This is a great lesson from the article: "Prioritize the opportunities that are furthest along, biggest, and most likely to close. If you do that, you’ll manage your pipeline most efficiently." -> the best way to learn how to prioritize is to fill your pipeline with more sales leads than you can handle. Nothing like a 14 hour workday in sales teaches you about how a good lead for your business looks like. You can't give every sales lead an equal chance. It's basic sales triage: don't concentrate on leads who you'll win anyway or who you can never win, focus your most work on leads who need your expertise to make a decision (for you).
As a techie , I dreaded making sales calls. I hated my accent, I hated my voice and I dreaded being rejected.
Then recently someone on HN mentioned this book "Go For No" by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. I have it on my kindle and it changed my attitude towards sales. I have yet to get traction with my bootstrap but I am learning more with each conversation. Rejection is so much more informative than A/B testing you web page.
We are 3 months old startup, have ipad and tablet apps in developement, zero experience in sales, our developers are freshers except me with 10 years exp in coding. We thought of trying to get some customers and strangers feedback about our product and their interest before launching the apps on app store. When we mail the prospect about our product, they don't even reply, it may be discarded.
We then tried showing up some data about prospects in our app, attached android, ipad images, at least they could say that they are not interested at this time, or they may decide and let us know sooner. Some of them pick our call, clarify their understanding about apps. Some of them are going ahead and asked for price, how to get the apps working on their mobile device.
For each prospect, our sales rep has to spend a lot of time preparing the data that is relevant to our potential prospect, to send the screen shots.
This article is very good to target high potential prospect who can give us good business even if we spend a 2-3 days to prepare the data for them. Since we lack in sales, we don't know the best way to get this done. For each prospect we have to spend a lot of time, if they are not interested, we are losing our time.
I agree on the content, but disagree on the form of some of the points.
Example:
Budget:
Validate leads. Yes, of course. However, I don't like that asking someone how much they're willing to spend. Not under this form, at least.
This information is none of anyone's business than the prospect (speaking as a prospect). However, it's an important information, so the salesman needs to adapt to get that information. He might not ask for it, but needs to get it.
Some cues on the means of the prospect can be visible, but this can be deceiving. Bling bling people often are broke overcompensating folks.
Conversation fu can also be used indirectly to get the information, but the prospect can be good at that and drop just the right amount of hints to convey he can afford it..
Authority:
Speaking to the right person. Yes. However, this is done on two sides: Convincing the pockets, using the daughter as leverage.
Asking the father "Besides yourself, who else is involved with the purchase" isn't, in my opinion, the right form.
Because it's like asking a man "Is your wife grabbing your ?". A man will never admit someone else holds the power. Those who do, the "I won't lie to you, she's the boss.." are way beyond the point of no return, but at least, they're at peace and you can go for it.
But with those who won't admit to that, you need to be careful not to scratch the ego. The problem isn't the fact he has no power inspite him being the earner, the problem is that you mustn't know. So you always make it seem it's his decision, and won't acknowledge the fact the wife or the daughter chose. He must feel good about the decision he -someone else- made.
With this, too, observation is key. You see a man with his daughter and wife, and you know. You see how they interact, and you see who's a daddy girl or a bossy wife, who's a wimp and who's dominating and who'se domineering. These are all subtleties one observes.
Needs:
Agree. How about a Cayenne ? It's fast, it's German, it's luxurious (a Porsche, after all) and it's got 4 doors. You drop the kids, and pick-up a young lady a two minutes later.
Handling objections is of paramount importance (Sometimes triggering them helps, too. I know it may sound weird, but triggering an objection on a point early on when the objection doesn't really matter (because there's no action tied to it at that time) is useful for when you go over that point later because the objection was already triggered earlier (or about another, less important point)).
I haven't sold a $100M for anyone, but let's say I have a slight knack for enabling people to do what they really want to do, but didn't find a way to.
If you're following up and are not getting a response then set a limit to the number of times you'll try again. I personally do 3 follow-up email over the course of a 3-6 weeks. On the last email, I let them know it'll be the last time I follow-up and let them know how they can reach me if they'd like to talk in the future.
If you just keep following up and never stop, you'll likely annoy someone who is probably not interested in what you're selling and you'll likely get spam filtered.
One other spin on the follow up comes in timing and content:
Follow up after 2 days, 7 days, 2 weeks, 3 months, and annually. This increasing time frame rarely is found to be annoying and is an effective way to keep in front of them. Also try and send a new set of content after 2 contacts.
Do you have any specific suggestions on how to connect with the higher level decision maker when you were contacted by a lower level employee? Thanks for the great article.
I'm sorry, but my inner hacker just has to mention this: There's a syntax error in your BANT script - one closing paranthesis missing at "(match(features, needs)". But the article overall is great!
if ( (budget >= price) AND (Authority.isInvolved()) AND
(match(features, needs) AND (timeframe == now)) {
Really great advice. All of the points made in this article can be distilled into one maxim - LISTEN. If you actually listen to your customer instead of trying to "sell" your product the conversation will naturally lead into discussions of budget, time frame, objections, etc.
The biggest mistake I've made with sales is getting nervous and talking too much. Ask open-ended questions and let the prospect do the rest.
Can't stress getting to the top quickly enough. It's so rare for a sale to close from the bottom-up in my personal experience.
I have a counter to the emphasis of getting to the top. I used to work for a much larger company (definitely "enterprise") and as a product manager I was often the decider of a vendor to use. There were times where the vendors' sales teams wanted to make an end-run and get to someone on the upper management/executive level to influence the decision.
If anything, that became more of a negative because it meant that I had to spend more time managing those conversations rather than analyzing the fit for their product.
I would change "getting to the top quickly" to "identifying the decision maker and getting to them quickly".
as a developer, how can I target the enterprise market, namely ERP, CRM type of software? I wouldn't mind creating one from scratch or based on some open source software and delivering that.
One point to note is that you don't necessarily need to explicitly ask their budget, you can ask questions about the size of their operation instead. eg. For an IT sale, ask about number of employees in the IT department, number of desktops serviced, tech refresh cycle frequency, server numbers, etc... You can then get a gauge on what their true overall budget is without having to ask for it - as that will possibly be lowballed. A 100 man department with 10000+ desktops to support can probably afford a 6-digit equipment sale, whereas a 10 man dept. with only a hundred users will perhaps be looking at low 5-digits spare on their budget.
Similar applies to the authority question. The larger the department/company, the less likely that a huge sale will be authorised by just one individual. Although the contrary can also sometimes be true in this case - very small/new companies may have the directors signing off on all the major purchases.
Personally, I'm very strong on the social networking side. And I love the engineering side, too. Part of the attraction to consulting for me is in meeting and getting to know new people. Especially, C-level. I've always done best reporting to or working directly with senior management or owners.
Spending too much time in one can leave the other feeling under-utilized. I'm guessing I'll end up needing to have engineers on contract and have 70:30 business dev to engineering ratio or something. I'm not sure but that ratio seems about right given how much time the social networking side needs to keep money coming in consistently.
Plus, there's the downtime needed to make the mental switch from one to the other. Or maybe just contract out all the work and do my various hobby projects on the side to satisfy the engineer in me.
Edit: Cold Calling: Things I learned in a non-tech venture.
Visualizations, and rehearsals (mental and physical) of each step of the calling process were very, very helpful. One click dialing straight off a spreadsheet of cold contacts made things easier, too.
After getting through the first 100 or so numbers dialing started to give me a rush. Fear was starting to be replaced by excitement. Very curious experience.
One other thing. I was told to expect, and found, roughly speaking, half of the numbers I dialed on an industry specific list of small to medium sized companies, no one answered. Another quarter were busy or couldn't talk and it really had nothing to do with me.
These numbers held across a few different industries. Since I was rather likely to NOT reach someone for a conversation I found it much easier to dial.
Great post! As a sales guy (non-hacker), I think this post properly lays a foundation for technical founders and hackers to begin the sales process from MVP to first sales-hire. Like the author, I'm open to offering any tips/advice to help you make progress in your efforts.
23 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadYour time is your most valuable commodity and you will have less as you get older. Don't waste it on unqualified leads, ever.
Then recently someone on HN mentioned this book "Go For No" by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. I have it on my kindle and it changed my attitude towards sales. I have yet to get traction with my bootstrap but I am learning more with each conversation. Rejection is so much more informative than A/B testing you web page.
We then tried showing up some data about prospects in our app, attached android, ipad images, at least they could say that they are not interested at this time, or they may decide and let us know sooner. Some of them pick our call, clarify their understanding about apps. Some of them are going ahead and asked for price, how to get the apps working on their mobile device.
For each prospect, our sales rep has to spend a lot of time preparing the data that is relevant to our potential prospect, to send the screen shots.
This article is very good to target high potential prospect who can give us good business even if we spend a 2-3 days to prepare the data for them. Since we lack in sales, we don't know the best way to get this done. For each prospect we have to spend a lot of time, if they are not interested, we are losing our time.
Example:
Budget:
Validate leads. Yes, of course. However, I don't like that asking someone how much they're willing to spend. Not under this form, at least.
This information is none of anyone's business than the prospect (speaking as a prospect). However, it's an important information, so the salesman needs to adapt to get that information. He might not ask for it, but needs to get it.
Some cues on the means of the prospect can be visible, but this can be deceiving. Bling bling people often are broke overcompensating folks.
Conversation fu can also be used indirectly to get the information, but the prospect can be good at that and drop just the right amount of hints to convey he can afford it..
Authority:
Speaking to the right person. Yes. However, this is done on two sides: Convincing the pockets, using the daughter as leverage.
Asking the father "Besides yourself, who else is involved with the purchase" isn't, in my opinion, the right form.
Because it's like asking a man "Is your wife grabbing your ?". A man will never admit someone else holds the power. Those who do, the "I won't lie to you, she's the boss.." are way beyond the point of no return, but at least, they're at peace and you can go for it.
But with those who won't admit to that, you need to be careful not to scratch the ego. The problem isn't the fact he has no power inspite him being the earner, the problem is that you mustn't know. So you always make it seem it's his decision, and won't acknowledge the fact the wife or the daughter chose. He must feel good about the decision he -someone else- made.
With this, too, observation is key. You see a man with his daughter and wife, and you know. You see how they interact, and you see who's a daddy girl or a bossy wife, who's a wimp and who's dominating and who'se domineering. These are all subtleties one observes.
Needs: Agree. How about a Cayenne ? It's fast, it's German, it's luxurious (a Porsche, after all) and it's got 4 doors. You drop the kids, and pick-up a young lady a two minutes later.
Handling objections is of paramount importance (Sometimes triggering them helps, too. I know it may sound weird, but triggering an objection on a point early on when the objection doesn't really matter (because there's no action tied to it at that time) is useful for when you go over that point later because the objection was already triggered earlier (or about another, less important point)).
I haven't sold a $100M for anyone, but let's say I have a slight knack for enabling people to do what they really want to do, but didn't find a way to.
If you just keep following up and never stop, you'll likely annoy someone who is probably not interested in what you're selling and you'll likely get spam filtered.
Sometimes we just have to take the hint :)
if ( (budget >= price) AND (Authority.isInvolved()) AND (match(features, needs) AND (timeframe == now)) {
The biggest mistake I've made with sales is getting nervous and talking too much. Ask open-ended questions and let the prospect do the rest.
Can't stress getting to the top quickly enough. It's so rare for a sale to close from the bottom-up in my personal experience.
If anything, that became more of a negative because it meant that I had to spend more time managing those conversations rather than analyzing the fit for their product.
I would change "getting to the top quickly" to "identifying the decision maker and getting to them quickly".
Similar applies to the authority question. The larger the department/company, the less likely that a huge sale will be authorised by just one individual. Although the contrary can also sometimes be true in this case - very small/new companies may have the directors signing off on all the major purchases.
Spending too much time in one can leave the other feeling under-utilized. I'm guessing I'll end up needing to have engineers on contract and have 70:30 business dev to engineering ratio or something. I'm not sure but that ratio seems about right given how much time the social networking side needs to keep money coming in consistently.
Plus, there's the downtime needed to make the mental switch from one to the other. Or maybe just contract out all the work and do my various hobby projects on the side to satisfy the engineer in me.
Edit: Cold Calling: Things I learned in a non-tech venture.
Visualizations, and rehearsals (mental and physical) of each step of the calling process were very, very helpful. One click dialing straight off a spreadsheet of cold contacts made things easier, too.
After getting through the first 100 or so numbers dialing started to give me a rush. Fear was starting to be replaced by excitement. Very curious experience.
One other thing. I was told to expect, and found, roughly speaking, half of the numbers I dialed on an industry specific list of small to medium sized companies, no one answered. Another quarter were busy or couldn't talk and it really had nothing to do with me.
These numbers held across a few different industries. Since I was rather likely to NOT reach someone for a conversation I found it much easier to dial.
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...
I know there are some techniques I use from the book that helped me significantly.
Best of luck to all.