Your best sales advice
I've recently had to do a lot of sales. I used to build a lot of product for consumer, but these days I tend to focus on businesses.
I do cold outreach, warm outreach, mostly via email. I create case studies, I send around presentations, but it's tedious work and not always successful.
What's you best sales advice? How do you do sales? I'd love to learn.
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Disclaimer: I run a (paid) course on Sales For Founders (but applications are currently closed)
I'll list some good resources for learning how to do sales below.
But first, the really important thing (as a founder who is new to sales) is to get into a mindset of:
The early days of lead generation, sending emails that don't get replies etc is hard. Unavoidably so.
Founders (especially technical founders) tend to 'look for hacks' - they're that combination of lazy and clever which works in most areas of startups but not in sales.
There is no hack. You just have to put in the work.
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Some resources to get you better results, quicker:
In general though, founders need to spend less time learning about sales and more time just knuckling down and doing it.
Good luck!
(and happy to answer any specific sales questions, either here or via email)
Great post thanks for sharing!
Hey Louis, is the pop-up bar on your landing page supposed to contain clickable links?
The green bit that says "an exclusive earlybird discount" looks clickable on the first glance but doesn't work for me - I'm on Chrome.
Thanks for the heads up :)
Yes but not the green bit (in most cases at least - there is a screen size where it replaces the button, but I doubt you'd come across that).
There should either be a button which takes you to the signup form (on mobile)
Or just a signup form right there (desktop)
If you're not seeing either, then either you've already signed up in the past, or you're doing some javascript-/ad-blocking stuff which stops the ConvertKit signup form from appearing :/
Thanks for sharing!
Was expecting to see you here, thanks for the resources, they look great!
I think it's interesting that you talk about creating win-win situations. If I'm trying to push product X, should I be upfront about it, or is it usual to discuss the situation in a few emails first? Should my initial email even mention the product? Or simply ask more about the problem I'm trying to solve?
Impossible to say "in general" - sorry!
Selling a more complex product to enterprise? Probably highlight just the pain and try to get to a meeting as soon as possible (a lot of email to and fro is normally a bad sign).
Selling a simpler product for a lower price where the value is super obvious and there aren't many objections? You can lead with the value/product and be more salesy. At PostPerk for example, this approach worked well. But I'd say it's rare, especially in the early days!
As a founder I had to learn sales the hard way. By sucking and slowly improving. This what I've learned so far and still have a long way to go.
For me, early on, sales was the used car salesman. "I'm never doing that!" I thought. After humble pie and experience I realized sales is not just used car sales. You can do sales in an honest genuine way. As a founder if you don't genuinely believe your business can help that's a problem.
After you start a business, sales is oxygen for your business. As a technical guy I didn't want to hear, believe, or live this. In most cases, it's reality. Sink or swim.
Approach sales as a process like any other. Develop a sales process.
After a few books about sales my go to sales guide at the moment is: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro (no affiliation)
He's been on the Indie Hackers podcast and helps YC companies with marketing. The guide is superb. He covers a lot more than just sales but the sales section is very helpful.
Remind yourself that prospects don't care about your solution. Prospects care about their problem. Solve their problem with your solution. Don't show off solution features.
Find a mentor or sales coach. Someone you can go to to ask things like "how do I ask a client for a referral?"
Learn how to translate conversations to money in your bank.
Part of the Sales process translates fairly well to founders well... uncovering problems and providing solutions.
The hard part for me was "closing" AKA "asking for the sale". It's like you're getting along nicely with your prospect and then you have to mess things up by asking for money. This was something that took me a while to get over. In my case, coming to realize that customer problems don't get solved if I'm homeless and that most prospects want to pay to alleviate their problems. You can further optimize this step by focusing on moving to the next step and moving the conversation towards solving the problem which is preceeded by revenue.
Sales is oxygen for your business. Approach sales with a learning mindset. Seek to improve your sales skills/process. Make your next sales activity better than the last one.
Best advice is to pick up the phone. Sometimes I'll send someone 3+ emails with no response and then I just call their office and ask to speak to them and they'll say "Oh yeah I saw your emails but then I got busy and forgot. What does your product do again?". Even if they do say no, a lot of the times you'll get product feedback that you wouldn't hear otherwise. You'll get 10x results if you just decide to call people on the phone.
Can you expand on
Do you have time for a book or two @dqmonn ? Great sales books (they have to be great... not some void bullshit) have indeed changed my life. My recommendations:
🎉 Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley
🗽 The greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
⚡️ #AskGaryVee book (any other Gary fans here?)
Always try to create need for a product not work on current need and communicate that need (created by you) to your target customers.
Get a sales job. Joining a sales-heavy startup was one of the best decisions I've made. Like engineering, there's basically infinite stuff to learn, and not all of it comes at once
if you can't make a list of people who you know would want to use your product, you maybe don't understand your users, or your product well enough.