You’re In Sales, Whether You Like It Or Not
Sales is one of the hardest jobs in America, yet also probably the most necessary job across every industry. Every business in any given industry, to some extent, is going to have a sales or business development team that drives growth and revenue for that business.
Sales is very straight-forward: Bring In Revenue. Yet, the job itself is so much more complex, and incredibly difficult. Between countless hours of cold-calling, being constantly rejected, and living month-to-month not knowing what kind of commission money you may be bringing in, it truly takes a dedicated, ambitious individual to pursue a job in sales.
I think what I love most about sales people is that they’re the biggest losers — and no, not losers as in geeks or dweebs. As I stated above, they’re constantly being rejected, cussed at, and disrespected. Generally, they’re hated by most everyone — even their colleagues within their own company. Sales people just can’t catch a break, and we non-sales individuals still turn our noses up at them.
Yet, they endure. They fight everyday. Every conversation is a potential sale. Every objection can be overcome. Determined and motivated, sales people are what drive our economy forward.
So, why do we make every effort to remove sales people from the picture? From a web app perspective, subscription models are becoming the standard, encouraging users to sign up for a product without ever having to interact with an individual; the tech industry is actively developing itself away from a sales-driven model! I find this to be so paradoxical, because engineers/developers then have to develop other ways to sell their products. Building product pages on their websites, creating demonstration videos, giving users free versions of the software to try it out for themselves — these are all sales methodologies that have been built into a software’s self-service model. On top of that, there’s a constant need to push your product in front of potential users; whether it be at conferences, on social media, digital marketing, etc.
However, it’s not hard to understand why the technology industry would move away from a traditional sales model. Software, especially SaaS modeled web applications, generally have very high profit margins since they require little overhead capital to build and have reasonable operating costs. A product can be developed and released with a relatively small team, and a viral branding campaign can build a core user base with very minimal “paid” marketing channels required to advertise. Why would a small start-up put money into a sales team if it’s able to sustain a steady stream of revenue? It just doesn’t make sense to hire those individuals.
Yet, these small, self-service web applications I come across everyday all have one thing in common: they don’t gain user buy-in. A “demo” video will only go so far in educating a user, and often times they fail to deliver a value proposition. A free trial is great to gain interest, but how do you convert the user? A series of targeted on-boarding emails? This a great approach, but how do you get your emails to stand out in a user’s crowded inbox? And please, not another annoying chat box that literally every web-app uses these days — sorry Intercom.
I’m very familiar with the short-comings of an ineffective self-service on-boarding model, because my own SaaS product ran into these exact issues. In an effort to automate and build lean user on-boarding processes, we’re turning away from one of the most valuable contributors to any organization: a motivated, competent sales person.
What I learned most from that experience is that our service team was often having to re-sell our users on the value of the product…
In the earlier days of our web app, we were running an extremely lean service model. Our sales people were selling the product like crazy, and our services team was tasked with on-boarding, delivery, and servicing the software for our ~2000 clients. The two biggest issues we ran into from a high-level perspective were: 1) Our sales people didn’t understand the product and didn’t like selling it — hence why I included the phrase “competent sales person” earlier; and 2) Our service model was not structured in a way to scale with the increase in our users.
To combat the support and servicing issue without hiring more bodies, we took the rather cliche approach of building an automated on-boarding process — a process which required little-to-no client interaction for the service representative, and made use of training videos, documents, and FAQ pages to allow our SaaS users to get all of the help they could possibly need. While it did help, the culminating result of our experiment was that users just weren’t interacting with the software in a meaningful way. They didn’t understand the UI components, and often would call the support line asking very basic questions that should have been handled much earlier in the process. What I learned most from that experience is that our service team was often having to re-sell our users on the value of the product, and why they should continue paying us each month to use our awesome software.
I’m happy to say that we’ve turned it around since those times. Our sales people are much better at presenting the value proposition to prospective clients, and our service model has become much better at delivery and servicing the product. The biggest change that had the most effect was actually using a team of sales representatives to be the “on-boarding success team” (or named similar to this) for the product. Charismatic individuals who were able to educate or users and gain buy-in or the product. Our user sessions are up, our user feedback is much more positive, and subscriptions for the software technology are trending upwards of 10,000 client websites that we’re integrating with. All-in-all, I feel our sales-supported model for servicing the product has made it infinitely more successful on-boarding process, which as in-turn built up our core user base.
But, let’s pump the brakes real quick and go back to a thought I just presented a second ago. When our services team was having to re-sell the product to our users, I learned an invaluable career lesson: you’re in sales, whether you like it or not.
When I was on the service side for this product, approximately fifty percent of the interactions I had with our clients felt like the customer was on the verge of churning — I say “felt like” because some clients were on contracts and wouldn’t have churned regardless. It was very tough being in a position where you could clearly see that your customers were unhappy, misinformed, or entirely uninformed, in regards to the product (happy customers rarely call support lines, right?). I had to adapt my communication style from person to person, because not all had the same technical competencies. Some calls/emails you had to be more sympathetic and sincere, most required patience and confidence, and others needed a technical explanation in non-technical terms. Yet, nearly every conversation required a hint of sales. I always had to reaffirm to the customer what the value they were getting in return for their money — whether that value be the product itself, or the service they were getting from our team. Always Be Selling.
As a member of a company that delivers products to consumers (whether they be individuals or businesses), you are always being held on a representational pedestal for the product/company. If you’re in customer service and you have a poor attitude about your job, and do not communicate well with clients calling into your support line, you have [potentially] single-handedly destroyed that person’s perception of your company and your product. If you’re a sales person and you lie about the features of a product just to close the sale, well, don’t be shocked when that client churns and you’re kissing your commission check good-bye. Oh, and as a product person, I feel like I’m constantly having to sell my product — internally and externally.
As a product manager, It’s my job to communicate to various stakeholders inside the company, as well as to our users, what the value of the product is after each new release. This is why I will always argue that a product manager’s most useful skill is their ability to communicate — because gaining buy-in is everything. A product manager is the product’s biggest proponent, the user’s biggest advocate, and the stakeholder’s biggest influence. Yet, the correlation that loops back into everything is that the product manager has to be able to sell their product, otherwise they’d never be able to get the support necessary to continue developing it.
In fact, just the other day, our product was brought into question by one a client’s website vendor. Several accusations were made that our product was negatively effecting page load speed for the client’s website. I was asked to join a call with the client and the vendor to help troubleshoot the issue that was brought to the table. Using empirical data from the Network logs alone would have shown that our product was not at fault, but I used the opportunity to educate the client on how our Javascript worked, and more importantly, to re-introduce the value proposition one more time. I wanted our client to not only recognize the technical expertise of our company, but also affirm that our product continued to meet their needs, even when being challenged by another company. Thanks to the efforts of our team, and special shout out to the account manager who has been on top of this situation since the start, our relationship with the client couldn’t be stronger, and their feedback for our product is nothing but praise.
Communicators dominate in the business world because they can take any concept and make it a reality for whoever their audience is. The sales people I most enjoy interacting with are the ones who can get me to buy into an idea of a better life with their product, regardless if I really need it. The customer service representatives I most enjoy speaking with are the one’s who can clearly understand my needs and communicate to me in a way that meets those needs. The developers I most enjoy working with are the ones who can communicate their work into comprehensible terms. It’s just a simple fact that the better someone can communicate, the more likely I [personally] am going to enjoy interacting with that person.
That’s why I believe we’re all sales people, no matter what role we serve in. We’re all sales people because we’ve all got something we have to communicate to someone, and the only measure for success is whether or not you were able to get that audience to buy into whatever it is you’re presenting them.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 28, 2017.
