Founding Sales

You need to have and project full confidence that you’re going to win the deal, but at the same time be unfazed when you do not.

If your demo is non-contextual and not tied directly to the business realities of the prospect, it will always smell like you’re running the demo to make the product perform at its peak attractiveness.

Objections are great. They mean that your prospect is engaged, and at least thinking about the problem you’re addressing.

Understanding the costs associated with the problem you’re addressing will help you frame an argument for why would-be customers should expend budget on your solution.

If you traditionally charge $9,000 up front for a seat of your solution, for a twelve-month contract, but the customer states they don’t have the budget to swing that, you can offer monthly pricing of $999 for a twelve-month contract.

To help win customers at this stage, your job is to maximize each customer interaction—and effectively transform your customers into fans.

Start with the minimum viable coverage of each piece of the narrative, and then build out as appropriate.

Once you know what you want your culture to be, you need to document it for distribution and reference.

For instance, if you are selling to the recruiting market, then it’s important to know all the things that will be important to your client: number of inbound candidates, quality of candidate, response rate of candidates, cost per hire, time to hire, quality of hire, and hiring funnel drop-off.

There’s very little chance that your solution operates in a vacuum, so it’s important for your staff to understand the market.

The most important thing to remember is that you’re not selling the product on this call. You’re selling the opportunity to spend a limited amount of time to understand the prospect’s pains better.

This is largely an exercise in information gathering, and as such, is an investment exercise, as much as a revenue-generating exercise.

Sales professionals are in the business of taking a known-good solution, and taking it to market, in a repeatable scalable way. They’re good at finding prospects that match a known-good persona.

Reject a mindset of scarcity—and, hence, hoarding—and embrace a mindset of plenty.

Quantity has a quality all its own.