Don’t sell — hire your customers

How to use recruiting insights to drive customer conversion and loyalty.

“I noticed on your LinkedIn that you spent some time as lead campus recruiter at Acme. Can you tell me a little more about that?”

“What about your role do you find most interesting? Frustrating? What are you most proud of?

“Regarding next steps: you’ll hear back from me within 48 hours. Do you have any questions for me?”

Interview questions, clearly. But the great part about interviewing is that the goal of an interview is perfectly aligned with what a first sales call’s goal should be: getting to know the person, how they think and make decisions, and how they achieve goals in their job.

Unfortunately, the goal of a typical sales call isn’t always aligned. Mass-emailers, demo-pushers and quota-hitters abound. Many times the questions on a first call with a vendor end up something like, “Have you heard of Widget? Well, thousands of companies like yours are using it, so…”

Okay, now you’ve demonstrated 2 fatal flaws: 1) you didn’t take 5 minutes to learn anything about my business, just assumed I’d think, “sounds like a lot of people use Widget, of course I need it too!” and 2) you insulted me in a backhand way — if your product is so great, and I need the solution, why haven’t I heard of it? Am I not doing my job?

This is garbage sales, and I hate it. My early sales career was riddled with it — reps that relied on these tactics to browbeat or shame their customers into buying. I hated it so much I left sales for a career in analytics, fleeing to more black-and-white world of data.

But when we founded TransparentCareer I started thinking hard about sales again. We had hired some amazing people while we were building our company, and during the process (as a data company) we had analyzed our funnel, created a workflow for bringing leads from application to interview to offer, and built a candidate scoring system to help us sift through hundreds of applicants. We took the same methods and applied it to our intern hiring, with phenomenal results.

But when I started meeting with prospective customers I felt lost. I felt like I was missing some “secret” of SaaS sales. I felt awkward trying to convert cold leads to demos. I felt like I wasn’t asking the right questions. I felt like I didn’t understand the people I was supposed to be selling to.

So I reflected back on what we’d done well in our 12 months since starting the company, and the answer was unequivocally hiring. I started applying the concepts we used in our talent funnel to the sales process, and began hiring customers.

What does hiring your customer mean? It means you ask them questions. It means you care viscerally about the relationship you’re trying to form. If you treat them like they’re about to become part of your team instead of your monthly quota, your entire mentality will shift, and they’ll notice.

It means you start thinking how they think. You’ll understand their goals, frustrations, and triumphs.

It means you get to know them as a person. Working with — and, as a byproduct, selling to — John from Acme who went to Michigan, loves college basketball, and collects old National Geographics is a lot easier than selling to plain old John, Campus Recruiting Manager, Acme Co.

Just like interviewing, these skills take practice. Here’s a simple 4-step framework that helps me get started:

1. Create a matrix of problems your product addresses.

Every sales rep should be prepared with these value propositions, and understand what kinds of customers might appreciate each one.

2. Start a list of questions you’d like to ask for all intro calls, to understand which needs the prospect might have.

Dive deep without sounding pushy — sometimes it takes a few questions on the same topic to peel back the onion.

3. Score their answers on where they match with your product’s solutions. Focus on the top 2–3 matches, and tailor future questions to this area.

This simple exercise helps me understand that David needs help with branding and candidate lead generation, while Pete has the opposite problem — he needs help prioritizing and scheduling his applicants. Matt is probably not a great fit for my product — and that’s okay too.

4. Start providing value pre-sale on these match areas. Maybe it’s a whitepaper. Maybe a tip based on you’ve seen other clients do. Maybe an interesting article you’ve read (or better, written). Take 10 minutes to tailor a deck to their situation, with some solutions your product can help provide.

Hubspot does a fantastic job with this approach, which they call “inbound marketing”. I think it’s even simpler than that — it’s caring about the process of getting to know your future customer, not just the result.

Go through this simple framework with a prospective client and you’ve gone from being a salesperson to a true value-add in their professional lives. Perhaps more importantly, you’re now someone they’ve connected with personally, and that matters.

Thoughts? Tips? Examples of what you’ve done? We’d love to hear about it.

At TransparentCareer, we build products to help students and job seekers find the right careers in a personalized, data-driven way. On the employer side, our proprietary candidate scoring system helps companies access the right talent not only based on their attributes (degree, school, major, etc.) but their interests and values. Learn how we can save you time and optimize your campus pipeline here.