## Highlights you need someone who can take a partially baked product, formulate a coherent narrative around it, present it, and then iterate. You need evangelical sales, which is a mix of product management and product marketing. You need you. — location: 264 ^ref-63294 --- they think they “can’t do sales” because they’ve never done it before. Or that they’re not “salesy.” This is absolute bullshit. Sales acumen is not inborn. It’s just another skill to be learned. And if you can’t roll up your sleeves and learn a new skill set, then woe betide your startup, because startups are just one long chain of learning new things — location: 278 ^ref-25022 --- I like to joke with new members of my team that doing sales changes neural pathways in your brain—but it’s really not a joke. They end up agreeing with me a few months in. A lot of the behaviors required for sales success are a massive departure from the ones you’ve valued in your career to date, even from generally accepted ways of being in society. But while they may feel uncomfortable at first, they have led, time and time again, to sales success. — location: 290 ^ref-62420 --- Reject a mindset of scarcity—and, hence, hoarding—and embrace a mindset of plenty. The thinking should be “Even if this one does not work out, there’s a line of thousands standing behind it that I need to get to.” So if a deal is stalling, if the customer doesn’t have the budget, if it turns out an account is not a perfect fit, and so on, great, fine, close it out. On to the next. You’ll get them the next time around. — location: 303 ^ref-64882 --- The thing that is scarce in sales is time. — location: 306 ^ref-38928 --- Everyone’s a fan of working “smarter, not harder” in the modern knowledge-worker economy. Well, sometimes you just have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. — location: 318 ^ref-22829 --- More time on the phone. More demos. More proposals sent. More emails sent. More dials. More keystrokes. All of the above is activity, and activity is the goal. — location: 323 ^ref-21872 --- Jump first, prepare midair. Template all communication. Drive activity, and output will follow. — location: 328 ^ref-47247 --- One proofread is all that email needs. Send it, and then move on to the other fifty you have to send to your pipeline today. Don’t overthink. Just act. — location: 336 ^ref-64545 --- Society often gets along through polite obfuscation. Through indirection. Through politesse, and circuitousness. Not in sales land, friend. Much of sales is about getting down to brass tacks. Do you have the problem I’m trying to solve? Are you in agreement that it needs a solution? Are you prepared to spend money to solve it? — location: 338 ^ref-24227 --- For the first-time sales pro, the scale of person-to-person interaction is a massive adjustment. Think about how many distinct people you typically interact with in a given week. If you’re like most professionals, it’s likely a constellation of one or two dozen people with whom you have frequent, ongoing interactions that build over time, and with whom you have substantial history. With sales, it’s the opposite — location: 349 ^ref-20235 --- If you have indeed qualified an account as a good fit, then the mindset should look something like this—“This is going to happen. It makes sense for you. This solution is the future, and it will make you more successful now and going forward. — location: 365 ^ref-36248 --- 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. Being unfazed by rejection, and not internalizing it as a negative reflection on you or your offering, is key to maintaining the tempo and confidence required for sales success. — location: 385 ^ref-4456 --- On my sales teams, we call it “setting ‘future you’ up for success.” That is, when you come back to look at this account in a week, month, or quarter, what information will you wish you had? Record that now while it’s available, and make the ephemeral permanent. — location: 399 ^ref-9694 --- Compel yourself to talk to grocery store clerks, people in lines, or strangers at parties with no introductory context. You’ll be exercising your fearlessness muscles. — location: 422 ^ref-5086 --- If you are doing a good job, you will have all customer-facing interaction instrumented and recorded—every single email, every presentation, and every call—either in its entirety in the case of presentations and email, or in some partial capacity when it comes to calls and conversations. You should get comfortable with teammates jumping into those records and asking questions about why a call went this way or that way. Your creation of this transparent data is of paramount importance for the success of the organization, from both a go-to-market and a product-development standpoint. — location: 426 ^ref-44286 --- There will be a circular feedback loop between the product narrative and your sales narrative as it meets the market and either fails, succeeds, or does a little of both. So this shouldn’t be looked at as something set in stone, but rather as a hypothesis that will change over time. But you still have to have a coherent rough draft to start. — location: 488 ^ref-56978 --- Know, and be able to articulate, the problem you’re addressing. — location: 535 ^ref-24737 --- Generally, having a crisp sense of the specific titles you are selling to will help lead to the right accounts, because accounts that don’t have those titles in-house won’t be qualified. We’ll get into that more when we talk about prospecting. — location: 569 ^ref-56653 --- Now it’s time to present why your solution does a better job, as measured in the same language as existing solutions. Typically, it’ll be as simple as “Our offering does more X” or “Our offering requires less Y.” What that X and Y are will depend on the space, but that will typically be the formula. — location: 698 ^ref-13860 --- Take a second to think about what the comparators in the market might be for your solution and their pricing. If you don’t know, go figure it out and use it to inform your thinking. — location: 775 ^ref-11185 --- if you block an organization’s ability to “just buy one to try it out,” be aware that you are making your sales challenge harder. With your solution, can you align value and threshold in a way that eases your entry into organizations, while at the same time positioning you well for growth? — location: 821 ^ref-65265 --- Segmenting your solution can be a great approach later on to extract better pricing out of higher-end clients who are price insensitive. But early on, it’s usually a distraction. — location: 851 ^ref-31408 --- We’re going to cover only the few you should start with—namely, slides for a sales presentation, email templates and phone scripts for prospecting and appointment setting, sales-demo scripting, and basic video content. — location: 943 ^ref-15826 --- When there is a trade-off between “perfect” and “good enough to persuade the customer,” opt for speed. — location: 957 ^ref-19405 --- And much like your sales narrative, it will pretty much always be a work in progress. The more you embrace this notion of “always shipping” marketing collateral, kind of like your product, the better off you will be. It will drive the correct behavior—that is, not thinking about a deck as being “done”—and remove the onus for a “perfect” deck. It will also compel you to think about your deck and other materials in an extensible fashion. As you build your sales deck right now, think about how you will build on top of this later. — location: 978 ^ref-19266 --- Be sure to include title slides in your template—that is, full-stop slides to define a new section of your presentation (even if that’s just “Demo!” or “Appendix”). And as you progress, have a “templating” mindset. If you create a new type of slide—like one that shows images of features along with subtitles to support a value prop—make sure that you clone it as you’re making new versions of that slide for other value props. — location: 1035 ^ref-3544 --- Client says, “No, I’m really not interested.”—Articulate that you’re going to follow up, and aren’t going away. (More here: http://kazanjy.svbtle.com/pitching-the-inevitable) — location: 1512 ^ref-16549 --- 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, rather than showing how it will work when used by the client. — location: 1566 ^ref-9743 --- you need to change your mindset and start seeing yourself as “bringer of solutions to those who have a problem.” Prospecting is about finding those who have your problem. — location: 1803 ^ref-23450 --- If you can reliably find promising new accounts with a specific source (e.g., Datanyze or LinkedIn or Yelp), and there is a good quantity of them, you’re kidding yourself if you are trying to get much more out of other sources, at least to start. Usually this is a sign of prospecting ADHD more than anything else. Feel free to iterate and see if there is a more effective tool for account sourcing, but don’t pretend that prospecting across things like Twitter and Meetup and Facebook is actually anything more than poor discipline. — location: 1941 ^ref-35683 --- manual prospecting is a very good exercise to go through to get a more concrete sense of what these accounts and individuals look like. As you go, you may discover that a characteristic you thought was important actually isn’t, or discover another characteristic that is even more important for sourcing or qualifying potential prospects. So stay away from lists. — location: 1949 ^ref-39530 --- The selling you will be engaged in is what is known as “evangelical sales,” a mix of product management, product marketing, and sales. In evangelical sales, there is a tight feedback loop between your interactions with the prospect and modifications of both the selling materials (product marketing) and even the features of the product itself (product management). It will be an iterative approach, with a number of false starts. But that tight feedback loop is indispensable in tuning your go-to-market in a way that allows you to start winning customers and, later, to package your approach in a way that can be replicated by an army of sales professionals. — location: 2225 ^ref-42546 --- If your messaging is clear, straightforward, non-bombastic, and focused on them—with each communication adding value to their lives by teaching them something they didn’t know, or offering a way of solving a problem that’s been frustrating them—your outreach will be welcomed with open arms. — location: 2387 ^ref-41433 --- I have a standing desk, but even if you don’t, take sales calls standing. You will project more authority and be quicker on your feet. — location: 3206 ^ref-33074 --- Specifically, they start with quick pleasantries, move into discovery, feature a slide-based presentation followed by a live demo, touch on success proof points, and conclude with pricing and commercial discussion. — location: 3247 ^ref-35601 --- It’s best to set this up at the beginning of your pitch, and characterize it as a benefit to the prospect. Something like “I like to start with some questions so I have a better idea of how your team goes about its day to day, and so I can do a better job of focusing on things you’ll get more value out of.” — location: 3315 ^ref-41231 --- As writers and communicators, we typically worry about saying the same thing more than once, for fear of being boring or insulting the intelligence of the audience. In a sales presentation, repetition is your friend. You need to appreciate how new the topic you’re covering is for your audience. You deal with the topic all the time, but they don’t. It’s critical to keep coming back to the key points that you want to get across, which typically correlate to the big messaging buckets in your sales narrative. — location: 3414 ^ref-10878 --- Another approach is to ask a specific question that requires a specific answer, ideally correlated to the pain point, solution, proof point, or feature being discussed. For instance, if you were Immediately, and discussing the challenges of field sales reps documenting customer-facing interactions, rather than saying, “Does that make sense?” the better approach would be something like “Do you find your field reps have this same issue?” — location: 3440 ^ref-9750 --- Extending from repetition and comprehension is the notion of building agreement. That is, at every opportunity, you want to elicit agreement from your prospect that their worldview is aligning with the one that you’re espousing. If you do this well all along, at the conclusion of your pitch the sale should be a no-brainer! — location: 3471 ^ref-40635 --- By the time you’ve done a dozen or so of these pitches, you’re going to have it pretty nailed. And when you know something well, you have a tendency to speed up your delivery. Even before that point, nervousness also tends to compel faster delivery. — location: 3481 ^ref-10137 --- Through continual creation and execution of micro-contracts, you can make sure that you are being effective with your time, and always on the same page with the prospect. — location: 3532 ^ref-47087 --- Something along the lines of “Okay! Thank you so much for sharing all that great information with me. It’s really going to make this a productive conversation. So, based on what you’ve shared with me, I think that what we’re up to is definitely relevant to what you guys at {company} are doing as related to {whatever it is that you solve}. What I’d like to do next is share some slides that help set the tone on what we do, before we get into the product live demo. Does that work for you?” — location: 3543 ^ref-44134 --- extremely important to not skip this step. For — location: 3642 ^ref-35202 --- For founders and first-time salespeople, presenting pricing and affirmatively asking for the sale is often where the most mistakes are made—largely because they don’t do it. After going to all this trouble to find the prospect, make an appointment, and then present the value of their solution, they drop the ball short of full execution. It’s an understandable error. This is where you can feel the most exposed to rejection. It’s akin to another common founder error, selling to people they know versus qualified accounts because acquaintances are less likely to reject them. But we’re going to surmount this! And we’re going to get good at it. Part of the trick here is convincing yourself that your solution is worth it. — location: 3642 ^ref-21790 --- Don’t back yourself into a corner and start negotiating against yourself at the start, like “It’s ten thousand dollars per seat, but don’t worry, I can get you a deal.” Just state the pricing and the rationale that backs it, shut the hell up, and see what the reaction is. This is often one of the hardest things to do, sitting in silence waiting for the reaction. But you have to do it. — location: 3693 ^ref-32730 --- When you have leading indicators of interest, it’s time to proactively ask for the sale. None of this “So, what do you think?” wishy-washy stuff. Forthrightly ask for the business. Good approaches here are things like “Based on what we’ve discussed, this sounds like a great fit. Is this something that you would want to progress with?” or “Is there anything that is preventing us from getting you started as a customer?” — location: 3701 ^ref-33834 --- A great way to elicit specific objections when a prospect is being vague is with a line like “What specifically is blocking us from progressing right now?” That puts it to her to surface one, or many, concrete objections. — location: 3800 ^ref-42341 --- Something like “I’m happy to help you get more comfortable with the value the solution provides. What sort of further proof would you be looking for?” You will be amazed how many times this turns out to be something as simple as “Well, I’d like to see some proof of prior success.” That — location: 4119 ^ref-30966 --- it’s important for you to frame the pilot in a way that makes it clear how success will be defined, and for prospective buyers to be held accountable for participating in training sessions and check-in meetings and acting on defined activities, which they know will be instrumented and reportable. To the extent that you can remove the risk of non-execution on their part, you should seek to do so, because the biggest issue in trials is always non-usage. — location: 4148 ^ref-13279 --- As they talk about in press training, “Answer the question you wanted them to ask.” — location: 4215 ^ref-41958 ---