Jason M. Lemkin’s Post

Good listener, understanding the product and client, some must have skills for a great salesperson. It takes long time to master them, but the fruit is sweet. Similar thing applies for product-management as well. #sales #listening #leadership #productmanagement

Sales is a brutal arena. The entirety of your business's success depends on it. Whether you have an amazing product or not, if you can't get it into the hands of your ICP, then you'll eventually reach the end of the road. All that you've invested (time, money, mental health, relationships, etc.) will lead to no pay off in terms of your company's success. So the question is "How do I find and sell to my ICP?" My co-founder and I, throughout the last 10 months building SellerIQ have approached this question with a scientific process and distilled sales success into a few key stages. 1. Extremely focused avatars: We have spoken with 100s of VPs and sales reps, not only across different companies, but also across different verticals. Throughout the last 10 months, we've slowly but surely eliminated entire business types in order to build the perfect ICP for what we have created. This research allowed us to find our sweet spot, so now when we conduct our outbound, we know exactly what companies we should be targeting, who is the key decision maker we should be having our conversations with, and also what problems they are most likely facing that we have a solution for. 2. A well oiled sales process: We started out by throwing darts and seeing what was sticking. From there, as we had more and more conversations, we began testing a variety of different approaches and making our decisions on the direction of our approach based on the numbers. Which cadence was most effective, what are our conversion rates stage to stage with specific talk tracks, what approaches are resonating best with our ICP? This testing went on for months before we felt we were confident in our process. 3. Leveraging relationships: We like to build connections with everyone we speak to. If we don't close them as a client, we at least sold them on our product enough to where they are excited about it and want to be part of our success. From this approach, we receive introductions to other companies and key decision makers that they want us to speak with. This is paramount for start-ups and newer companies. Every conversation you are having while going through the stages I mentioned above is an opportunity to get them onto your side and invested in your success. This is what worked for me with SellerIQ and is why we are experiencing the success we are. Just this last week we closed on three enterprise accounts and going into this week have 7 new demos lined up with extremely qualified leads. How are you going about your sales process? Is there anything I missed?

When it comes to Sales, particularly in early-stage Startups, the harsh reality is that not all the baby turtles make it to the ocean. Unless that Startup is building a viable, high-performing Revenue Engine, from the beginning, hiring Salespeople will always be hit or miss. Unless the Revenue Engine is built and managed by someone with relevant experience, statistics prove that most Startups will fail. C-Levels, Founders, and Investors - Contact me to explore ensuring your baby turtles get wet.

Founder-led sales is HARD. I mean very very VERY hard. ESPECIALLY if you’re targeting mid-market or enterprise customers ($100K+ ACV). It took Pocus over 1 year to successfully “get out” of founder-led sales. Here are some key takeaways from that journey: 🔮 As the CEO, you should be the top SDR. We experimented a ton on how to repeatedly drive pipeline with cold outbound, but then we realized our best source of pipeline was warm outbound. I remember having a huge unlock when this was validated by Shensi Ding who told me she was the top SDR at Merge in the early days. Tap your network so you can experiment faster. As CEO, your higher response rate to warm outbound = faster learning on messaging / ICP / sales process and more. 🔮 Build the bench of expertise As a CEO, you tend to get a higher response rate compared to your team because you are the expert in your space (for us, Product-Led Sales). Getting out of fonder-led sales for us meant extending that PLS expertise to our entire GTM team. We emphasize PLS knowledge as part of our new hire onboarding so everyone can have those strategic thought leader level conversations throughout the sales process. 🔮 Take control over the process. In the founder-led sales era, I admittedly ran a pretty messy sales process. I was moving so quickly, so process was not top of mind. But, after we hired a seller who was extremely process-oriented, I saw how much prospects appreciated clear instructions on how to run an evaluation. The more prescriptive we got in our process (eg. which calls to have when and the steps in the evaluation), the more successful we were. 🔮Lean on advisors who know sales in STARTUPS Doing sales for the first time is hard… doing sales for the first time AND at a startup is even harder. I had constant communication with sales advisors to walk me through best practices on everything from running great disco, demos, negotiations, and more. Shout-out to First Round Capital, specifically Emery Rosansky, who was my sounding board on every 👏 single  👏 deal  👏 in the early days. 🔮Don’t be afraid to say no In the early days, I said yes to everything - whether it was a feature request, ask for POC, or a discount. Moving out of founder-led sales meant learning how to say no strategically. For example, in Q4, we stopped offering POCs to customers spending less than $100K. Guess what? We still closed those customers that “required” a POC. We found different ways for them to evaluate Pocus and speed up the sales process.

Relationships drive sales—always have, always will. Most sales teams miss quota year after year. Yet, quotas continue to increase. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Sales leaders bemoan that they don’t have enough qualified leads in the pipe, that their people aren’t getting meetings with decision-makers, that they can’t seem to differentiate themselves from competitors. The problem is all in the prospecting and the relentless focus on getting the newest, the best, the most sophisticated technology—when sales teams should be focused on building the best relationships, having the most sophisticated business conversations, and providing the most value for existing customers so sales reps can ask those folks for referrals. In 2023, 72 percent of sales pros expected to miss quota, according to the Salesforce State of Sales Report. That doesn’t surprise me, considering those same salespeople only spent about 28 percent of their time actually selling.

The way most sales reps manage a pipeline leads to a lot of leaks and "Oh crap" moments when they realize an opportunity was missed. When we're prospecting into our list of accounts, we all know there are 'right now clients' that exist in that list, but many 'in-the-future clients' as well...for a variety of reasons. Prospect says: "We're in a (1yr/3yr/27yr) contract" "I have other things top of mind right now but I'll be ready to discuss this in 3-6 months time" "I'm not interested" All different answers, usually handled by reps in the same way: Put a note in (Pipedrive/Hubspot/Salesforce) and a task to start calling and emailing them again at some point in the future. Then things get busy, tasks get overlooked, and potential opportunities fall by the wayside. A Rebel handles this differently. It's called the Living Pipeline, which is alive and vibrant instead of rusted and leaking. A Rebel creates curiosity and attention with a first touch piece that gives the prospect a unique experience. The follow-up yields much higher interest, but also those 'future clients' that go into the Living Pipeline. In the Living Pipeline, the unique experience is continued, where we cultivate familiarity, relevance, and further interest, until the time is right to engage. The CRM is helpful, but Rebels aren't just reliant on a task reminder...they own the process. If you think this is easier said than done...you're right. 😁 But you're also in luck - this Friday at the Rebel Sales Kickoff, creating touches for the Living Pipeline is one of the things we'll be doing...which is one of the things that even the best Rebels can struggle with sometimes. So, we're just going to walk through it with you. 😎 If you haven't even taken a peek at the event page yet...link is in the comments. I might even have a little discount for my 1st degree connections and Rebel Slack members...so shoot me a DM for the code. See you there Rebels!