Selling the Internet

Does money matter?

Truthfully,

No

Think of it like this, the decision-maker in the company you are selling to doesn't have the mandate to get the best deal from the vendor.

So what is the mandate that they have?

It is usually something to do with improving revenue.

This can be done in 3 major ways,

1. Make more money
2. Save cost
3. Save time which, in turn, saves cost or improves productivity

And as far as I know, it is rare when the decision-maker is thinking of saving costs to improve revenue. That is usually a drastic step taken in during drastic scenarios.

In most cases the primary driver is ROI and if you have significant proof that makes sense to your customers then the push back on cost would be minimum, provided you are able to stand apart from the competitors who also are pitching to your customer.

The question comes down to one thing,

How well can you make your customers understand the ROI or value that your product or service can add to his/her KPIs

You don't need a sales team, not yet!

When I talk to founders specifically service or SAAS business CEOs or founding teams.

They would be like “If only I had a sales team, I would be able to scale my business”

And this is at a very nascent stage of the companies life, where most sales were made because of family, friends, and acquaintances. But at that point, the initial boost that was there due to these sales has died down and now is at the stage where sales have either stagnated or is declining.

Here is the thing, a sales team won’t be of help.

What would happen in most cases is,

• A sales team is hired
• Asked to generate leads
• Sell and bring in revenue
• Which they can’t
• The sales team is fired and everybody is back to square one!

Here is their reason why every company I have worked with is different not in the way the problem they were trying to solve. But in the way the product was built,

They usually set our build a cycle but came back out with a Land cruiser.

Originally meant for a weekend cyclist the Land cruiser was not what they wanted.

This happens more often than not.

Having said that if you are the founder and are contemplating hiring a sales team. Here are a few questions that you need to ask yourself,

1. If you were asked to sell today, can you go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator create a filter, and show us the target group that would become your perfect customers - I call it the Linkedin Persona test. If you can’t then stop.
   
2. Have you already sold to such a customer? If not, then you need to stop
   
3. If you have already sold to such a customer, are they the best users of your product adoption-wise? If not, you need to stop.
   
4. Can these customers who are your best customers adoption-wise, afford to pay for an increase in cost? If, not you need to stop.
   

Most of these questions has a couple of simple answers

1. You need to define a customer persona and filmography or in marketing terms, you need to define your ICP
   
2. If you have defined your ICP, you should have a framework- might be a skeleton framework for finding, reaching out, engaging, and closing deals with the ICP available with you.
   

If you have these 2 in place then you are ready to hire a sales team. If not go back to the drawing board, sell your product to a cold customer first, scale them and note down the process.

Nobody knows your product and your customer better than you and the whole point of a sales team is to use this knowledge and your ad hoc process to create a scalable, repeatable process that generates revenue.

So before you get into hiring a great/expensive sales team. First, get a basic understanding of what needs to be done, ready.

Yesterday, contact from Linkedin reached out to me to ask how I moved from a salesperson to a marketing position.  

 The answer was pretty straight forward and here is how.

As salespeople, we have just one job.

Make sure that our potential customers understand the solution/product we are selling them to.

But more than a few salespeople I've spoken to over the years tend to complicate things with industry-specific jargon and abbreviations that no one except them understands.

Yes, big words sound cool. Makes us look good. 

But that doesn't help your customer understand what you are selling and that's where most sales conversations drop off, customers do not understand what your product does.

In the words of Dave Gerhardt, " Be the friend who takes time and explains things to you with examples that you can relate to"