Inside A Technical Founder’s Mind
Do You Hate Sales? I Did Too…
Go from sales-loathing to sales-loving in 5 minutes
From across the room, our eyes met…
“Dammit, we caught eyes…” I thought to myself. “Now he’s going to want to talk.”
Sure enough, he starts walking my way. I can feel his gaze locked on me as my heart begins to race. Adrenaline flows in preparation for the upcoming conflict.
I start preparing my go-to ways out for the conversation that’s about to happen, but as he made his final approach I lost composure and bolted for the door.
If the above sounded like a nightclub experience, it wasn’t.
This was much worse in my book. It was my experience at Best Buy today.
Sales Is A Dance People Don’t Like To Do
I’m not going to lie; the idea of sales used to make me cringe. Then one day, my startup needed to sell its product.
The idea of actually being a salesperson made me want to ball up into a fetal position.
I was forced to reconcile my hatred for sales with my love for the product we were building. After some research, I enrolled in a sales course from an ethical sales coach. The rest is history, and I’ve actually come to love sales.
If you feel really cringy about sales like I did and you have a startup that needs to start selling, this article is for you.
I’m going to give you the 5-minute version of a 48-hour sales class that might help you as much as it helped me.
Sales Results That Crush & Lets You Sleep At Night
If you despise the idea of doing sales, I can surmise two things:
- You don’t believe salespeople act ethically.
- You see yourself as ethical.
If this is you, I’m happy to tell you that not only can you come to love sales, but you can probably outperform if you follow this mold.
To transform you from sales-loathing to sales-loving, we will quickly hit on five general concepts. Keep in mind each of these could be expanded on ad-Infinium, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll hit the high-level points only.
- Defining “Sales”.
- Understanding Why Sales is a Broken Process.
- Establishing Trust.
- Finding The Customer’s Pain.
- Being The Customer’s Champion.
1. Defining Sales
The first step of the process is to simply define “sales”. The common dictionary definition is generally how most would explain sales:
/sāles/
the exchange of a commodity for money; the action of selling something.
However, I would recommend you reshape your definition of sales. In the lens of how we will approach sales, it should be defined as:
/sāles/
the action of helping a customer arrive at a reasonable buying decision.
The difference in these definitions are miles apart, and critical. The former leaves up to interpretation how you would go about selling something.
The latter clearly demonstrates your only job in sales is to help your potential customer arrive at an educated buying decision.
Also, in our definition, a “no” decision is just as good as a “yes” decision — so long as that’s the correct choice for the customer.
2.Understanding Why Sales is a Broken Process
Sales is a process that requires two people to participate, and generally speaking, the motivations of each party are completely misaligned.
The consumer wants information and guidance to help them determine if the product or service is something that solves a legitimate need of theirs.
The salesperson wants to sell the product.
Historically speaking, this has caused salespeople to do anything they can to sell the product, with or without the best interests of the customer at heart.
As a result, salespeople have earned adjectives such as “dishonest”, “shady”, “unethical”, and “slippery”.
Customers come into every sales interaction with their guard up, often looking for the first reason to abort the conversation.
In order to get around this, salespeople have developed increasingly more confusing, complex or tricky sales processes — which in turn cause customers to become even more mistrusting.
You can easily see the downward spiral this creates — and thus the broken process.
The great news is, this leaves a massive opportunity for ethical salespeople.
3. Establishing Trust
The simplicity of establishing trust while selling cannot be understated.
To establish trust, be honest and consider your customer first.
Set your intentions from the start.
Your job is to help this customer find their answer, yes or no.
You should not push them toward a yes, nor recommend them to use your service or product unless you are certain you can help them.
State these intentions to them right from the get-go. Letting them know this frames the entire conversation with the context that you are there to help them.
If you can effectively convey this, customers will let down their guard and discuss their situation with you openly.
Ask questions — Let them answer.
A good salesperson needs to know things about their potential customer before they can make an honest recommendation to them.
In order to know the customer's circumstances, needs, and fears you need to ask questions.
But it doesn’t stop there. You need to LISTEN to what they say, then use your professional experience to take that information, analyze it, and make recommendations.
Any time you have the urge to tap dance or lie, don’t.
One concept I learned at the sales seminar was the humanization of error. Customers expect slick salespeople to have an answer for everything in a way that makes them seem unflappable.
When was the last time you asked a salesperson a question and their reply was “wow, that’s a really good question and I don’t know the answer… let me ask my team and follow up with you”?
How would it make you feel if a salesperson honestly told you they didn’t know an answer to a solid question you asked?
Being honest, even when it makes you look bad, creates trust.
If you follow these basic tenants, you will find yourself having more honest conversations with clients who have let down their guard. This will allow you to help them make better decisions quicker.
4. Find the Pain
Customers are savvy nowadays. They know when they’re being railroaded into a solution they don’t need. No one appreciates that.
They are engaging in the sales dance with you because they have a problem that they need to be solved.
If you can solve those problems for them, you are providing value to them. The level of value depends solely on what the pain is.
Thus for you to sell your products or services ethically, you need to know exactly what their pain points are and how much value you can bring to them for solving them.
How to find the pain.
Generally speaking, clients won’t reveal their true pain, but rather a symptom of it. To find the true pain, follow this easy three-step process:
- Ask them why they’re seeking out your services.
- Whatever they reply with, ask them why that matters.
- Repeat step 2 until you hear a real pain point.
Example:
- Q. Why are you looking to work with PushPress?
A. It looks like you guys have good lead generation, and I’m interested in that. - Q. Why do you feel you need better lead generation?
A. Oh because we don’t seem to get enough members every month. - Q. OK that makes sense. Why do you think you need more members each month?
A. Well, our revenue seems to have flatlined, and I need to grow things on that side because my I’m catching some heat in our weekly meetings. - Ah ok, so it sounds like you not only need some easier lead-generation processes, but it might help if you had some automated churn prevention processes. Good news is PushPress can help with you both of those!
In the above example, if you would have just taken at face value that the person wanted lead generation tools, you would have missed the real pain point (the customer wants to be seen better in company meetings) and you also would have missed the other end of the pain point that you can help solve — retention.
5. Be The Customer’s Champion
The final piece of an ethical sales process is to follow thru on your initial promise; Help the customer find a solution to their pain point, regardless of if the solution is your product/service or a competitor.
In our earlier days of existence, PushPress wouldn’t be the best solution for the customers needs more often than not. We often were missing critical features our competitors already had.
In those instances, I would tell the customer who would service their needs the best. You could imagine their surprise when I would tell them to talk to one of our competitors as a better option over us.
On many occasions, I either still won the business of that customer immediately or over time. The impression you will leave by ethically looking out for the customer, regardless if they become your client or not will pay itself back 10 fold over time.
Results Almost Guaranteed
These basic principles have worked for us here at PushPress now for over 4 years. An honest, upfront sales process is something that’s become core to our identity. If you follow this simple process and make it a practice daily, you will not only see the benefits on your top-line, but you won’t feel like a total jerk in the process. Happy bootstrapping!