You need to experiment on price, on pitch, on the offering, and essentially everything about the product.  When you experiment, you learn about what the issues are that are the most important and also what the levers are that will draw the actual close out of a person.

Experimentation can lead to learning that your price is too high, or that people want to pay monthly instead of annually.  Experimentation can tell you that one particular feature drives sales more than other features and can lead to shifts in marketing or product direction which can drastically improve the results for the company.  Most entrepreneurs understand today that playing with your messaging and keywords in organic and paid search helps you to learn about the product and what will cause an uptick – and therefore it should be an easy extension to apply this to sales techniques.

For example, at one of my start-ups, we played with offering different levels of users, and also different price packs – ultimately learning that our initial assumption that companies wanted to pay “per user” was dead wrong.  Our customers were willing to pay MORE for an unlimited pack because it meant they only had to ask for budget once rather than each time they had more users.  Lesson learned… sales prevailed.

Another time, we experimented with messaging.  The product spoke to many different aspects of the business.  Sometimes we led the conversation with the “functional”  aspects of the product – what it could do for them in terms of increasing productivity, and other times we lead with “safety and security”.  In conversations, we always talked about both – but sometimes we stressed one over the other.  This was not always random… but was often thru just a little bit of research about company goals.

One really important way to experiment is with the “non-commit” offer.  Offering something that is phrased as a non-committal is a great way to get to the root of an objection and to also learn about your product.  For example, you might say, “I can’t guarantee that my boss will go for this, but if I let you pay monthly, would that change your mind about buying this week?”  If they say yes, and your boss doesn’t want to make the offer – you have a way to go back and not take the deal.  And… perhaps after you hear “yes” 10 times, you realize that offering your product with monthly payments is what you should be doing from now on.

What you should NEVER do is lie in your experiments.  Blatant outright lies will only come back to haunt you and may actually set you up to fail – both as a salesperson and a company because lies in sales follow you.

For example, NEVER inflate your price and then claim that you are taking percentage off the price to get you to the same or other price.  Yes, I am aware that retail outlets do this all the time, and people are used to it – but in anything other than retail it simply smells rotten and slimy and will get you a reputation.

Never lie about features your product has, or customers you have landed, or your roadmap unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences.  I’ve had bloggers, reporters, and competitors that try to catch me in a lie.  And if they ever had, I’m sure they would make sure the world knows it.  Ask yourself if the risk you take is worth it.  I say that it rarely is.

When you experiment, you need to assume that your prospects will see ALL sides of any messaging / offer / or otherwise.  If you can easily resolve the discrepancies, then you are OK.  If you imagine getting the call from the prospect where she says, “I was told by you that your list price is $5,000 and I’m going on the site and seeing that the price is $4,500.  Why are you charging me more?”  and you are unprepared to let her know why?  Then you have a problem.  Your answer cannot be that you were experimenting with some new pricing – because she will want to know why you didn’t offer her the experiment.  Most likely… you will be caught in a lie and will lose the sale – and the respect of the prospect.

If you are A/B testing, are you prepared when two people in two different locations bring up your site and see completely different pricing?  If you can’t resolve the discrepancy, then you will lose the deal.  Perhaps change the price on different packages, or different length commitments, or otherwise, but simple differences in prices based on how you surfed the site or what salesperson picked up the phone when you called?  not good.

If its different messages that you are giving – do they resolve to the same core product?  Do you know that ultimately, you aren’t saying something that just isn’t true – just to see what happens?  That will certainly back-fire on you.

The bottom line is that you should experiment at will, but what you shouldn’t do is experiment with untruths – or with shady tactics that you can’t resolve if you get one prospect seeing both sides of the coin.  There are PLENTY of ways to experiment without needing to resort to shady and slimy tactics – so stay away from those.

Honesty is really the best way to go… always.

While those are truly admiral professions, I have to say that I am not sure why salesmanship is not promoted more.  ”Let ‘em be doctors or salesmen or such” fits just fine.  (My apologies to all the VERY talented saleswomen that I work with – but salespeople was too many syllables, but don’t think that doesn’t mean that I don’t think mommas should push women into sales too.)

Can someone point out a single organization in the world that doesn’t have a salesperson on staff?  Even non-profits have people whose entire job is fundraising.  Call it Business Development, or Advancement, or Stategic Relationships, or whatever – its still sales.

Why then, don’t more mommas tell their kids to study negotiating, or closing.  Why don’t kids make sure that Proper Prospecting Techniques 101 and Cold-Calling Without Being Pushy 203 make it on their schedule.  Oh yeah – because to my knowledge there is not a single school that teaches sales as a major or even has a department focused on it !  Yet EVERY organization needs it.  I’ve heard of some schools spending a little bit of time on sales within another class – but since its not taught by salespeople, I’d love to hear how it has helped people if it has – and I’ve never heard of it being more than a “here are some ideas” rather than an actual effort that will yield people that can be successful honest salespeople.

If you could get a salesperson to take a teaching role and a school (business school or otherwise), could you even get students to sign up for these courses?  What would most parents say if their kids came home and said, “Mom / Dad… I’ve chosen my major.  Its in sales.”  We are a capitalist society, yet there is something strange about deciding to get into sales.  Sales guys are those creepy guys who swindle people.  They only care about money.  They are in it for themselves.  Many parents would be horrified if their child announced they were going into sales – as if they’ve just chosen a life of debauchery and sin.  I get plenty of comments about my chosen sales career – as if I made a more honest living when I was writing code – yet I’ve done a lot more good in sales than I ever did as a programmer.

My entire sales mantra is always about honesty, and doing the right thing.  If we taught sales in a university to EVERY student, perhaps we wouldn’t start with people that go into sales ONLY for money.  We wouldn’t get people who go to sales because they realize that they know how to manipulate people.  Perhaps if we taught sales the way I try to train salespeople that work for me, and the way I was taught, we would get better salespeople – and more honest transactions.   It often takes a long time before great salespeople figure out that if you just do the right thing, sales and cash follow.  Maybe if we taught that in school, people would know it from the start.

Since every organization needs sales, and sales don’t stop ever… is there a job that is more recession proof?  You can live without a lot of functions in your company, or you can significantly reduce them or outsource them.   Can you ever live without sales?  Not for long. If you are a properly trained and experienced salesperson, you become MORE valuable when the economy goes sour.  Those of us that can find the value sale will always have people we can sell to because we aren’t trying to swindle anyone, and prospects flock to that.  Doesn’t that make it more attractive to have our kids become salespeople?

Properly trained salespeople can hold senior management positions very easily.  Why?  They understand how businesses work – how they thrive.  In figuring out how to get people to make purchasing decisions, and determining the value sale, salespeople learn a lot about what makes businesses tick, how they spend money, how to negotiate better deals when you are on the buying side of the table, and more.  So, sales careers also can be launchpads for other careers in management.

For all these reasons and more, I will encourage my kids to consider a career in sales – or at least to understand the mechanics of sales very well.  I hope that more parents do.

Sometimes, I’ve learned these lessons through failing and picking myself up again.

Other times, I’ve learned from talking to people more experienced than me.  My sales mentor has been an incredible resource to me.

Yet other times, I’ve learned from watching the people who sell FOR me, or around me.  I’ve seen younger, less experienced salespeople have bursts of brilliance in sales and close or move deals with tactics that didn’t come to me immediately.  And, sometimes they may read a situation better than I have – and therefore have better insight in what the next move is.

Sales is an artform, and its hard to get it perfect every time.   And.. there are a lot of ways to learn and get better.  I’m ALWAYS looking for new ways to get better at sales.  When I discuss sales tactics with anyone… regardless of the level of experience of the person I am talking to, I would never discount what they are telling me about an account – in case there is something that I have missed about it or perhaps there is an innovative way to move an account forward.

This is why it boggles my mind when fresh, young salespeople are SO arrogant that they refuse to listen to advice  on how to get better at sales.  Its easy to misread an account, miss a “closing” cue, commit sales sabotage, and more.    The people around you:  your mentor, your sales manager, other salespeople in your company, your CEO, and anyone else in and around your deal can offer you tips and cues to get better – and you should be taking this advice.

I’m not perfect in my sales record.  There isn’t a perfect person out there.  (If there is someone with a 100% close rate – then stop reading this blog and go read theirs!)  However, there is nothing more frustrating than to see a young salesperson make blatant errors and then actually refute advice given to them by their sales manager and sales peers within the same company (that have better sales track records).  Just like me, you aren’t perfect, and in fact, as a young salesperson, you haven’t lived through a lot of the errors, and you don’t have the arsenal of ways to overcome situations that your salesmanager has.  EVERYONE should listen more and learn more – and rarely should advice be refuted on first glance.

In my career right now, I’m often the master – but often… I’m still the grasshopper.  And, I’m OK with that.  I want to learn and learn and learn so that I can continue to be a better master when I am called to be the master.  I actually think that because I like to be the grasshopper, it makes me a better master when I’m the master.

So… be the grasshopper sometimes.  It will serve you well.

A true salesperson does what needs to be done to get the deal done. Sometimes that means sweetening the offer. Sometimes it means dropping the price. Sometimes it means explaining the benefits better, or comparing yourself against the alternatives. But a good salesperson always figures out whats holding up a deal and then looks for ways to overcome that obstacle/objection and get the deal done.

However, very few salespeople can achieve and crush their quotas without the use of tools. The tools in a salespersons bag include the obvious: the cell phone, the laptop, the iPad, Blackberry, the nice suit, business cards, etc. There are also the increasingly important software tools like salesforce.com, Hoovers, Jigsaw, etc. As a sales manager, part of my job is to use these tools to make sure that the sales PEOPLE use these tools to get more sales! To track progress – to uncover deals slipping away – to help lagging salespeople.

One of the more frustrating conversations that I have with salespeople is over important deals (or ANY deal) on the one yard line that is not closing quickly – and I’m not part of the process. The BEST salespeople that I have ever worked for come to ME first when a deal is slipping away or stuck or otherwise. These sales people know that their sales manager is the best and one of the most important tools that they have in their bag of tools.

Salespeople have egos which are sometimes too big – we can all agree on this – but there is NO shame in getting your sales manager to help out. THAT IS HIS/HER JOB!  I see too many salespeople try to close the deal 100% themseleves because somehow doing that makes them feel better about their progress.  I say, doesn’t getting the commission check feel better?  Too many salespeople try to work around the salesmanager and then look like a hero because they brought in the big deal alone.

In reality…who gets the biggest praise from the sales manager?  The salesperson who closes the most deals!  And… the salespeople that close the most deals make the best use of EVERY resource placed in front of them.  And this includes the sales manager.  Sales people and Sales Managers are aligned in compensation

At the pipeline calls each week, I will review and try to find these deals that I should be helping out with, and force myself into the deal.  Force the salesperson to get me on the phone, or send an email, or call the gatekeepers boss, or whatever needs to be done.  Yet, I hate having to force myself into the deal.  This salesperson should be reaching out to me at every turn to have me help close the deals – or move them along.

One of the best salespeople that I have dealt with is the master of this.  She calls and emails me several times a week with tasks for me.  She will email me with precise details of who she wants me to send an email to and, if she hasn’t supplied me the exact words, she will give me an overview of what she wants my email to say.  I will oblige and help her move the deal along.  She will also give me a call list.  This list will be VP’s or otherwise that she needs me to call as the grey hair and move the deal along.  She will give me a synopsis of what has been happening on the deal since my last interaction and how she thinks this move will help it.  Sometimes she isn’t sure how I can help, and we discuss if I can and what the right move is.  Sometimes she just calls me and asks me what my opinion is on how to move a deal forward and if she is doing is correctly.

Wow… she uses me, her sales manager, quite a bit.  Is she weak?  Is she untalented?  NO.  She is the opposite.  She is hands down one of the BEST salespeople I have ever worked with – and she makes and breaks her quota consistently.

What has she figured out?  She has figured out that her sales manager (and for that matter ALL of her senior management) are tools that she can use at her disposal to close deals.

Once you figure this out – and get over your own ego – you will close more deals.

Use your sales manager.  He/she is one of the best and underused tools.

I was certainly fascinated by Istanbul.  Its history.. Its beauty.. Its culture.  One of the many sites that I visited was the famous Grand Bazaar.  The Grand Bazaar is a massive market with over 1,000 shops selling everything from jewelry, clothing, food, trinkets, etc.  The trip through the Bazaar gave me a fantastic chance to view lots of different sales styles, tactics, mistakes, and successes.

The overarching style of sale here is one of haggling.  There is no set price for just about anything.  The vendors and the customers all understand that haggling is the mode of operation here.  I set about a number of purchases to investigate the sales style of some of the vendors.

Understand your prospects alternatives and willingness to walk

My first purchase was a toy gun for my son.  (Yes, yes… Its already been established that I have questionable parenting skills – and I’m sure I will get judged in the comments again.)  A beautiful replica of an Ottoman Empire Blunderbuss with a mother of pearl inlay seemed like a great purchase for a boy of 7, to me.  I asked the vendor how much the gun was.  He said it was 90 Lyra.  I said that I only wanted to pay at max 50 Lyra.  He then showed me some cheap guns at about 30 Lyra.  I said thanks and started to walk away.  He grabbed me back and said that he could do 85 Lyra for the original gun.    I said, “sorry.  I only want to pay 50 Lyra for something for my son.  If you can’t do 50, then I’ll find something else.”  He went to 75.  I said, “50.”  He said, “I keep changing my price, but you stay the same.”  So I said, “OK.. 51 Lyra”  He laughed, put the gun in a bag and said, “60 Lyra”.  I handed him 60 Lyra and went on.

I respected his tenacity, and his salesmanship, but he certainly saw that I didn’t have that much attachment to the item, and was willing to walk.  My willingness to walk was not a tactic.  It was literally that I wasn’t that attached to the item – but at 60 Lyra – approx $40 – it seemed like a decent deal.  The challenge that this vendor, and all vendors there have, is that there are 50 vendors selling very similar stuff in a very close proximity.  So his challenge was to make the deal as quickly as possible and as fairly as possible.  By keeping it a fast exchange, and quickly understanding my pain points and my willingness to pay, he was able to quickly negotiate a deal – and get me off my initial price.

When you are selling, you need to understand your prospects ability to walk, their absolute need for your product, their willingness to take alternatives – even if they aren’t perfect matches.  When you are selling your product, do you know the alternatives that they are looking at?  Do you understand why they might choose an alternative?  This vendor might have understood my hesitancy with getting a gun home on a plane or my willingness to just get anything for my son.

When you truly understand why someone will NOT buy your product – you are more likely to understand why they WILL buy your product.

Understanding generally what your customer is looking for – if anything

After I purchased the gift for my son, I started browsing around again, and was stopped by three different people asking me to “check out their uncle’s shop right around the corner”  These wandering “lead generation tools” are seeking out people on the street to pull them to their shops.   When the first person grabbed me, he asked what I was looking for and I told him that I was shopping for my wife.  He then took me around to his “uncle’s store” and when I got in the store, I was brought a delicious glass of hot tea.  I was then shown, in a private space, a series of very beautiful and amazing silk carpets.  I acknowledged that the carpets were indeed well made and beautiful (which they were… probably the most beautiful carpets I’ve ever seen or touched) and kept looking for my exit.  After I was shown about 25 carpets, the salesman finally told me that the rug I liked the best was only $10,000 – which he said was a great deal.  I actually believe this probably was a good deal given that it was a very large handwoven silk carpet with a very complex design.

I explained to him that while I thought the carpets were beautiful, I was not in the market for a carpet – and especially not a carpet for $10,000 that I then had to cart around the rest of the day and then 5,000 miles back home.  He then tried desperately to show me $5,000 and $3,000 carpets but I finally got my exit chance.  I thanked him for the tea and went on my way.

Two more times I was approached by the “lead gen” guys to go to their “Uncle’s Store”  Apparently the thing in Istanbul is to have your nephew pimp your store in the Bazaar.

What struck me as I thought about the exchange was that I wondered how often this tactic was successful.  Were there many people who when just walking thru a bazaar, just suddenly decide to drop $10,000 when they went to the bazaar not looking to?  It seems to me that if I’m going to spend $10,000, there has been some thought put into it before hand.  And, I was certainly not dressed in such a way that would have given him the impression that I was much wealthier than I am where dropping $10,000 would have been an afterthought.  (or do they think all Americans are that wealthy?)

This salesperson didn’t once try to understand me, my shopping habits, my ability to spend $10,000 on a moments notice, or any of the skills that I would expect someone to have if they are in a high priced product sale.

When you sell your product, do you think about who you are calling on and their ability to pay for your product?  If you are cold-calling, do you even know if they need or have ever thought about a product like yours.  The answer is probably that they havent, and you need to take this into account.  You need to take the time to understand the customer better.  This salesperson sat me down and gave me tea – which would have been the perfect opportunity to find out things like… what do I do for a living, do I live in a house or an apartment, do I have a co-financial decision maker (wife) at home that would change my purchase habits on large items, etc.  He didn’t ask me any of those questions and was therefore just throwing anything and everything at me in the hopes that something would stick.

It was a very curious exchange and one that I’d love to see stats on how often this works for them.

Speaking the same language

My third exchange was purchasing food.   This exchange didn’t actually happen inside the bazaar, but near it.   As I tried to order food and wine, the waiter just looked very confused – obviously not understanding anything we were saying – and it took quite a while pointing at menus and pictures before we got our order.

This was certainly not the waiters fault as it was me who was in the foreign country and should have been able to communicate, but it helped to illustrate something to me.  Are you and your prospect speaking the same “language?”  Are you talking in your native tounge and using the buzz words and phrases that make perfect sense to you – but when your prospect looks at you – they have no idea what you are talking about?

Too often I see salespeople who are so close to their product that they don’t realize that everyone outside of their company has NO idea what they are talking about.  You should always make sure that you are speaking in the native tongue of your prospect if you want an easier sale.

I have to say that my trip to Istanbul was educational, successful, and informative, and as usual… I found great sales lessons in the trip.

Anyone who has done sales in a start-up can attest to that fact.  Great salespeople make it look easy – or at least hide the struggle well from non-salespeople.   Once a great salesperson builds their pipeline, gets down their pitch and starts rolling with it, they can easily bring companies on the pipeline, and move them through, and can often do it with, what looks like, ease and finesse – and often with amazing predictability.

For people and managers who have never been the person on the firing line, especially in a start-up, this predictability and finesse look like a hands down victory.   And in many ways it is a victory.  The ability to get your startup to this point means that you have a product that people want, that people will pay for.  You have identified a good sales team, and they have developed the pitch and the product offerings and pricing that allow sales to happen.  It seems as if sales will just happen now – regardless of who or what is in the sales role.  I’ve seen too many non-sales startup founders think that the product must be speaking for itself, and that the sales will happen regardless of  who or what is in front of them.  But in a start-up, it is often the case that these great salespeople are masking the actual difficulty that is going into this sales machine.  In many instances, the sales team is still pushing the truck up-hill, even though the truck appears to be coasting just fine.  These sales people deal with rejection all the time, and focus on the positive, so the message to the outside team is that everything is going well – even if it isn’t.  And if numbers are getting hit – or near to being hit – then it appears that it is time for a victory lap.

This is most often very, very far from the truth.  The predictability that you see is often completely dependent on the people making it happen, and when you take these people out of the equation, the bottom can fall out.  If you are a start-up manager, you need to resist the urge to change something that is working – even if it is costing you money – ESPECIALLY if its costing you money.  Since the process looks smooth and easy, the natural reaction will be, “OK, this is easy now, so I shouldn’t have to pay as much in commissions.”

WRONG…. WRONG… WRONG!!

Pay away and smile.  Why?  Because you’ve found a team that is bringing in revenue – and revenue is good.  The more you are paying in commissions, the more this process is working.

True… it is possible that there are things you are paying more commission than you should – but until you know for SURE that this is the case, I would argue vehemently that you will lose more revenue than you will pay out in extra commissions.  I can name significantly more companies that overpaid salespeople and succeeded than ones that cheaped out and succeeded.  And, if you succeed and paid a little more to your salespeople no one will care.  And if you fail and overpaid your salespeople, its highly unlikely that the commissions were the reason (after all paying commissions implies some degree of success).

One start-up I worked with tried at every turn to figure out when sales were “working” and they could scale back on what and how things were paid out.   Sales were happening… but they were never automatic, and they were never easy.   I was always amazed at how they would look to save a few thousand dollars in commissions, when if the salesperson left…. it would have cost them potentially HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars.

Cheaping out on a working sales team – even if parts of it feel bad – is never a good strategy in startup mode.

So… given this, when CAN you scale back and change your compensation plan.   Well… if you built the plan so poorly in the beginning, that you are actually losing money – then I certainly would change the compensation package.  If the compensation package isn’t working to bring about the goals that you need to set for revenue – then I would certainly change the package.    Once you have a large sales team that consistently makes goals – even the weakest and newest of salespeople, and it is VERY obvious that there is no large effort, then perhaps it is time to scale it back (although again I might argue if you make your revenue and profit goals – keep it).

But unless any of that is true and if you are making money, then don’t change it!  This is the sign that your plan is working!  NOT that you are overpaying, and not that sales have suddenly gotten easy.

Too many start-up sales managers are quick to declare victory…”mission accomplished”, and to try to scale back what and how they pay on things in an effort to save precious cash – but I warn that this is very often penny-wise because a disgruntled or demotivated sales team will not take you where you want them to take you.  And very often the reason you are paying a lot – is because they are doing exactly what you motivated them to do.

Don’t punish them now that they are doing it.

What exactly is a murder board?  Murder Board is a term that was originally coined by the U.S. military and referred to the practice of preparing people for oral exams – particularly for oral exams related to becoming an instructor.  A panel of several people would be convened to hear the presentation of  the candidate, and to become the worst set of students that this instructor would ever face – and to see how they would handle the frustration. humiliation, and the general situation.  The thought process was that if they could handle that panel of people, then there would be no student that could topple them.  At the end of the murder board, the instructor would get a thumbs up or down, and in the case of a thumbs down… subjected to another murder board.  This ritual was part training / part hazing, but actually probably quite effective at weeding out bad instructors and preparing good ones.

So what does this have to do with sales and entrepreneurship?    When we talk about murder board as it relates to sales, it is not a hazing technique, but rather an essential tool to arm the salesperson with responses to all of the tough questions that a customer can ask.  It has the same roots, but can truly be critical in making sure that you don’t blow that meeting that you worked so hard to get.

I recommend murderboarding early and often.  It is very easy in the early stages of a company, or in a tight knit sales team to get into “group think” where you start to actually believe everything that you say in your pitch and about your product without taking a very hard and critical look at it with outside eyes.

A murderboard should be conducted with one person taking the role of salesperson, and the other people taking the role of hyper-critical clients that have a problem with anything and everything.  This should NOT be a hazing experiment to see if you can throw this person off their game just for the fun of it, but it should be difficult.  The point is to prepare yourself, to learn about your product, and to get better and better pitches (and perhaps learn something more about your product in relation to your competition, the world in general.”   The people serving as the clients need to object to any and every part of the product and pitch that is presented:

I already use one of your competitors

Its too much money

That claim can’t be true

My company already has a solution like that

I don’t need this

Cloud solutions will never get past my CIO.  We NEVER host data outside our company.

I have more important priorities

This is a “nice to have”

Your competition is cheaper

and on and on…  If you have heard the argument, or think about the argument, you should bring it up.  The person in the line of fire should be able to respond to each and every question in a proper way.  Don’t be afraid to get specific about your product and its features – because your potential customers wont.

When you stump the person presenting, you should stop and think about the question.  Why did that particular objection or response throw you?  Is it an overlooked product feature?  Or a place where your competition trumps you?  Or is it just something for which you haven’t thought of a proper response.  No matter… if you get stumped… THIS IS GOOD! Its means you are learning something about your product, your pitch, or your ability to pitch.   Work on and practice better responses to each objection and incorporate them into the arsenal you use in your selling.

The sales team should take turns on this, and iterate the pitch over and over again.

How often should you murder board?  Often… especially in the early stages of a product.  It should help bring out deficiencies in the product and how to deal with them in the sales pitch.   If you get a new objection in the field or lose a sale, bring it back into the next murder board and use the experience to determine if there were ways to better handle the objection, or deal with the competitive threat.

Murder board when you get new salespeople.  Don’t subject them first, but let them be the “bad client” first.  Chances are their outside view will bring up something you haven’t dealt with before and help the experienced people pitch better.  Then, once they have heard the pitch a few times, they can role play themselves and have the experience of battling overly-critical prospects.

I’m not sure how I would get better or how to train my teams better without the murder board, yet I’m always amazed when people in sales and start-ups say that they aren’t murder boarding.  Sure… there are a lot of people claiming to role-play, but that is not completely the same thing.  In role-play, there is not necessarily a concentration on raising all the possible objections.  I’d love to hear in the comments other ways people are training themselves, their sales staff, and just sanity checking their pitch/product other than murder boarding.

Good salespeople build their entire career based on one of integrity.  We believe, that every step of the way, we should be open and honest with you about our product, about its limitations, about how and where we are better and worse than our competition.  We even try to be completely transparent and honest with you about our sales process so that we can start our relationship on the right footing.

Therefore, there is really no reason for you to tell us you want the product, or give us a verbal commit unless you really do in fact want to buy our product.  We are salespeople, and we are accustomed to rejection.  In fact, our entire mode of working is based on the fact that only some of you will buy.  We know that many of you will not buy, and we are OK with that.  Our bosses are OK with that.  We all know the way this works.

But, as we said, our careers are based on integrity, and when you tell us, “yes I’ll buy that.  Its all the way through legal and I have my bosses approval.”  and then you disappear from the face of the earth, it makes us look bad.  We’ve tried to do right by you, please try to do right by us.  When we mark a deal as “verbal commit” and then we can’t get you on the phone, the contract never appears, and the sale never happens, we look bad to our managers, our CEO’s, our investors, and advisors.  These people question whether we ever really got the verbal commit, or if we did it simply to save our own skin – yet, it seems to be an epidemic these days of you prospects not wanting to tell us “no. I won’t buy,” and you continue our relationship longer than it needs to be continued.

Yes.. we are not going to take a NO answer without a fight but since we are honest salespeople, we really want to find the solution that works for you.  We are on your side…if we need to help get you a better price, or get something thrown in, we will fight for you because we want to establish a long relationship that allows us to get sale after sale after sale.  I’m more concerned about getting you the right solution, and doing the right thing, then I am about cash, because I’m in this for the long haul with you and with my company.

But… if there is really no way that you will ever buy from us, or you boss has shut you down, or you don’t have the budget, or you just think we are not a company you want to do business with… its really OK.  I’d rather have you tell us NO, then have us turn into “that sales person” who calls EVERY day, sends email after email, and just generally becomes a persistent pain in the butt.  However, if you tell us, “Lets call on Monday and finish this up because my boss has said yes,” and then you don’t take our calls on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and on and on… you can be sure that we’re going to keep going after you.  We are trained to keep going when the conversation gets had, and the sale is emminent.

We commit to always be honest with you… just please always be honest with us.  I promise, we will have lots more positive interactions, and everyone will have less stress.

Sincerely,

Salespeople

When talking with entrepreneurs and their sales teams, an exercise that I like to go through is to have them think critically about their own product and its sales cycle.   Then, I like to have them really think about how they buy similar products and what the experience has been for them.   The results of the exercise are very often quite interesting, and revealing about why some fledgling products have trouble getting traction in sales.  A great deal of it boils down to a particular view of what and how you should charge and feeling “justified” in charging something, or using a particular sales tactic, yet you need to know if you were on the other side of the table… how would you respond to these situations?

Some examples:

• The over-aggressive sales guy: I had a conversation with an entrepreneur recently who was directing his sales person to call and email, and call and email, and call and email these prospects until he got an answer from them.  When the customer said, “call back on Monday.” on Monday at 9:30AM, he was questioning why the call hadn’t been made.    Later that same day, he complained that a sales rep had been hounding him to make a decision, and was frustrated that this sales rep had no appreciation for the fact that buying his product wasn’t the most important thing on his list.   Hmm… seems like a pretty evident disconnect.  This entrepreneur’s revenue pressure was causing him to force the exact aggressive behavior that was irritating him by another company because he was under the pressure.     Taking a small step backwards and looking at the situation critically, he should have recognized that aggressive sales tactics often don’t work.  He was fully aware of that fact, but forgot it.
• Set-up Fees:  Another company recognized that in order to get their product up and running for a customer they had a significant effort that they had to deploy, and therefore they decided that they needed to charge a set-up fee in order to re-coop that cost.  Yet… this same management team resisted a set-up fee for a service they were deploying because it made the initial pain very difficult – and it caused that decision to take about 6 weeks longer than if no set-up fee were charged.   Do I think that looking at their set-up fee in a vacuum that they are justified for wanting to charge a set-up fee?  Yes.  But I don’t know anybody that likes paying set-up fees – and it makes the decision for the prospect needlessly harder.  When you are trying to make the most sales you can in the shortest amount of time, adding obstacles to the sale only hurt you.  If you charge $5,000 / mo, and your set-up fee causes a minimum 6-week delay in the sale (if you get it at all), then your set-up fee better make up for the $7,500 you lost by even HAVING a set-up fee.  When this customer was challenged on it, the response was still that it was labor intensive to set-up and therefore a set-up fee must be charged, when in reality the set-up fee was just an obstacle.  Think about it from the customers perspective.  If paying a setup fee is painful, then don’t do it!  (or understand that sales will suffer)
• Free Shipping / Promotion Codes:  How many times have you left one site for another site because one site charged for shipping and the other one didn’t?  Have you not bought on a site because they didn’t offer (or your couldn’t find) a promotional code?  Yet, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who forget this simple lesson.   Don’t you like to get a deal?  If you see a promotional code field, but have no promotions, do you frustrate your sales targets?   I worked with a client who justified that he needed a shipping fee, “because the shipping costs really hurt my bottom line.”  Is this true?  probably.  But… his target market was used to no shipping fees.  Therefore, even though he was justified, he was using a practice out of the norm that was hurting him in terms of sales.  Once he looked at it from his customers perspective, suddenly he figured out a way to overcome the shipping dilemma (offering free shipping over a particular cart amount).
• “In your face” selling:  Most entrepreneurs that I talk to, during the exercise, talk about how they hate when a site/email/ad has so many calls to action that it feels slimy – yet I look at their site/emails/ads and it looks like a late night infomercial with “BUY NOW” messages plastered all over it – or very obvious slipperiness to get people to buy.   I’m certainly not a conversion expert, nor am I a design expert, but I know slimy sales when I see it.  Take a critical look at the marketing materials you have, and ask yourself if you’d be offended by what you send – or question its tactics.
• Difficult return or cancellation or trials:  The simple most important thing to me when I sign-up for a new service, is knowing how and when I can cancel provided I don’t like the service.  Once I do this, how do I delete my data.  How can I make sure you would pester me or use my information?  These are the things I think about when I sign up for a service, and I know many people who agree with me.  Yet, I have clients who create their service and purposely make it difficult (or more subtle) to cancel.  Why?  The reasoning is that if its easy to cancel… people will.  I say, if your service is good, then people won’t cancel.  Knowing, and trusting, that I can get out of our relationship is a faster path to get INTO the relationship.  Ask yourself about how you would feel if any of the subscription services that you use made you feel like you were being held captive?

There are many, many examples that I have experienced with entrepreneurs.  If you have any other great examples, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

My posts on this topic to date have been much more subtle (i.e. Colorbrind Prospects, Easier to Buy = Easier to Sell).    I think that for many companies, this is a critical problem in their sales DNA.  Its very easy to think about how you’d LIKE to sell your product and how you’d LIKE to get paid for your product – but its not about you – its about your prospects.  And, if you were your prospect…. would YOU buy from you?  Would you like the way you were being treated?  Would you trust the person on the other end?  If you can’t unequivocally say yes, then you need to re-think your sales strategy / tactic / pricing.

At the bagel store near my house, a bagel costs $0.49.  Yet, order that bagel with $0.03 worth of butter, and the bagel is suddenly $1.69.  Why does the store do this?  Because its great to advertise bagels that cost only $0.49, but who comes into the store and only orders 1 bagel with nothing on it?  The upsell is the critical method of driving profit into the store.

It’s not a dishonest strategy, but if you sat there and really thought about what is going on, its kind of maddening.  And if you listen to the entire process of people walking in and out of the store (which as a person who looks for sales techniques in anything, I do), you will hear the constant upsell.  “Can I interest you in a coffee too?  Perhaps some cheese with that taylor ham sandwich?  Can I interest you in home fries?”  The entire sales process is hinged on the upsell.

Think about every infomercial you have ever seen.. “but wait… act now and get a second for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling”

So, I can see how people think of the upsell as a technique that lies on the border of sleazy in terms of sales tactics.

However, I think it is an honest and essential tool for start-ups that sell to enterprises.  As I wrote in my post on Easier to buy, easier to sell one of the major keys to seeing breakthrough sales processes in start-ups is to make the decision to buy an easier one.

For most start-ups, especially for those in technology, buying from you takes a major leap of faith.  They have to trust that:

• You will survive until next year
• That all of your claims of success to date are repeatable… after all, you are basing your past successes (assuming you have some so far) on a very small and stastically insignificant base
• Your product even does what you say
• That you have the ability to scale
• That you won’t embarrass them to their boss, their investors, wall street, their customers, etc.
• That you won’t disappear with their money
• That your visionary new way of doing something will even work
• and dozens of other dears around working with an unknown entity.

All of their fears will surround ideas like these.  Therefore, the larger the leap that they have to make, the harder it will be for you to get the deal done.

How do you solve this problem?  The intentional and explicit up-sell.  You need to create a snack-size version of your product, and get these people “half-pregnant.”  Once you get them hooked, if your product is as good as you say and provides them value, then they will happily upgrade to the larger package.  Buying anything from you is a massive leap, so you need to figure out the best ways to make the leap smaller.   You should avoid the free trial if at all possible – because you want to establish the relationship of customer-vendor as quickly as possible rather than customer-prospect.  Its too easy for a prospect to say yes to a free trial, when he/she really has no intention of buying.

Lots of companies have embraced the upsell with the freemium models that are so common now in SaaS products, and that’s a great thing!  In fact, its the entire beauty behind the SaaS model.   By allowing someone to buy in smaller chunks, and with an upgrade/upsell path to a larger commitment, you make getting on board significantly easier.

The tricky part here is to make sure that you provide enough value in the lowest version, and enough differentiation and value to get people to move up to the  more expensive options.  I can’t generically speak to what must be included in the minimal package since all products are different, but it should be enough to have the company understand the value that they will get and then also make them feel comfortable with your company enough to write a large check.  There are entire discussions about what and how you should position your packages, and in this post, I don’t intend to dive into that much detail about those issues – just how critical the upsell availability is, and how it affects the sales process for a start-up.

Assuming you’ve embraced my logic behind the up-sell, you need to really think about how it affects the sales process particularly in how your prospects buy.  Do you really understand how the buying happens in their company:  Do you know what the threshold is where the decision maker can buy without major approvals?  Do you know what the budget process is?  Do you know what the fiscal year is?  Do you know how add-ons (up-sells) are treated?  You may offer something at $2,000 / mo with an opportunity to cancel at any time, but the person buying your service may need to budget for the full $24,000 just in case they use it for the full year, so, once again, you need to realize the size of the leap that the prospect needs to make in order to buy.  Is your minimum level, when multiplied out for a year, still too much pain for the prospect? And, while you think you are only asking them for $2,000 – they are making a $24,000 decision – and that is a very different decision.  Can they make a $24,000 decision without needing to bring the decision to a C level person OR can they make a $10,000 decision on their own?  If so, perhaps your initial offering is $10,000 with an up-sell from there.

There is no generic correct answer because every product / offering / value prop / prospect mix is different – but I strongly believe that the start-ups that spend the time to figure out the correct up-sell strategy will have better results with selling to larger enterprises.