One thing that makes sales (really) hard is that you lack information on what people need.

Imagine if you knew exactly what every company in your market needed to buy right now in your category. You would sell an amount way beyond any reasonable dreams.

This lack of information causes us to use ham-fisted approaches to prospecting. These ill-informed approaches are working less and less effectively. Buyers simply don’t have the time to deal with salespeople approaching them on topics that are not relevant to their challenges (and job/company survival.)

If it doesn’t work, do more

Without knowing what a prospect needs we approach a “segment” of buyers assuming they all must need the same thing (but knowing they don’t all want the same thing.) We take the approach that it’s a “numbers game”. “So, what if 97% of people won’t want this offer of min, let’s email them anyway. The 3% will let us know who they are, and we don’t care about the other 97% anyway”.

As buyers are more and more frazzled and do a better job of ignoring our irrelevant pitches, we decide to use technology to compensate. If the 3% of people interested in our kind of solution drops to 1%, then our solution is to use software and AI to produce 3 times as many prospecting emails.

AI agents can help (a bit)

AI can help with some of this “information gap” if we use it for research (not for creating hundreds of emails). Tools like ChatGPT’s new Deep Research are an AI agent that can be thought of as a sales assistant on your team. You can tell the agent to go away for 15 mins and research all the public information on XYZ company and their issues around what you sell, and it comes back with a decent report with links on what it has found. It’s not BCG-worthy yet but it’s a start—and clearly this is only going to get better.

But there’s still a gap with the information this AI assistant can produce for real selling. The agent can only research publicly available information.

Humans can help more

But we all know much of the “juiciest” information, and often the most useful for selling, is not out in the public domain. This is the “unobservable” information. This is the stuff that makes companies tick in reality–things like who is being let go, who is moving departments, which project is being cancelled and what upcoming acquisitions may be on the horizon.

You won’t get this information from ChatGPT because it’s not public.

If you knew this information for all accounts on a prospect list, you could be super-relevant each time you approached a company but the only way to find out this information is to talk to people in the know.

The people need to be people that know what is going on at that company and they need totrust you enough to tell you the “juicy” stuff. These people do not need to be the CEO of the companies we are interested in; they just need to be in “the information flow” of the company, so they know what is going on there.

Open relationships vs. close deals

If these people can help you so much, then why don’t salespeople and business owners invest time in developing them? Why don’t we “open relationships” instead of focusing on “closing deals”?

I have found in my years of selling that we should spend some of our time on developing such a network. If we plan to spend a significant number of years in our market, then our success could depend on our network of people who will help us find out the key information we need to effectively sell there.

Summary

• If you had perfect information on your market, you would sell an amount beyond your reasonable dreams.
• New AI agents can help with some of the drudgery of compiling all the public information available on a topic relevant to your sales.
• AI agents only access public information. Some of the “best stuff” is private. You will only know the stuff if someone that knows what is going on at the company trusts you enough to tell you.
• If you plan to stay in your market for years, you should invest in growing a network of people that will help you find out what is going on there.

The biggest problem most salespeople (and founders that sell) face these days is getting meetings with prospective customers. Metrics for getting meetings have gone way down across the board, whether you use email, a phone call, or a LinkedIn InMail.

There are just too many messages inundating buyers. Buyers know that most of the messages are spam (or close enough), ranging from poorly targeted outreach by salespeople to outright phishing attempts. As a result, buyers want to hit “delete” as quickly as possible.

Many companies (and experts) are tackling this problem by “playing the numbers game”. If only 1 in 100 emails get through now, and that used to be 1 in 10, then we must send 10 times as many emails. This brute force approach has been the answer for more than a decade now, and so conversion numbers keep dropping.

Backwards Selling

​Charles Green, of Trusted Advisor Associates, an acknowledged leader in the trust and selling space recently wrote an insightful LinkedIn post entitled “backwards selling”. In this post, he argues that we have the sales process all wrong. Instead of the traditional approach of defining our target market and then trying every way we know to get through to those people (the vast majority of whom do not know or trust us), we should instead speak to the people we know best and find out what they need.

Charles tells the story of his friend who is an expert in sending mass email (and even as an expert gets a 1 in 1,000 email to meeting conversion rate.) When his friend sent emails to his friends instead of strangers, his meeting conversion rate changed from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 6!

I’ve wondered about this approach myself. The biggest missing piece in sales today is trust. What’s not optimal about this “backwards selling” process is how well your connections fit what you sell. If you’ve been deliberate about building your relationships over a long period of time, then you may have many potential clients in your “Rolodex” and “backwards selling” may work like a charm! Unfortunately, I find most people don’t have connections like this. Most of their best relationships are people that do not align well with what they sell.

Sideways Selling

I’m going to test a hybrid approach, somewhere between traditional targeting and “backwards selling”. For lack of a better term, I will call this “sideways selling” (also because I really like the Sideways movie from 2004 with Paul Giamatti).

In this approach, I plan to define my target market more loosely than modern sales theory suggests, for example my target market might be “healthcare” vs. “medical devices firm in Illinois between $10m and $50m in revenue with a recent investment of over $20 million”).

This lack of focus would be considered too sloppy by most modern sales professionals, but the upshot of today’s recommended tight buyer persona is a lot of difficulty finding relationships that can get you a meeting. Using a looser focus like this, gives you a much greater chance of finding a trusted connection (or common affinity–like going to the same college) that will get you an initial meeting.

There will be plenty of work to do to tune this market definition into something that is efficient, maybe “healthcare” is too board, and a tighter definition will be more successful. Turning the dial on target market definition is where the “rubber hits the road” here.

It’s my guess that leaving room for relationships in my selling may be a big multiplier for success. I don’t think my sales will go “backwards” or “sideways”.

Summary

• Mass outreach results continue to drop. Doing more (and more) of the same is a “road to nowhere.” (I like Talking Heads too!)
• Charles Green (a long-time expert in trust and sales) argues for a new way of selling that starts with relationships not a target market.
• I plan to test a hybrid approach, which uses a “loose” target market definition, allowing room to leverage my relationships wherever possible.

“Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”—Bob Burg, The Go Giver

Mass outreach continues to get worse. I frequently hear from people that “email does not work” or “how can you cold call people when everyone works at home?”

There are still many people out there who think the answer to this declining effectiveness is to send more outreach. If cold email only gives you a 0.1% reply rate, versus the 1% it used to give, then just send ten times more!

Content is too easy to mass produce now

For about the last two decades one of the ways to improve cold outreach has been to send content (like this email!) to cold connections in the hope that the content would so impress them they would inevitably be drawn into your universe. The issue of course is that two decades in, nearly everyone sends content, and it is very hard to stand out unless you have amazing insight or primary research.

The new age of AI we have just entered is making content production so easy that the value of average content is dropping exponentially.

So, if you’ve relied on content as a value-based tool to get in the door with connections, what can you do? Do you need to get into an AI-based arms race to develop the best possible content so that you stand out?

Humans still rule

I don’t think so. My experience is that the value of human connections always exceeds the value of any content you can produce.

Instead of focusing on sending people great content to build goodwill, look for opportunities to connect people, so they can use other people’s knowledge and connections to help them solve a problem or create new opportunities.

You may not know the solution to an individual person’s problem but someone in your network does—or at least they can point them in the right direction.

When you consider that we humans can maintain an average of 150 relationships, that means that our friends’ friends number around 22,500 (150 x 150)! Within 22,500 people there is decent chance that someone can help.

If you keep connecting people, you will in time develop a reputation as a connector. People in your network will start to learn that they can come to you for connections. You will become a valuable person, not only for your knowledge and skills but for the knowledge and skills of every person in your network.

Develop a connecting habit

Making yourself a connector does not take a lot of time. I allocate 30 minutes per day to maintaining my network. This includes replying to outstanding emails and then checking my CRM for people I have not spoken to in a while. I check their LinkedIn profile and postings for any interesting news that I can ask them about. If I see something, I will base my update email on that, if not, I will go with something like “Just thinking of you? Do you need anything?”

With just 30 minutes per day, I have found that in less than a year, people will start identifying you as a “well-connected person” and they will start to ask you about some of their more pressing needs.

Summary

• Mass outreach yields are cratering. Adding content to mass outreach is still a losing battle, as AI makes content too easy to produce.
• Instead of sending people content, become a connector so you can help people form new relationships! Most humans still like other humans more than their AI bot.
• It does not take a lot of time to maintain your network. I have found 30 mins per day will do it. Develop a habit of doing this and you will soon be known as a valuable resource.

People are people, so why should it be, you and I should get along so awfully–Depeche Mode

During a conversation with a friend who is the CEO of a small professional services firm the question came up “how well do you know this person?” and “do you know them like a real person?”

Looking at these questions on the page, they seem a bit odd. But I’ve found in practice they are not. When we are selling, we tend to project some odd traits onto buyers. We forget that buyers are just normal people.

How do real people speak?

We are all on the receiving end of some truly strangle (bad) prospecting emails. These emails are not written in normal language to a normal person. The salespeople sending them would never write to their friends this way. They are following some kind of playbook they’ve been handed or some kind of “best practice” published on the Internet. The problem is we humans have a six sense for BS. Emails that are packed full of adjectives about how amazing this or that company’s products are, or how such and such a client of theirs is now a multi-millionaire, don’t ring true.

What do real people care about?

Salespeople also tend to assume buyers are well-aligned with the goals of their company. Good employees who have drunk the Kool-Aid and really bought into the mission of their company may indeed by aligned with the company’s goals (around 30% of employees fall into this category according to Gallup.)

Buyers have personal goals. At work, they may want to get promoted, not get fired, get a raise or maximize their yearend bonus. Achieving these goals is not always well-aligned with how well you do your job. More often the outcome has to do with how your boss perceives you. In addition, we all have a life outside the office (spare bedroom). We all have goals like looking after our kids, managing our health, managing our personal finances, going on nice vacations and hanging out with friends.

Can you help the real person?

How can you help the real human inside your corporate buyer meet their goals? Can you help them get that promotion or not get fired? Can you help them spend more time with their kids, or at the gym, without their boss thinking they are a problem employee?

Can you find a way to communicate how you actually help these real people meet their real goals? Can you say it in a normal way Next time you’re writing a prospecting email, or outlining a call script, think about the real human being that will be on the receiving end. Can you write/speak in a normal way that starts to build a relationship built on trust? One that is based on you helping the other person achieve what they really want to achieve.

Summary

• Don’t speak like a corporate bot. Speak and write like a normal human being.
• People may be aligned with their company’s goals but those are likely not their main goals. We all have personal goals, at work, and at home.
• Set out to build a trusted relationship with people. Talk to them in honest open manner and try to figure out how you might help them in any element of their life.

It’s darn tough to get through to anyone these days. People have become really good at ignoring what we want to tell them.

I hear this all the time from all kinds of businesspeople and salespeople. Emails don’t work. Calls don’t work. Social media doesn’t work. Nothing works!

But I had an experience this week that reminded me that communication does work when it’s something people want, it’s a little different, and it’s from someone they know.

An old-fashioned approach

I finally got my act together to start sending my friends and connections physical holiday cards again—you know the ones on paper that you write with a pen and stick on a stamp.

Since it’s been so long since I sent these, I was concerned that a lot of the mailing addresses I had were going to be out of date. I sent an email to my friends and connections asking them to confirm their mailing address because I wanted to send them a holiday card.

Normally when I send an email these days not that much happens. We are all so busy (and “frazzled” as Jill Konrath would say) that we have become “black belts” at ignoring email.

But when I sent this email it was like I was transported back to the glory days of email when I would get a 20%-25% replay rate. Suddenly my inbox started filling up with replies from people updating/confirming their mailing address.

Several people told me it stood out that I was going back to sending old-fashioned physical holiday cards and how nice it would be to get one. (I like getting them too…)

After the holiday spirit

So apart from recommending that you start sending holiday cards again, what does this project of mine tell us?

If you buy into sales being about human relationships (and I think for selling high-ticket items you should), then this holiday lesson can inform what we do when Santa has pushed off back to the North Pole.

Let’s think about how we can communicate with our target market(s) in ways that people want, are a little different, and help us become someone our potential customers know. Too much of the communication coming from most companies is the same boring old stuff, sent in the same boring old ways.

• Email: We all know there’s too much email. The first thing we do when we get an email is see who it is from. If we don’t recognize the sender, we delete it (quickly.) Can we become someone the recipient actually wants to hear from–and then does not instantly hit “delete”?
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• The telephone: The telephone is an amazing invention, but it’s kind of intimate and it takes a bunch of time to have a phone call. Most busy people today will not answer their phone unless they recognize the caller’s ID. Can we become someone the recipient actually wants to hear from?
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• Ground mail: There’s not so much physical mail these days, especially handwritten stuff. It’s a pain to write (it takes so much time) and stamps are expensive (73 cents for a first class stamp—I thought they were 48 cents.) But because ground mail is a pain, fewer people send any and it has a better chance of standing out. You can also get super creative (whacky?), see some of the work being done by Dale Dupree and Stu Heinecke.

In the end, it’s not the medium that makes the biggest difference, it’s the human relationship. But if there’s no relationship yet, I’d test each medium, and a combination of methods, to see what works with the people in your market. And yes, to be different, I’d recommend testing some “inconvenient” methods like ground mail—what’s retro is always so much cooler!

Summary

• It’s increasingly difficult to get through to people, as they’ve become adept at ignoring most messages.
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• Sending physical holiday cards led to an unexpectedly high response rate to an email asking my connections to confirm their mailing address.
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• Building human relationships is key to sales. People respond when they know the sender, regardless of the medium used.
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• Consider using “inconvenient” methods like handwritten mail to stand out, while also experimenting with combinations of traditional and digital methods to see what works for your market.

Often when we’re talking about about sales, we seem to be saying the salesperson is in charge of when deals move forward and ultimately when they close. But that is not reality.

When you’re selling you are a steward of a buying process. You can influence when a sale happens, but you cannot overcome the inherent dynamics of how that customer wants to buy.

Don’t slow it down

You can slow deals down. Buyers need reminders of things they should do. Follow up is a critical part of selling. It’s way too easy to miss the follow up you need to do to generate pipeline and progress opportunities. Tools are getting better at reminding salespeople what they need to do, and when they need to do it, but it’s still up to us to act. It can seem like completing an activity such as prospecting is not critical in the frenzy of our busy day, but each action skipped at this stage can mean a reduction in closed deals in the months to come.

Don’t gamble

Over the years, I have seen many salespeople taking big risks with important deals by talking to only one person in the company they are selling to. A common outcome of this kind of “single threading” is “radio silence”—no returned calls or emails, and ultimately no deal.

It does not have to be this way. Once we realize that all sizable deals have multiple people involved in the buying process (research from companies like Gartner put the average number of people in a complex purchase at 6.8), we can change our sales approach to one that maximizes our chances of winning.

One framework for progressing sales opportunities that I have had a lot of success with is described in Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman’s book “Strategic Selling” (now called New Strategic Selling.) In this framework there are three types of people always present in a larger sale.

1. The economic buyer
2. The users
3. The gatekeepers

If you don’t know the people that play the roles above, you are taking a risk with your sale. The first step to increase your chances of winning is to identify the people involved in buying.

Take the win

Take the win. Sales is a tough gig and it’s not getting any easier. We put hours and hours of work into generating opportunities and then turning these into closed deals. When deals do finally close, celebrate! Don’t instantly make your goals bigger. There are so many lean times in selling that it’s well worth giving yourself a pat on the back when good things happen. Do something nice for yourself when you have success. It does not have to be big—buying a Starbucks with extra whipped cream might work. But do something to tell your brain “Hey! This closing stuff is fun!”. It will help you during those tough times when you are trying to put off making one more prospecting call because you’ve already had seven “nos”.

Summary

• You can trace closed deals back to sustained business development work done months earlier.
• Follow up is essential to maintaining a healthy sales pipeline.
• Relying on a single contact in an account risks deals falling through. Identifying the key players increases the chances of closing large sales.
• Celebrate closed deals. Recognizing success will help maintain your motivation during challenging times.

I got some unsettling feedback a few weeks ago. I was told I was a “Brainiac”. I want to help you avoid the same fate.

At first, I thought it was a compliment. It sounded rather flattering. OK I think I would like to be know as that. But then the next part of the feedback came. “And the client said he had no idea what you were talking about.” Uh oh!

In the Ear of the Beholder

One of my roles for this client is to help them sell more complicated services than their salespeople do on a day-to-day basis. This role is somewhat like a sales engineer. I accompany salespeople to meetings where the prospect has an interest in these types of services. Many of these prospects have very little technical background.

For about the last twenty years I have prided myself on my ability to “translate tech speak” into English. I have gotten feedback on many occasions that I am good at that.

Now it seems however that I have met my match. Despite my confidence that I think I can turn “tech babble” into English, I have encountered a prospect that did not know what I was talking about…and in my experience when that happens, it’s no sale every time!

No gobbledygook!

Over the years, I’ve worked with many technology companies that were unable to describe what they do in actual English. They used descriptions like “128-bit encryption with blockchain algorithms”. Prospects eyes glazed over rapidly as these executives spoke to them about their amazing products.

I’ve taken a stand against that kind of gobbledygook in marketing materials, emails, websites and conversations with prospects. I’ve tried to translate every bit of jargon into words normal people (like your grandma) would understand. And up to this point, I thought I was doing well.

Time for some kaizen

In this one aspect of selling, it looks like I became too comfortable. I got cocky that my skills were so good that I would never need to improve in this area. And of course, the universe just showed up to shake me out of this delusion.

It’s time for me to look at how I can improve in this area. I need to be able to explain complicated tech products to the type of prospect I am now encountering. They are the ones buying, so even if their technical knowledge is absent, I need to communicate clearly to them the value of the offering.
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I have always bought in to the idea of continuous improvement. The world seems to move more and more rapidly. As soon as you rest on your laurels, you find you are losing ground. Time for some kaizen (as you may know, Japanese for continuous improvement—not jargon!)

Summary

• Don’t use gobbledygook in any of your sales or marketing. If prospects don’t understand you, they aren’t likely to buy.
• One man’s technical description is another man’s gobbledygook. Know your prospects and market well enough that you know you are being understood.
• Don’t get overconfident in any part of your sales or marketing game. The world moves so quickly that once you stop improving in that area, you are likely to be losing ground. Keep up the kaizen!

I am working on a new sales project and I am sharing what is happening, hoping that it may help you in your selling.

I’ve gotten to the point in this project where I need to start building a list of prospects. I need some quick wins in this project, so I’m looking for ways to leverage companies my client has spoken to before. To find these types of companies I’ve been fishing around in my client’s CRM.

CRM fishing

Like every CRM I’ve ever encountered, my client’s CRM data has plenty of issues. There is data missing and there are duplicate records. Trying to build the prospect list that I need within the CRM would be too time-consuming, involving manually updating thousands of records and tens of thousands of fields. There would be no quick wins this way and probably no project for me soon! What the CRM is useful for is running searches on historic data and pulling out various lists of accounts and contacts that I can use to build a new prospect list.

In this particular project, I am looking for medical practices. There is an “industry” field in my client’s CRM that has as an option the value “doctor” but when I ran a keyword search on company names that included the word “MD” I found hundreds of records that were not tagged as “doctor”. To work around this had to run two reports, one using the “industry” field with the value “doctor” then a second report on the company name field to find all company names including the text “MD”.

The next step is to merge these two lists and then dedupe them. Enter Excel. So my next step was to export these two CRM reports into a CSV (Comma Separated Values) for some spreadsheet work.

Clean up starts

I merged both CSV files together and then I used my favorite Excel function “Remove Duplicates”. On my Mac version of Excel that function hides out under “Data”, see screen shot below.

When you run that function you need to be careful what you choose to dedupe on. Usually this is the column that contains the company name (in the screen shot below that field is called “Customer” in my spreadsheet) if you are trying to get a list of unique accounts, as I am here.

After following this process, I had a pretty good list of all the accounts that are actually doctors in the CRM (not a perfect list but a list that passes the “80/20 rule”, which is enough.) This prospect list is a good start but it is missing data that will help me take a smart approach to prospecting. I will need to append information to this initial list. More on that in future emails.

Summary

• When looking for quick sales wins, one great place to look is in “dusty” old CRM records.
• Most CRM data is a mess but the “nuggets” are in there. Be prepared to do some spreadsheet work to find them.
• Don’t rely on colleagues tagging the accounts, or contacts, you need accurately. Most salespeople hate this kind of data entry work and will skip this step if they can. Cross check the data a couple of ways to see if you’ve really found the data you need.
• Fixing fields and records in a CRM can be super-slow. Use Excel (or Google Sheets) initially to do mass clean up and data appending. You need to get on to the selling part quickly!

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, American philosopher (1863-1952)

I’m working on a new sales project, and I need some quick wins.

One instinct in this situation is to jump in and start prospecting without wasting any time. But I like to figure out which direction I need to point before I go running off.

Sales history

I’ve been looking at some of the small healthcare accounts that my client serves. After some initial analysis and some conversations with sales management, it has become clear that one type of healthcare account is more likely going to have a shorter sales cycle than the other types of account. Since I need quick wins, this type of account is going to be my target segment.

Delving deeper into the history in the CRM I am starting to get a picture of how these accounts have been approached in the past. The short version of this history is that the past sales approach looks transactional. Salespeople made a couple of phone calls and sent a couple of emails. If they did not sell the product they were focused on at the time, they moved on. After moving on many of those accounts were not approach again for a year.

The selling effort was very focused. It seems that there was virtually no attempt to sell anything but the product of the moment. It was pretty much “take it or leave it”. No attempt to set a meeting with the clients to discuss business improvement, be consultative, or do any solution selling.

Surprisingly my client’s salespeople sold 30% of the accounts that were approached in this manner. Most of us that study “Go To Market motions” (or whatever jargon you prefer) would consider two calls and two emails a pretty “light” effort to sell an account. In this 30% conversion rate I think there’s a clue that my client’s product has some pretty good appeal to this market.

Future test

If there are no changes, I believe my client’s salespeople will repeat this same sales process this year.

To increase sales results for my client I’d like to see a move from a totally transactional conversation of “do you want our focus product (or not)” to “can we meet to discuss marketing ideas for your business?” The goal is to upsell other products in addition to the “focus product” that has been the only thing sold to these customers in the past.

I am going to need to work with my client’s salespeople to get this question asked. These salespeople are going to need support and certain collateral, such as one-pagers, web pages, scripts etc. to feel empowered enough to open a wider conversation.

We will see how this part of the project evolves. I will let you know. To increase revenue for my client in this area we are going to have to learn from the past and change our behavior in the future.

Summary

• When you get a new territory, you may feel the need to start prospecting immediately, but I’d recommend figuring out which direction to point before you go running off.
• All accounts are not created equal. If you need quick wins (like me), figure out which ones are likely to be easier to sell.
• There are surprising things to be learned from boring old CRM history records. If you don’t yet know your market well, this history may have a story to tell you.
• Many salespeople are still transactional. They sell what they need to sell that month and move on. This can leave a lot of money on the table.

I am continuing to report on findings from my new sales project. The project has already thrown up a few reminders I see time-and-time-again in the sales world.

To remind you of the story so far. I am taking over a sales territory from a salesperson that has recently left the client’s company. I am looking for some quick wins in this situation as this will help keep the project going. I have been looking through the “old dusty files” to see if the previous salesperson left any qualified opportunities that could be quickly closed.

Little left behind

My journey through the “old dusty files” did not turn up much. The salesperson was one that did not fill in the CRM. I found a few clues from the odd call note and the salesperson’s name attached to certain contacts in the CRM; however, nothing that would represent an opportunity ripe for closing.

I spoke to the salesperson’s manager, and they thought the salesperson was calling on all the accounts associated with them but just not making any CRM notes. Therefore, a real opportunity may lurk in these accounts that could be closable in the short-term but such hope rests mostly on hearsay at this point.

Reminder 1: Company owners, be nice to salespeople but make sure they leave notes in your CRM, or when they leave, you will have no clue what they did or where your investment went.

Placing bets

Since the salesperson’s account list might turn up some short-term deals, it is one potential source of the quick wins I seek. It is certainly not a given that any of the accounts the salesperson was allegedly calling are ready to do business. Given this, I started looking for other possibilities to close short term deals.

One of these seems to be healthcare accounts in certain relatively well-covered territories where current salespeople still have relationships. These accounts have not been sold everything that the company could provide. The challenge here becomes working with the salespeople still in place to cross-sell more products.

Reminder 2: Sales are driven by the customers. Salespeople cannot push sales to happen. Given that sales are not fully in our control, it’s wise to have a “portfolio” type approach and try several strategies to making sales.

Boil the ocean

A temptation that seems to creep in to this kind of new sales project is to “boil the ocean”. Rather than focusing on a tight ICP, someone will suggest that it’s a big world and there are 1,000’s of accounts that the sales team has not touched. They are a “green field”.

Once upon a time, this thinking made sense to me but having gotten a couple of more decades of selling under my belt, I have realized that this is the tough way to go about solving short-term revenue needs. These accounts know nothing about my client’s company and will take a lot of time and effort to warm up. Meanwhile my client has dozens of ICP type accounts that have at least spoken to the client’s salespeople in the past.

Reminder 3: The “grass is NOT usually greener” in the accounts you have never marketed or sold to before. They have not said “no” yet, but they don’t trust you at all either. Starting from scratch can take a bunch of time.

Internal selling

To move this project forward, discussions have had to occur with various management players in the client company. In each discussion there is an element of selling. People tend to stick with what they know and how things are done now unless new ideas are suggested, discussed and sold to them. Without these agreements the project would have much lower odds of succeeding.

Over the years I’ve seen salespeople that became very skilled at selling to clients but then when it came to getting their colleagues onboard did not put in the same level of sales effort to get internal support for what they were doing. Many of these salespeople did not last at their companies.

Reminder 4: Selling is not only something you only do with clients and prospects, but something you do all the time. Some of the “internal sales” you make, might be the biggest factor determining if you make your quota.

Summary

• If you own a company, be nice but make sure salespeople put notes in your CRM; otherwise, when they leave you won’t have anything for your investment in them.
• Have a “portfolio” approach to selling and try several strategies to make your sales goals.
• The “grass is NOT usually greener” in the accounts you have never marketed to before. Starting from scratch can take a bunch of time.
• Selling is not something you only do with clients and prospects, but something you do all the time. Some of the “internal sales” you make, might be the biggest factor determining if you make your quota.