Product Lessons Learned from 100 Sales Calls
In the process of getting InsightSquared’s Service Analytics product off the ground, I’ve done 100+ sales demos. As a product manager, I relish the chance to get firsthand feedback on what we’re building. As an introvert, however, I break into a cold sweat at the idea of talking to strangers and asking them for money.
Product managers tend to look for ways to improve the product to drive results. Here’s the thing to remember: as a product owner you’re responsible for the build side and the sell side of the process. Early on when traction was low, it was very tempting to add more features. Maybe if the product does this one extra thing the needle will start to move… No. It won’t.
Product owners need end-to-end visibility of the customer experience. Figuring out how to present and position what you’ve built to prospective customers is critical. It’s been a slog, and I’m by no means done yet, but I’ve learned a few things worth sharing so far.
Avoid Proud Parent Syndrome
On my first few calls I was aimless, and I treated them more as feedback sessions. Desperate for some kind of market confirmation, I would show as many features as possible to see what got a positive response. “Do you like this screen? What about this one? Check out this cool button! Look how fast this goes!”
This was, frankly, a terrible approach. Customers weren’t retaining anything I showed them: it was as if they were watching a TV while I surfed the channels for them.
I knew more about what the product could do than anyone else, and I was eager to show it off. The trick is to divulge that knowledge more selectively. Your product has to fit into the customer’s world, not the other way around. I started asking about which metrics they cared about most, and what they wish they could measure but can’t.
Tell a Great Story
As my questions improved, I got a better sense of which screens to show. Pattern recognition is a part of the job, right? After about a dozen calls I started to get a sense of which screens had the most wow factor or were universally relatable. But knowing which features customers will like most is only half the battle.
You need to tell a story that helps customers understand how that feature will improve their lives.
InsightSquared is a business intelligence platform, so our demos involve showing screens of dummy data that offer lots of ideal use cases. I had to get better at helping customers imagine their own data on the screen, and — more importantly — imagining InsightSquared as part of their regular workflow.
To do that, I started asking more questions about the way customers collect and assemble data, and how reports are shared throughout the organization. I learned even more about the customer: what role data plays in decision making, the cultural stance on transparency, and openness to change. These are key success factors for InsightSquared customers.
Eventually, I started getting people to share their pain. People don’t just want “better reports.” They want answers to questions they can’t get today. They want more productive meetings. More solved tickets. Faster response times. Happier customers.
These are the rational appeals — the business justifications for buying InsightSquared.
On a few calls, though, I got to go a level deeper. People would share their frustrations and fears. People would tell me how management views customer service as just a cost center, undeserving of kickass analytics. One customer actually told me that his sales team was blocking the helpdesk from seeing account data they felt was too sensitive. Another told me she knows that the team needs to add 3 more people, but she can’t get budget approval.
These are the emotional appeals — the reasons people will champion your product around their organization, bring power to the table, and ultimately prioritize your product over other capital expenditures.
Now, instead of rattling off a laundry list of features and benefits, I could start telling stories about how InsightSquared could help make their lives better. “If you show this report to your boss, there’s no way she can disagree that your team is understaffed.”
Anchor and Twist
A great story isn’t just interesting, though. It aspires to make some broader statement. Monsters, Inc. isn’t just a brilliant story about monsters who scare children for a living. It’s a parable for the promise of clean, renewable energy.
There’s a philosophy behind your product. Share that story with customers.
In my most recent calls, I’ve started telling our product story before I share my screen. It’s our point of view that most SMBs — despite their differences in industry and business model — tend to ask the same questions about their business performance. So we offer “turnkey analytics” to customers who just want answers and don’t know the best way to work with metrics.
Our implementation time is a significant competitive advantage to us, but that’s only relevant if you’re shopping for other BI solutions. I want every customer I speak with to know why InsightSquared exists, because that philosophy informs every aspect of the product. Anchoring customers with this point of view aligns us with a shared perspective, and it informs their line of questioning. You wouldn’t ask McDonald’s for cloth napkins because you know they’re not not that kind of restaurant.
Once the anchor is in place, I offer the twist: the new, unfamiliar part of the story — InsightSquared. The product is, by design, visually familiar. The dashboard layouts, charts, and tables look like what you might see in native reporting tools from systems like Salesforce and Zendesk, or what you might build yourself in Excel. The twist is that we’ve already done the legwork based on thousands hours of customer conversations and pre-built them.
As a product manager, I’m often most excited about new capabilities we ship like exclusion filters, new API transports, or faster refresh times. But one of the most impressive aspects of our product from the eyes of a potential customer is the basic fact that it comes ready-to-use.
You’re Obi-Wan. They’re Luke.
In her book Resonate, Nancy Duarte explains the classic storytelling structure of the hero’s journey, and how that applies to sales and marketing. In short, your customer is the hero, and you are the mentor — the voice of experience and wisdom — who takes the customer on a journey from an ordinary world with a familiar problem into an adventure world of new possibilities enabled by your product. Ultimately, the hero returns to the ordinary world changed for the better. Star Wars is a classic example.
After about 100 calls, I’m finally getting to the point where I can stop treating these conversations as a tactical back and forth about use cases, features, and pains. I still ask about these things, but the calls are becoming more cohesive. Customers are latching onto different parts of my story, and their questions tell me they’re starting to imagine a world made possible by InsightSquared.
I’ve still got a long way to go before I get my sales championship belt (a real thing we do), but it’s been tremendously helpful — and humbling — to do all these calls and truly understand the difference between what we build and what we sell. Product/market fit is easy. I knew we had the right product early on in the process. Convincing people the product is right for them? That’s some Jedi master shit.
