard espouses can be tremendously useful at a certain point in the process. And I think it can tie back to Thull's idea that if you work closely with the customer to actually jointly develop a solution and explain the value it creates, then there won't be any of the typical "closing" issues, since there won't be any question about the value of the solution.
Back in my VAR days the money was always in moving to that trusted advisor role. You move from quoting parts to actually helping design and architect solutions, also helps that when you're involved at projects at that stage the deal reg is almost guaranteed.
Take 100 calls with in-bound leads. I hated it at first but over time got the hang of it. That initial customer feedback is essential. So this is not something you can outsource, you just need to bite the bullet and do it yourself.
One the plus side you'll close more deals because of your status as a founder. It makes customers feel confident that any issues they have will be addressed. So you have it easier than an AE which will pick this up after you.
I also like standardizing a few things:
- customer intake doc (which questions to ask). really a lot of the sales process is listening to the customer and capturing their problem
- explainer presentation. just some slides that you can send after the call.
- setup hubspot, clearbit, fullcontact to make sure you know who your inbound leads are
I also enjoy reading SaaStr, most of the advice is for a bit later stage though. IE how to build your sales team.
Think of sales as technique. The method IBM took from NCR provides a framework for understanding where you are and what you need to do next. "Prospect, survey, demo, proposal, close" Contains psychological truth upon which you can build a machine that pumps money.
You can find good books on attachment theory as it relates to romantic relationship (your romantic relationship is one of the best places to develop this aspect of yourself). Those books can give you an understanding of the framework.
To embody it and get it somatically the best way is to work with a coach or therapist and to get into more intimate relationships (romantic or creative) with someone who has a more secure attachment style.
Doing embodiment work, trauma work, practicing empathy and learning how to hold space.
Note -- you'll also have to be selling something you believe in and that is in integrity with your values -- otherwise you'll be working against yourself.
Don't. I mean it: if you are good on the technical part, focus on it and do it as good as possible and let someone else to do something that you don't know enough. You cannot become the master of everything, but it is fairly easy to become the master of nothing: don't go that way.
There's no doubt that experienced sales people are valuable, but I would argue that there is a point in a startup lifecycle where it's too soon to hire one. For one or both of two reasons:
1. You're still trying to figure out exactly what it is you're building and how to best price/sell it. That is, you're still in more of a "customer development" mode than a pure "push the accelerator on sales for all it's worth" model.
2. You don't have any money to hire a sales person, because you're either bootstrapping or haven't raised a round yet.
To add to this, if you don't know how your product is sold, your first salesperson is going to have a much harder time doing it since you won't be able to share anything about what resonates with customers and what doesn't. Most of the good salespeople you'd want to hire as your first won't go anywhere that the founder isn't already doing sales.
Early sales isn't something you can outsource to someone else because it's as much product development as it is sales. Your sales process is essentially getting told no over and over, and then following up with "well what if it did this?".
That said, one hidden benefit of hiring someone to help with sales is that it forces you to spend time focusing on it (instead of just coding or whatever). It's sort of an expensive way to practice time management, but it can work if you need that push. Just don't expect the person to actually sell anything--figuring that out will still be mostly up to you.
Both excellent points! Also, sales people don't come cheap but effective sales people bring in far more revenue than they cost in commissions.
But... there is probably a baseline price below which it doesn't make sense to have a full time sales person knocking on doors. In that case, drop down one level to "Inside Sales" where you hire people to cold call a list and pitch your product.
If your product can't afford inside sales, sell direct online and optimize your funnel.
If someone even has to ask the question in the OP then they need a co-founder to handle the soft skills. I really think it's as simple as that. It's unreasonable to expect to be able to get good at everything.
* It is a numbers game. You will fail more than you succeed. But the few successes will be material.
* Train yourself to equate the dopamine hit you get with running a new piece of code you made with the act (not necessarily success) of performing a sales activity. For example, by the end of today, do 10 cold emails and 10 cold calls. Then, feel good about it. Don't worry about the outcomes just yet; get into the groove of performing the act.
* Get out of the room. Always be getting coffee, going to meetups, connecting with groups you part of, etc. The more people know who you are, the more people can help you.
Identify your core issues clearly. Sometimes, when your customer reaches the sales process, doesn't understand what you are selling, it's a marketing problem.
Process is everything. If you can map out the entire sales process in sequences, you can find ways to optimize it.
I started my sales funnel with mostly manual touch points, and gradually started adding automation (automated cadences, automated scheduling, and etc) and we were able to increase our efficiency by 200%.
Track EVERYTHING. Each metric matters a lot, and if you don't have a dashboard of all the metrics, you are going to make some bad decisions (learned it through trial and error)
What kind of sales? What's the product? Is it Software? Hardware? B2B? B2C? Self serve or high touch? Have you found product market fit or are you still trying to figure it out?
A lot like tech there are tools for every problem and in sales there is a playbook for every kind of product.
I'd recommend the reddit sales community [0] as a good place to start, and specifically the best of thread.
They'll go over everything you need to know about sales. The first thing to learn is that sales is an umbrella term for a lot of different activities many of which won't be relevant to the type of sales you do.
The first two questions you should answer is what type of sale are you making and to who. Selling a $5/month consumer product is very different from selling $300,000/yr product to the CFO of a fortune 500.
Read the book Pitch Anything. It will help you come up with ways to reach people based on what works for you. It will also avoid the extremely common problem that you're providing logical reasoning to someone whose brain has routed what you're saying to /dev/null.
My wife's natural tendency is to help solve problems for people. Before that book, she'd talk to someone, noticed that the most urgent problem that they wanted solved is her bothering them, and the obvious solution would leave her with no sale.
Now she is able to playfully get their interest and attention. She gets them to talk through a real problem that they have, it doesn't matter what. She helps them work through how to solve it. She doesn't try to sell them anything. It is up to them to decide whether the experience was enjoyable and valuable enough that they wish to work with https://www.leanst.com/ more. Enough do that sales is fun for her, and has not been a bottleneck to growth.
You're not selling consulting and aren't her, so her exact approach probably won't work for you. But I'd still bet that that book will help you.
One of the most important part about sales IMO is to remember that you're dealing with humans on the other side who have their own personal and professional incentives. Think about how you can make your customer look like a genius, get promoted, help make some process better/cheaper or get to a business goal quicker. Do you have a solution to help achieve one of those outcomes? This requires listening far more than speaking and will always result in selling solutions to problems...product feature/functionality is just the way to get there. You may be very proud of everything you've built, and rightly so, but the customer only cares about their own outcomes and whether you can help them achieve it.
Don't learn sales, learn people. Reading recs:
* the social triggers podcasts by Derek Halpern
* Start with No by Jim Camp
* Demonstrating to Win (super cheesy title but amazing content)
One thing I've learned: talking to users and potential users is crucial, like everyone says, but it's also crucial to talk to the right users, and to iterate on how you find them.
In the beginning, most people are probably going to dismiss what you've built. That's normal--people have a bias against adding yet another tool to the pile (for good reason). So unless your product is an exact bullseye for solving their problem, and has no real drawbacks, they won't be seriously interested. That's actually fine. You can have an extremely low conversion rate in the beginning. As long as you can find someone who is enthusiastic about what you're doing (and ideally wants to pay you for it), they will show you the path forward.
80 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadGood luck!
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-wh...
https://training.kalzumeus.com/
https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-efti
They're bite-sized sales videos from a partner over there, I found a lot of value out of them.
For a sales strategy and organizational perspective, "Predictable Revenue" is a useful book.
The hardest thing for me to get right was empathizing with my prospects and their challenges. Putting yourselves into their day-to-day problems can be incredibly difficult to do correctly, but improving that skill really helped me in all aspects of the sales process.
That comes down to looking for bugs that “crash” the sales process(objections) and optimizing performance of the sales cycle by decreasing the time it takes to close.
After every sales call, log objections as well as ideas the prospect seemed to respond to positively in a spreadsheet or CRM. Over time, patterns will emerge and you will naturally optimize for being better at sales.
Instead of "how do I get Product X into Company Y," ask "how can I help Company Y accomplish their mission with my product in a way they are currently unable to do?" The flipside of this question is "if I were CEO of Company Y, why should I want to buy Product X?"
Instead of "how do I convince Buyer Z to go with Product X," ask yourself "what are Buyer Z's incentives? Do they need to lower costs/increase their revenue/help their team communicate/etc?" Buyer Z has incentives - some of them corporate-wide, some of them specific to her/his day job, some of them very personal. Try to learn what those are.
Also remember that sometimes it's not a good fit, and that's okay. Preserve relationships. Sometimes you catch Buyer Z working for Company Y, and she says "right now, we're really not focused on $THINGYOUDO, and your price would be prohibitive anyway." Fast forward three months and she might have changed jobs into something that is very much $THINGYOUDO, and she now has a vastly increased budget. Much better for both of you if you have preserved the relationship.
Sales becomes a much easier road to walk if you remember "this person is a person just like me, and they've got things they're trying to accomplish in their day job. Let's see if I can help them out."
I think Saras Sarasvathy's Effectuation Model offers some excellent guidelines on how to approach building trust and developing a viable business relationship. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/02/07/saras-sarasvathys-e... and https://www.amazon.com/Effectual-Entrepreneurship-Stuart-Rea... for more on this.
Jerry Weissman's "Understand-Believe-Act" sales model is also a very good fault tree to use in diagnosing where your efforts may be stalled:
Understand: do prospects understand what it is you can do for them (here vision generation and simple explainer demos can help as well as basic case studies with clear examples).
Believe do prospects believe that you can deliver the results you promise (here technical proof demonstrations, benchmarks, case studies, references can all help).
Act: Do they have a reason to act. Are you addressing a critical business issue or a nice to have. What is the total cost of implementing your product (not just your price but any changes in workflow or practice or infrastructure that will be required). How does this compare to value. Is there a critical event or date that offers a strong reason to act.
See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/08/08/understand-believe-... and https://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Your-Story/dp/... for more on Weissman's model.
One can go beyond and suggest alternatives to their own product that might be a better fit. Remember to keep customer's best interest at heart.
I'm in dev tooling market and have suggested open source tools as alternative to my own products numerous times. The kind of trust I gained through it is immense.
The first goal is to start a conversation and the 2nd is to get a callback for a 2nd conversation.
I'm a big fan of Jeff Thull's approach to sales, as laid out in his books Mastering The Complex Sale, Exceptional Selling, and The Prime Solution. It really goes against the grain of the old school "grab 'em by the throat and don't let go until they buy" mentality. He rejects the kind of stuff you might associate with the sales guys in "Glengarry Glenn Ross" and advocates a much more respectful and honest approach, where the goal is to serve a role closer to that of a doctor or a private detective, than the stereotypical "used car salesman" type.
I couldn't do it justice trying to explain it here, but if this all sounds interesting, I really recommend reading at least Mastering The Complex Sale to get the idea straight from the source.
I also recommend reading How To Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. It has nothing to do with sales, at least on the surface. But in terms of understanding customer problems, I think the approach Hubbard espouses can be tremendously useful at a certain point in the process. And I think it can tie back to Thull's idea that if you work closely with the customer to actually jointly develop a solution and explain the value it creates, then there won't be any of the typical "closing" issues, since there won't be any question about the value of the solution.
One the plus side you'll close more deals because of your status as a founder. It makes customers feel confident that any issues they have will be addressed. So you have it easier than an AE which will pick this up after you.
I also like standardizing a few things: - customer intake doc (which questions to ask). really a lot of the sales process is listening to the customer and capturing their problem - explainer presentation. just some slides that you can send after the call. - setup hubspot, clearbit, fullcontact to make sure you know who your inbound leads are
I also enjoy reading SaaStr, most of the advice is for a bit later stage though. IE how to build your sales team.
You have to sign up for their mailing list to get it, but here's the static file:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...
Once I unlocked this, my close rate and inbound referrals went through the roof.
Literally closing 95% of leads and 100% of leads are from referrals.
Granted, this is in person 1 on 1 work but isn’t sense is that will translate into the other work you do.
To embody it and get it somatically the best way is to work with a coach or therapist and to get into more intimate relationships (romantic or creative) with someone who has a more secure attachment style.
Doing embodiment work, trauma work, practicing empathy and learning how to hold space.
Note -- you'll also have to be selling something you believe in and that is in integrity with your values -- otherwise you'll be working against yourself.
DM me if you'd like.
"If you build it, they will not come"
1. You're still trying to figure out exactly what it is you're building and how to best price/sell it. That is, you're still in more of a "customer development" mode than a pure "push the accelerator on sales for all it's worth" model.
2. You don't have any money to hire a sales person, because you're either bootstrapping or haven't raised a round yet.
That said, one hidden benefit of hiring someone to help with sales is that it forces you to spend time focusing on it (instead of just coding or whatever). It's sort of an expensive way to practice time management, but it can work if you need that push. Just don't expect the person to actually sell anything--figuring that out will still be mostly up to you.
But... there is probably a baseline price below which it doesn't make sense to have a full time sales person knocking on doors. In that case, drop down one level to "Inside Sales" where you hire people to cold call a list and pitch your product.
If your product can't afford inside sales, sell direct online and optimize your funnel.
* Train yourself to equate the dopamine hit you get with running a new piece of code you made with the act (not necessarily success) of performing a sales activity. For example, by the end of today, do 10 cold emails and 10 cold calls. Then, feel good about it. Don't worry about the outcomes just yet; get into the groove of performing the act.
* Get out of the room. Always be getting coffee, going to meetups, connecting with groups you part of, etc. The more people know who you are, the more people can help you.
Process is everything. If you can map out the entire sales process in sequences, you can find ways to optimize it.
I started my sales funnel with mostly manual touch points, and gradually started adding automation (automated cadences, automated scheduling, and etc) and we were able to increase our efficiency by 200%.
Track EVERYTHING. Each metric matters a lot, and if you don't have a dashboard of all the metrics, you are going to make some bad decisions (learned it through trial and error)
Also read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Wolf-Straight-Persuasion-Influenc...
His 9th slide here basically outlines how to quantitatively identify what your core problem is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/a75lejeqli1rmrs/Suhail%20Doshi%20-...
A lot like tech there are tools for every problem and in sales there is a playbook for every kind of product.
They'll go over everything you need to know about sales. The first thing to learn is that sales is an umbrella term for a lot of different activities many of which won't be relevant to the type of sales you do.
The first two questions you should answer is what type of sale are you making and to who. Selling a $5/month consumer product is very different from selling $300,000/yr product to the CFO of a fortune 500.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sales/comments/3y1jb9/the_best_thre...
My wife's natural tendency is to help solve problems for people. Before that book, she'd talk to someone, noticed that the most urgent problem that they wanted solved is her bothering them, and the obvious solution would leave her with no sale.
Now she is able to playfully get their interest and attention. She gets them to talk through a real problem that they have, it doesn't matter what. She helps them work through how to solve it. She doesn't try to sell them anything. It is up to them to decide whether the experience was enjoyable and valuable enough that they wish to work with https://www.leanst.com/ more. Enough do that sales is fun for her, and has not been a bottleneck to growth.
You're not selling consulting and aren't her, so her exact approach probably won't work for you. But I'd still bet that that book will help you.
https://www.useronboard.com/imgs/posts/mario-water.png
Source: https://www.useronboard.com/features-vs-benefits/
One of the most important part about sales IMO is to remember that you're dealing with humans on the other side who have their own personal and professional incentives. Think about how you can make your customer look like a genius, get promoted, help make some process better/cheaper or get to a business goal quicker. Do you have a solution to help achieve one of those outcomes? This requires listening far more than speaking and will always result in selling solutions to problems...product feature/functionality is just the way to get there. You may be very proud of everything you've built, and rightly so, but the customer only cares about their own outcomes and whether you can help them achieve it.
In the beginning, most people are probably going to dismiss what you've built. That's normal--people have a bias against adding yet another tool to the pile (for good reason). So unless your product is an exact bullseye for solving their problem, and has no real drawbacks, they won't be seriously interested. That's actually fine. You can have an extremely low conversion rate in the beginning. As long as you can find someone who is enthusiastic about what you're doing (and ideally wants to pay you for it), they will show you the path forward.