Founding Sales

Author: Peter R Kazanjy

Highlights

• Like doing on-site sales visits for a product that will end up selling for less than $1,000 a year. The economics of that would never work at scale. (Location 244)
• He’ll tell you what the customer said, but likely not what the customer meant. You won’t be able to tell between pure sales failure and product failure. And all sorts of other unpleasant things. (Location 255)
• You need someone who can take a partially baked product, formulate a coherent narrative around it, present it, and then listen. And then iterate. You need evangelical sales, which is a mix of product management and product marketing. (Location 261)
• 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. The thing that is scarce in sales is time. To quote one of TalentBin’s key early sales staff, Brad Snider, spending “good time with good opportunities” is paramount. And, by extension, that means (Location 303)
• You should be ruthless with respect to truncating unproductive conversations with marginal opportunities, especially at the earliest of stages, when the world is a greenfield of untouched accounts in front of you. (Location 310)
• Spend good time with good opportunities. Let go of the marginal opps, knowing that you can get them later if they become more viable. There’s plenty of opportunity here. (Location 316)
• PUT ACTIVITY ABOVE ALL ELSE (Location 318)
• Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. (Location 320)
• 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)
• 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 339)
• Depending on your industry, and the point at which sales gets a prospect in the funnel, if yours is a new, innovative solution, a 20%–30% win rate is solid. (Location 382)
• That is, 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. (Location 385)
• While a killer demo and a great verbal description are no doubt important, and explainer videos are nifty, nothing works in a sales context like slides. They’re visual, so you can mix in images, charts, and so on that underscore your point, alongside text that explains it. You can speak over them, live. You can send them to someone who missed the presentation. (Location 964)
• progress. The more you embrace this notion of “always shipping” marketing collateral, kind of like your product, the better off you will be. (Location 979)
• Of course, all the while, be sure to retain the summary versions of these sections; you’ll want them later so you can choose the level of granularity you use in a given presentation and appropriately customize it for customers, press, analysts, investors, or what have you. (Location 1009)
• etc.). The goal is communication of business meaning, and that can be done with a minimal amount of flash. (Location 1027)
• Also, flash without a valid narrative is actually worse than nothing—you just look like an idiot with nothing to say who wastes people’s time. I’ve seen plenty of these sales decks. Don’t be that guy. (Location 1029)
• 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 1037)
• The whole purpose of B2B product development is to identify a business pain in the market and build a product or service that resolves that business pain. And the purpose of B2B sales is to identify companies and individuals that have that business pain, propose the product as a means by which to resolve it, and eventually come to a mutually beneficial agreement to exchange money for that product—which then resolves the business pain, as promised. (Location 1773)
• understandable. If you’ve never done sales before, you’re not used to the potential rejection associated with approaching people you don’t know and engaging them in a commercial conversation. (Location 1797)
• But your customer profile is the description of an organization. (Location 1881)
• There’s a concept of “complementary” decision-makers as well, who are typically internal customers of the primary decision-maker you’re seeking to target. (Location 2109)