you are in sales

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Thanks to Will, Stephanie, Bill, Rick, Louis, Tony, Ganatra, Grisel, Mark, Steve, & Andrew for sharing your customer development numbers. For those interested, the average number of interviews was 70 and the median was 50.

Today’s email is much longer than usual and I’d love your feedback on the format. Reply back with “longer” if you like the long form content like this or “shorter” if the previous weeks emails were a more appropriate length.

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You are in sales.
It’s ok, you’ll be fine. Most people base their opinion of the sales profession based on their own personal buying experiences, which are usually B2C. B2B is a whole different sport. I’ll walk you through the differences between the two and share why you are likely to be one of the best reps your company will ever see.

I’ve sold used car, not cars, just one. Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. I took the job because someone, my mom, told me not to and I’m not very good at listening. She was right, I hated it and quit two weeks later after only selling one car.

Selling cars is a hard game. You spend most of your time waiting for someone to walk in and when someone does you glance around the room to see if you’re “up”, then you’re in action. That’s if people at your dealership respect the “up” system, some don’t. The up system is a rotation between the reps so everyone gets an even shot at the number of people they talk to every day. It’s easy to see how this environment leads to undesirable customer experiences. When a large part of your paycheque relies on commission, you have no ability to impact the number of leads you get, and don’t know when you’ll have another shot at closing a deal, reps tend to push each lead a little bit harder than prospects might like. Not all car dealerships are like this and there are real sales professionals that work in the field. I just wanted to point out how the environment can shape the attitude of the reps. 

Additionally, selling direct to consumers sucks, at least in my experience. People can be irrational and emotional, myself especially, when spending their own money. It takes a special type of human to be able to absorb all this energy, sit with a consumer, and try to help them. I don’t have it in me. I strongly prefer selling to other businesses. The same people that make irrational and emotional purchase decisions as consumers are much easier to work with when someone else’s money is on the line. This removes most of the emotion from the equation and lets us focus on solving problems. 

Selling to businesses is about helping them make progress on something important to their bottom line. You have three ways to help, increase revenue, decrease costs, or reduce risk. It’s important to remember that first impressions are important and if you start off a relationship as the rep that helps them decrease cost, eventually the only way to get their cost lower will be to push your price (and commission) down. On the flip side, if you’re the rep that helps them grow revenue, they’ll always look to you when they have money to invest in growing revenue. Take our outsourcing business as an example. We provide a fractional SDR, sales dev leader, sales ops, and all the tools/data. When we talk to a customer we could lead with cost savings (cheaper than building internally*) or revenue generation (X meetings, Y pipeline, and Z future revenue). Either one works but one of them works much better. 

*Note: we’ll dig deeper into what it takes to build an SDR program later because it’s not always cheaper to outsource and well-run internal teams almost always outperform external teams. It generally comes down to how many SDRs you want and the resources you have on your team. 

Start with the end in mind.
One of my first B2B sales roles was added to the side of my desk because I’d found a way to automate my marketing role by copy pasting a few macros from Stackoverflow together. I was asked to follow up on some old leads to sell the Evacutrac, a portable wheelchair evacuation device to churches and community centers. These are for any public building that needs a way of evacuating someone in an emergency when the elevators and lifts are shut down. The leads were old (I knew because I helped run lead distribution) and I was struggling to make my calls when Mike, our top rep, gave me some advice. He told me to imagine myself in a wheelchair on the 3rd floor of our building, a fire has just broken out and all the elevators/lifts are now shut down. How am I supposed to get out? I paused, stuck in the hypothetical nightmare, and he said “that’s who you’re calling for, it’s not about the money, your goal is to help that person get out of the building alive.” Suddenly, the cold list of leads didn’t seem so scary. If you’re worried about taking on the sales role, reframe it by thinking about the impact your product has on the end user and their business. How does it impact their bottom line, the goals of the person who made the purchase, and all the people that might be impacted either directly or indirectly? If your product is genuinely helping people solve problems then you are on the cusp of acting maliciously if you don’t do your best to find everyone that might share the problem. I love solving problems and sales conversations are especially fun when you’re helping someone make progress on something that’s important to them. 

I was speaking to a founder named Gordon the other day and he was talking about how he couldn’t wait to get a “real salesperson” in the door. I reminded him that he was the number one sales rep, on a team of one, at his company for the last three years and asked how he expected someone new to come in and outperform him so quickly. He thought that anyone with sales experience would be able to quickly outperform him. What do you think? Who is likely to be a better salesperson (initially at least), the person who understands the problem better than anyone else in the world or the person that knows how to spell BANT? 

Side note: I’m not trying to take anything away from the complexity or professionalism of the sales craft. I’ve always seen sales as my trade and likely always will. My goal with the above is to help founders see that they already have the knowledge to help buyer’s solve their problems and sales will be much easier than they think. 

The purpose of building a new company is to help a future buyer solve a problem they couldn't solve before. Sales is just a small step on the buyer’s journey from problem identified to solved. As a founder, you’re the person that went through the customer development interviews, heard first-hand about people’s unmet needs, and built something to address the gap in the market. Who better to help solve these future customer’s problems than the person who is the expert in solving X problem in Y way? There is nobody better. Sales is only a tiny part of the buyer’s journey. Sales’ goal with a prospective buyer is to understand the shape of their problem to see if our solution would be helpful, make a recommendation, and then set good expectations for what it will take to solve the problem. 

Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, argued that rational human beings ought to be viewed as an end in their own right, rather than as tools for achieving other aims. We need to think of our customers with the same respect, we are in the business of making customers successful, not merely making them successful as a means of growing our company. Sales / go-to-market is just your way of scaling up your ability to help people. 

Getting sales off my plate.
In my experience, many startup founders are quick to delegate or outsource their sales efforts before hitting the $1 million revenue mark. This, in my view, is a misstep. Achieving your first $1 million isn't just a sales function, it is an extension of the customer development process. A good sales conversation is nearly identical to the customer development process, you just ask for money at the end. Think of it as your 'startup university' final project, it's the culmination of everything you’ve learned and your first opportunity to test your theory in the wild.  

Remember, a true customer relationship is created with a financial transaction; without that, can we truly say we've engaged in customer development? I know I’ve avoided the task when I knew deep down that we didn’t have product market fit but didn’t want to admit it. I kept saying to myself “just one more feature and then I’ll get out there”. 

So, what does a good sales conversation look like? 

Do not whip your deck out. You are not allowed to pitch/demo/or talk about your product until you’ve reached the point of mutual understanding. You get there with questions. First you need to understand the context of the buyer, what have they tried before, how did that go, why now, who else is involved? Next you need clarity on the progress they want to make, what is the job to be done and the obstacle impeding their progress. Finally, it’s important to understand the impact the progress will have on their organization. Now that you know all of this, summarize it and ask the prospect what you missed. Sometimes I have to do this a few times because I did miss or misunderstand something, that’s totally normal. Once they give you the Chris Voss certified “that’s right”, you can move on to the next step. 

Your recommendation comes next. It’s your advice on how to solve their problem based on what you’ve learned so far. There are three types of recommendations: I think we can help, I don’t think we can help, and I’m not sure. The best part of phrasing things this way is they invite conversation. 

With any of these recommendations you’re not saying “here, buy my shit”, you’re handing them a shirt and saying “try this on and let me know what you think”. It’s a directional question, not a closing tactic. You’re saying to the prospect, here’s what I see and how I think I’d solve it, what do you think? You’re just sharing an idea and looking for feedback on it. The best part of this process is it prevents you from going down the rabbit hole of talking about features/benefits of products the buyer doesn’t care about. You’re calibrating what you’re going to talk about next based on how they see the problem. It’s totally normal to spend most of a call asking questions and only leave a few minutes at the end for the recommendation. How this breaks down will vary greatly for you based on what you’re selling, how much $$ we’re talking about, and the type of buyer you're selling to. Here is roughly what it looks like for me when I’m involved in a sales conversation at Predictable Revenue: 

First call (45 - 60 mins)

• First 5% social 

• Middle 80-90% discovery questions

• Last 5% recommendation & setting next steps 

Second call (30 - 60 mins) 

• First 5% social + recap of last conversation 

• Middle 40% buyer’s asking questions about my recommendation

• Middle 40% myself asking deeper questions about the buyer’s context (asking my bant/meddpicc questions) 

• Last 5% new or updated recommendation & next steps 

An average customer of mine needs 5 calls from first meet to buying decision. Any calls after the 2nd will be structured very similarly. Sometimes we’ll bring in additional stakeholders on the second call, in which case I’ll redo my discovery questions with them. Sometimes, they’ll want to meet the coach they’re working with which we try to leave to the last call. When I look at the ‘buying conversation’, it’s breaks into the following stages: 

• Understand the buyer’s context 

• Clarify the progress they want to make 

• Quantify the impact that progress will have on the buyer’s organization

• Point of Mutual Understanding - I summarize the above and buyer confirms I got it right

• Make a recommendation & discuss

• Buyer asks about the relevant context of my product/service 

• Buyer asks about the progress we’ll help with

• Buyer makes & communicates decision 

• Housekeeping details (contracts, payments, & next steps) 

Notice how when you reframe sales to make it about helping buyer’s solve problems, the actual sale is the smallest piece? It reminds me of my contribution to our family having kids, brief but important. It’s arguably the least important part to the customer. As founders trying to grow our company, it is very easy to fixate on the function and related numbers as the only thing that matters. Sales is just here to help the buyer make a good decision, whether that’s to use our product or not. 

Salespeople find demand, not create it.
A great B2B sales process is really just preparing the customer for how they can make progress on this big hard problem they have. Good salespeople can’t manufacture problems or convince you to solve something that doesn’t make sense. They simply help the buyer understand the shape of their problem and if it’ll be well served by the shape of their solution. In most cases, the actual dollar cost of your product / solution will have the smallest impact on the customer. The internal cost of the implementation usually outweighs the amount spent on the actual software licenses. These include customizing the software, changing the process, and retraining staff.  But even these are just first order costs. The second order costs are the cost of time, not from an hourly rate perspective, but from a did I hit my goal this quarter/year perspective. 

Making a change in a business is not something people do for fun. Change usually starts with someone noticing something is either broken or could be much better. First they need to diagnose the root cause of the issue, is it a people, process, or technology issue? Sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s a mix of all three. Once they’ve diagnosed the issue, they need to figure out the best way to solve it, better process/people, more people, or find a piece of software or a service to fill in. Then they need to find a tool that closely aligns with the shape of their particular problem and make the business case internally that they should purchase this tool. Next, they buy and implement the tool. Reaching the magical ‘problem solved’ moment can take 1-12 months depending on the complexity of the solution. After 3 months, their team is likely to have adjusted to the new tool and process. After 6 months they’re likely to be close to full adoption. The internal cost of the implementation usually outweighs the amount spent on the actual software licenses.

Closing.
Reframing sales as helping buyer’s make progress has changed my perspective on ‘how to close’ customers. It’s no longer about closing them, it’s about whether or not it makes sense for them to solve the problem now, and if so, whether we’re the best place to start. I find this takes the pressure off and prevents me from looking for tactics that can help me manipulate buyers into signing with me (there aren’t any good ones).

If you made it this far, thanks for reading this whole thing. Hit me back with a “made it!” if you did. This is likely the bones of a chapter for the book. It’s not done yet and I was worried about sharing something incomplete. I shared it today because if it’s not at least a little scary, it’s probably not worth doing.

Thanks for reading,

Collin Stewart