What Sales Should Be

On bringing humanity to sales and setting engagements up to succeed

I recently left a terrific, mostly satisfying job in product management at a big corporation in order to work primarily on new business at a small software consultancy: philosophie.

No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Nowhere in the couple years I spent looking at data, empathizing with users, and saying no did I learn about closing deals and hitting gongs…or so you’d think.

There are many ways to sell. Some people picture cold calls, email blasts, or door-to-door — doing, saying, and promising anything to close the deal. I didn’t want to do that, and in fact, that’s not what I do.

Actually, I spend most of my time saying no.

We meet with a lot of interested potential clients who come to us with PRDs and RFPs and big, detailed spec documents that list out 10 product phases and a year’s worth of work. We also see startup founders that are so passionately committed to a vision that they lose sight of their business and users, believing that a specific set of features is exactly what people need, even if “the customer doesn’t know it yet”.

When we’re given those opportunities, we could say yes and commit ourselves to building something that may or may not have a market, that may or may not align with business goals, and that may or may not burn our product team out. But we don’t.

Instead of thinking like sales people, we think like product people.

Instead of overselling and committing to long-term (read: risky) engagements, we employ a consultative sales process. We try to help our clients simplify and prioritize, even before we start the work. We find ways to get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort and we stay entirely honest with our assumptions. Additionally, we pride ourselves on understanding the bigger picture, navigating politics, and making persuasive cases like “here’s why we don’t need that feature” and “let’s just let the users decide”.

These are skills native to good product managers and good consultants, and we accordingly employ no “salespeople”, but rather “product strategists” — people like myself who are familiar with the nuances of business success, product management, and sales, and can naturally translate our principles and the client’s needs into tactical product decisions.

This process can be contentious. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t like the idea of less functionality. Most also like the product vision they’ve dreamed up in the face of data to the contrary or no data at all. It takes all of the above skills and more to hone the product into something simple but great, and to do so in a way that leaves everyone satisfied with the end result.

We’ve realized that sales isn’t just about making money — it’s about setting the team up to succeed in a meaningful way.

Tactically, we support this approach by framing our sales process as a collaborative period of discovery. We ultimately want to design an engagement that lets us build the best possible product within given constraints. We focus on identifying a few key details during the sales process, well before the engagement kicks off:

1. As mentioned above, the business objectives & assumptions are a great starting point for aligning our definitions of success, and contribute to a shared sense of responsibility for the team. This helps us say no effectively, as we’re relentlessly focused on building the highest-value features first.
2. Who the users are is a critical question for everyone to agree on and understand; if we’re not designing an engagement and starting even the very earliest conversations about team, scope, and features with users in mind, the final product will suffer.
3. The primary problem we’re trying to solve is often our very first question. Users simply won’t care about a product that doesn’t solve a problem. We solve for inefficiency, for inconvenience, for inevitability, or for many other things, but we should be solving something for the engagement and the product to have meaning.

We’ve found that a process focused on these things results in a cooperatively constructed engagement where everybody wins. Not only do we create the right environment and structure for any client’s business and vision to thrive, but we get the opportunity to build something that we’re proud of: a final product that may actually succeed in practice.

So we think of our process as user-centered sales. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll document more learnings (and experiments, failures, and pivots) here in the months to come. If you have thoughts or questions, let me know on Twitter or in the comments!