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Sales

  • Feet on street

Sales model​

In a bottoms-up model, engineers within an enterprise start using your product to solve a well-defined problem such as API management. As more and more employees within the organization start to use your prodct, you can begin to engage the enterprise about becoming a paying customer for your product for your product. Since the enterprise is already using your prouct, the sales conversation is much easier.

In the top-down model, you engage the CIO, CEO, or CTO directly and try to convince them that your product is worth paying for. When the senior leadership of a bank buys into your product idea, you can count on that senior leadership to convince their developers to use your product within the bank.

SAAS Sales​

  1. Buyers spend more $ to relieve pain than to achieve gain. Stop obsessing about benefits. Start obsessing about problems.
  2. The biggest opportunity your competition is probably not leveraging is deep multi-threading. Swarm your deals.
  3. The demo your product team teaches you never works. They mean well, but they are too interested in making customers aware of every feature. Only show the features that solve problems. Leave off the rest.
  4. One of the best sales hacks is responding fast. Responding fast to inbound lead. Responding fast to emails. Buyers mirror your speed.
  5. Personalization will help you book more outbound meetings. But there are diminishing returns. Adding way too much personalization creates a lot of work and doesn't add to conversion.
  6. Offering an 'end of month' discount only ever works if your buyer has total control over pulling the trigger. If they have to get approval from others, go through legal, procurement, etc. it's not going to move the needle.
  7. Spend more time getting new influencers up to speed on past conversations you've had with their colleagues.
  8. A great question will always have more power than a great statement.
  9. People don't buy because of ROI. ROI doesn't create demand. It justifies demand.
  10. Perfect sales technique will not close the deal if you're talking to the wrong person. I still remember the best discovery call I've ever run. I didn't close the deal. Wrong person.
  11. Social selling isn't better than cold email. Cold email isn't better than cold calling. These channels work together. Leverage them as 'land, sea, and air.' Stop thinking binary.
  12. If you can describe your buyer's problem better than they can describe it, their lightbulbs will turn on. It's beautiful. Buyers favor the seller that can best articulate their problems.
  13. Get to know your market like the back of your hand. If you know your buyers so well that you can peer into their soul, you'll win.
  14. Buyers never reveal the real problem after the 1st or 2nd question. Uncovering the 'need behind the need' is the closest thing to a magic bullet.
  15. Execs want to know you did your homework. If you show up to a sales call with a C-SUITE exec and ask a generic question, you'll lose them.
  16. Never negotiate price until it's the last issue. If agreeing on price doesn't close the deal, it's too early to negotiate.
  17. Every time you demo a feature, preface it with the problem. You'll double your demo success with this change.
  18. Stop blaming buyers for falling short. If they said they were going to sign last month, and they didn't, your fault. Not theirs.
  19. The best demos are more about the customer than the product.

Tools​