customer development and sales

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Someone from the community (thanks Kincy) was kind enough to invite me to be on their podcast this week and asked a great question, “what does a dirty rotten salesperson know about customer development?”. He was much nicer about it, I’m paraphrasing, but I thought it was a great question that warranted a more thoughtful reply.

When I first started doing ‘customer development’ interviews, I took the phrase a little too literally. I had spent 10 years working with CRMs and considered myself an expert, I wasn’t but I didn’t realize it yet. This was a Dunning-Kruger moment for me. I had read books from Steve Blank, Eric Ries, & Ash Maurya but completely missed the part about customer development being about the customer. Instead, I weaponized their ideas to rationalize my approach, showing potential customers what I was working on and asking for feedback instead of asking questions to find their unmet needs.

The mistake I made was making the interviews about me (hit me back with an 🙋 emoji if you’ve done the same). These were my ideas, I thought I was the Steve Jobs of sales, and future customers should bow down to my brilliance. I’m not and they didn’t. Interestingly, I had a valuable and correct insight about the CRM market in 2012, that SaaS CRM was no longer a personal productivity tool for salespeople. In spite of this, I managed to work myself into a superposition of being both wrong and right.

On reflecting, it’s embarrassing because I was a good sales rep at that point and a good rep should know to start a conversation with strong discovery. Discovery, in sales, is the process of understanding the environment the prospect is operating in, the progress they are looking to make, and the impact the progress will have on their organization. The golden rule is to share as little with the prospect until you’ve completed most of your Discovery. This isn’t some dirty sales jedi trick (most of those don’t work anyway). It’s to prevent reps from dumping unnecessary context on a prospect and wasting everyone’s time. Think of a sales rep like a DJ, they could play from a near unlimited selection of songs but a good DJ will know how to find that perfect song to get everyone dancing. Good Discovery is about understanding which songs your prospect wants to hear.

Discovery conversations usually follows a flow of Context, Progress, Impact. Once you understand all three, you summarize what you’ve heard and ask the prospect if you missed anything. When you understand them and they’ve confirmed you haven’t missed anything, you’ve reached the point of mutual understanding. Now you’ve earned the right to make a recommendation. If the prospect likes your recommendation, they’ll run Discovery on you to understand the Context, Progress, and Impact of your solution.

Hit me back with “graphics!” if some truly terrible illustrations of my Discovery / Sales process would help you understand it better. They’re helpful but super ugly.

I knew all of this going into my interviews but I missed it because I was too excited about my own ideas. The moment that woke me up was when a mentor told me, “I can’t wait until you’re working on something that has a chance of being successful.” It sounds mean but it was the exact wake up call that I needed to realize that the customer development process wasn’t about validating my own ideas, it was about finding unmet needs. It helped me realize that good Customer Development was just the Discovery phase of the sales process. This insight changed the game for me.

I moved from a process that started with showing people what I was working on to one where I told them very little until I had reached the point of mutual understanding. One difference from the sales process, instead of making recommendations, I switched to asking my magic wand question & calibration questions.

Back to Kincy’s question, what does a dirty salesperson know about Customer Development? Quite a bit actually. Because, Discovery is Discovery. Once you’ve learned how to ask good questions, follow a process, and actually listen to the person on the other side of the conversation, you’ve pretty much mastered both Sales and Customer Development. Sure, there are tactics that can make both easier but if you can do Discovery, you’re 90% of the way there.

Did I just trick you into reading about sales tactics? You bet. Do I feel bad about it? Not even a little bit :)

Happy selling. You are great at it even if you don’t want to admit it.

Collin