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Fortune Cookie Wisdom for Sales: On Success

What is Grit?

Thinking of some of successful people, one of the greatest attributes they hold is grit. It's an odd term and not main stream in most talk paths, more studies have come out on how grit contributes to over achievement.

I pulled this off Wikipedia as a reference and it has some interesting definitions, links and empirical data.

If you DISC or personality test your candidates, perhaps a "Grit" test would be a better gauge of future success, especially in sales.

Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. Commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance," "hardiness," "resilience,” “ambition,” “need for achievement” and conscientiousness. These constructs can be conceptualized as individual differences related to the accomplishment of work rather than latent ability.This distinction was brought into focus in 1907 when William James challenged the field to further investigate how certain individuals are capable of accessing richer trait reservoirs enabling them to accomplish more than the average person,^[1] but the construct dates back at least to Galton, and the ideals of persistence and tenacity have been understood as a virtue at least since Aristotle. Although the last decade has seen a noticeable increase in research focused on achievement-oriented traits, there continues to be difficulty in aligning specific traits and outcomes.

Definition of Grit

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” ^[2] Building upon biographical collections of famous leaders in history, researchers and scientists have reached similar conclusions about high achieving individuals. Specifically, those individuals who were deemed more successful and influential than their contemporary counterparts typically possessed traits above and beyond that of normal ability.^[3][4][5] While ability was still critically important, these individuals also possessed “zeal” and “persistence of motive and effort.”^[2] Duckworth and colleagues (2007) believe this dual-component of Grit to be a crucial differentiator from similar constructs. Grit is conceptualized as a stable trait that does not require immediate positive feedback.^[2] Individuals high in Grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the Grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.

Literature Comparisons

Grit and Positive Psychology

Grit also ties in with positive psychology and in particular, with perseverance. As mentioned earlier, the ability to stick with and pursue a goal over a long period of time is an important aspect of Grit. This area of positive psychology has been interested in the process of perseverance as a positive indicator of long term success.^[6] Grit’s inclusion of the perseverance construct is perhaps unsurprising as Angela Duckworth was a doctoral candidate under Martin Seligman.

Grit and Intelligence

One of the best predictors of future achievement has been intelligence.^[7] This relationship has been found in scholastic achievement as well as in job performance.^[8] As such, one might expect that grit would be strongly correlated with intelligence. In fact, this prompted one of the early questions asked in Grit research, “Why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?”.^[2] Somewhat surprisingly, in four separate samples, Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence.^[9] This means that Grit, unlike many traditional measures of performance is not tied to intelligence. As the researchers have suggested, this helps explain why some very intelligent individuals do not consistently perform well over long periods of time.

[edit] Grit and Personality Measures

The Grit measure has been compared to the Big Five personality model, which are a group of broad personality dimensions consisting of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.^[10] In one study by Duckworth and Quinn, the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S) and 12-item self-report measure of Grit (Grit–O) measuring Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals.^[2] This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit distinct from conscientiousness. Another personality characteristic that is often linked to Grit is the need for achievement. One way in which Grit differs from the need for achievement is that individuals with high scores in Grit often set extremely long-term goals for themselves and pursue them deliberately even without positive feedback,^[2] while need for achievement lacks this long-term component.

Comparison with related psychological constructs

Traditional constructs in this area include perseverance, hardiness, resilience, ambition, and need for achievement. Grit has been argued to be distinguishable from each of these in the following ways. Perseverance is the steadfast pursuit of a task, mission, or journey in spite of obstacles, discouragement, or distraction. In contrast, Grit is argued to be trait to perseverance. Grit enables an individual to persevere in accomplishing a goal despite obstacles over an extended period of time.^[2] When compared with the construct of persistence, Grit adds a component of passion for the goal.^[11] This goal passion also contributes to the ability of the individual to sustain effort over the long term.

Maddi (2006) defines hardiness as a combination of attitudes that provide the courage and motivation to do the hard, strategic work of turning stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities.^[12] While Grit is primarily a measure of an individual’s ability to persist in obtaining a specific goal over an extended time period (Duckworth et al., 2007), hardiness refers to an individual’s ability to persist through difficult circumstances and does not address the individual’s long term persistence toward a specific goal.^[2] Maddi (2006) developed a theoretical model of hardiness as a tool for developing resilience.^[12]

Resilience is a dynamic process in which an individual overcomes significant adversity, usually in the form of a life changing event or difficult personal circumstances. Resilience can be conceptualized as an adaptive response to a challenging situation.^[13] Grit involves maintaining goal focused effort for extended periods of time, often while facing adversity but does not require a critical incident. Importantly, Grit is conceptualized as a trait while resilience is a dynamic process. Finally, resilience has been almost exclusively studied in children (cf. Luther, Doernberger, & Zigler, 1993) who are born into “at-risk” situations.^[13] Although resilience researchers recognize that adults likely demonstrate resilience in a similar manner to children, the resilience process has not been studied in a mature population.^[14]

Ambition is broadly defined as the desire for attainment, power, or superiority. In contrast to ambitious individuals, Gritty individuals do not seek fame or external recognition for their achievements. Ambition is often associated with a desire for fame.^[15] Unlike ambitious individuals, gritty individuals do not seek to distinguish themselves from other people, but to obtain personal goals.

McClelland (1961) describes need for achievement as a drive to complete manageable goals that enable the individual to receive immediate feedback.^[16] In contrast to need for achievement, Gritty individuals consciously set long-term goals that are difficult to attain and do not waver from these difficult goals, regardless of the presence of feedback. Additionally, need for achievement has been studied for almost 50 years and has been found to positively correlate to self-efficacy and learning goal orientation.^[17][18] These links have not yet been tested in the Grit literature.

Scientific Findings

The primary scientific findings on Grit come from Duckworth and colleagues’ examination of Grit as an individual difference trait capable of predicting long-term success.^[2] It was proposed that individuals who possess a drive to tirelessly work through challenges, failures, and adversity to achieve set goals and are uniquely positioned to reach higher achievements than others who lack similar stamina. In a series of six studies Duckworth et al. proposed, developed, and tested a two-factor Grit scale with notable results. In addition to validating their Grit scale, the authors also found support suggesting that Grit provided incremental predictive validity for education and age above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits (Study 2); that higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p < .01; Study 3); that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy (Study 4); and that participants in a National Spelling Bee with higher Grit scores typically work harder and longer than less Gritty peers, ultimately resulting in better performance. This series of studies provides empirical evidence that an individual difference conceptualized as Grit can account for significant variance in performance across a variety of settings. Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

In 2009, Duckworth and Quinn found additional support for the Grit construct when they developed and validated a more condensed version of the Grit Scale (Grit-S) by removing four of the previous items and improving its psychometric properties. Using samples from the data collected in their 2007 studies, the authors were able to achieve complementary results that suggested the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition.

Future Directions

Questions may surface relating to what additional cognitive and non-cognitive traits play complementary roles in the development of Grit. Of additional interest may be how the distinctive environmental conditions, specifically the interrelationships of emotional and cognitive load, might moderate and assist in explaining why some individuals succumb to significant challenges or struggle with obstacles that block their path to goal achievement, while others are able to overcome these barriers. The United States military believes that this and similar constructs may assist in explaining why some soldiers are better equipped to handle the psychological trauma of combat.^[19] Other on-going work includes investigations of the combined or multiplicative impacts of both cognitive and Grit-like predictors of achievement in leader adaptability situations.^[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

Fortune Cookie Wisdom: Where the Grass is Greener

Fortune Cookie Wisdom for Sales on Commission

Fortune Cookie Wisdom for Customer Service

When you are having a bad day in sales...

Find a little inspiration :)

Fortune Cookie wisdom for sales: On making money

5 Sales Tips to Recharge During the Lazy Days of Summer

Many people accept that a slowdown in sales  is a fact of business life during the lazy days of summer. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and as a business owner you need to get out of that frame of mind.

A summer slowdown may be something many people want because they expect this to be a season for vacations when the living is easy. But you don't have to accept that. When others go to sleep, you need to wake up. If you follow these tips, you can create opportunity for your small business while others are off to the beach.

1. Make a firm decision not to participate in a slowdown. Don't allow your employees to buy into this thinking because I assure you that they will make a summer slowdown one of the first excuses if there are any issues with their job performance. Hold a daily meeting to discuss what you are going to do to prosper--not contract—this summer. Set clearly defined goals and list the activities that need to be undertaken to achieve them. Give yourself deadlines for your goals and create a no excuses, no negativity environment. You'll be surprised by what you can achieve.

2. Work your power base. Get out in front of the summer slowdown and let your best customers know you'll be available all summer. Target anyone who has bought from you in the last 90 days through direct mail, phone calls, emails or social media. Get into regular communication with these customers and figure out how to expand your business with them. For example, find out what you can do to assist as they prepare for vacation or to help fill a gap in their absence.

3. Target busy customers who can't take a long vacation. Focus some of your marketing efforts on prospective customers who plan to be around in July and August. Remember that these are clearly busy people who are pressed for time and can't afford a vacation or leisurely summer work pace. Take the initiative by distributing flyers, getting on social media and updating your website to let people know you will be around, too, and can offer something valuable to help them deal with their time constraints. For example, if you're an auto dealer, take that new convertible by the customer's office and let your prospective buyer test drive the car and sign the paperwork there. Or if you're a lunchbox delivery service, let prospects know you can provide food so they don't have to leave their comfortable, air-conditioned offices.

4. Offer a value-added proposition to avoid discounting prices. You will probably need to make even more profit from each sale to compensate for decreased summertime volume. So, figure out creative ways to repackage your products or services to provide something extra, such as a special summer-themed promotion. For example, I took two of my lectures series and packaged them into a Fourth of July special. The value-added proposition: When taken together, the lectures are both more informative and effective.

5. Service is senior to selling and needs to be top of mind. Service should be a year-around commitment, of course, but it is even more important during a summer slowdown when your competitors go into that "living is easy" mode and take their eye off the ball. Show that you are motivated to make things happen quickly and empower employees to accommodate special requests, even if it means opening your business early or letting customers enter your establishment in flip flops or beachwear. This is your chance to shine and make a lasting impression. After all, your goal is to make sure your new business keeps coming back to you long after summer is over.

Source

http://www.frontrow-solutions.com/ and http://www.entrepreneur.com/sales/index.html

5 Traits of Highly Successful Salesmen

By Geoffrey James  of INC Magazine

Are you cut out to make the sale? Make sure you've got these characteristics--or else learn to develop them.

Selling and buying are not purely intellectual exercises. Buyers and sellers are emotional human beings, which is why great salespeople are always masters at managing their own emotions. Based upon my observation (and some pretty hefty research in emotional intelligence), highly successful salespeople cultivate the following five emotional traits:

1. Assertiveness

This allows you to move a sales situation forward without offending or frustrating the customer. Think of it as being located halfway between passivity and aggressiveness. For example, suppose a customer is delaying a decision. There are at least three basic responses:

Passive: "Could you give me a call when you've made a decision?"

Aggressive: "If you don't buy right now, the offer is off the table."

Assertive: "Can you give me a specific time and date when you'll make your final decision?"

The passive response puts the sale on hold indefinitely (or give your competitor the opening to outsell you). The aggressive response creates pressure and resentment: Even if it works, you'll be seen as a typical pushy salesman. The assertive approach sets up the specific conditions for the close, without forcing the customer's pace.

2. Self-Awareness

You need to be able to identify your own emotions, understand how they work, and then use them to help you build stronger customer relationships. This is a four-step process:

Identify the emotions that you're feeling,

Based on experience, predict how those emotions will affect your sales effort.

Compensate for negative emotions that might hinder the sale.

Expand your positive emotions that might help you make the sale.

For example, suppose you feel furious that an important customer stood you up. You might take a break before your next meeting in order to remind yourself of all the times you've succeeded in the face of challenges. Or you might, as an ice-breaker, tell your second customer that you're having a tough day and why.

3. Empathy

This entails adapting your behavior to the customer's moods and emotions. It begins with listening and observing, but simply knowing what the customer might be feeling is not enough. You must be able to feel what the customer is likely to be feeling.

Suppose, during a sales call, you discover that the customer's firm just announced major layoffs. You could ignore the news and proceed with the sales call as if nothing had changed, or you could focus on your own desire to make the sale and ask your contact who will have buying authority after the layoffs are over.

Both responses to the event make business sense–but if you want to build a better relationship, you'll be empathetic and imagine your contact's sense of fear and confusion. Then, depending on your emotional reading of the customer, decide whether the customer would prefer to commiserate, complain or (alternatively) be distracted from the situation.

4. Problem Solving

The desire to solve a problem helps you create new ways to satisfy the customer's needs, both financial (the ROI of your offering) and emotional–such as the customer's need to be convinced that your and your firm are reputable and reliable. Problem solving is a four step process:

See the customer situation as it really is. (Never try to solve a problem before you fully understand it.)

Help the customer visualize a more desirable situation.

Devise a way to move the customer from the ways things are today to the way the customer would like them to be.

Communicate that solution in a way that makes it easy for the customer to make a decision.

While those steps might seem obvious, they're the exact opposite of old-school salesmanship, where selling entails "giving a great sales pitch."

5. Optimism

Optimism helps you maintain a sense of balance when things go awry. It proceeds directly from the (often unspoken) rules that you use to interpret daily events. For example, if the first sales call of the day goes poorly, your performance for the rest of the day will be different if you have this rule...

A bad first call means that I'm off my game this will be a bad day.
... rather than this rule:

Every sales call is different, so the next will probably be better.
Note that both rules are arbitrary responses to the same event, and neither is more "realistic" than the other. Even so, if you automatically jump to the first rule, rather than the second, it will be difficult for you to remain happy.

This principle works on bigger events, too. I've run into about a dozen top salespeople who saw the weak economy as an opportunity to sell even more,and did so, while their colleagues were busy hand-wringing.

What is Inside Sales? — Our Definition of Inside Sales

The most pragmatic definition of Inside Sales is simple:

Inside Sales is “remote sales,” most lately called “virtual sales,” or professional sales done remotely. Where Outside Sales or traditional Field Sales is done face-to-face.

Taken in this context, the majority of all sales is done remotely, and the numbers are growing. A recent study done by SKKU and MIT, in conjunction with infoUSA, found that over the next three years, Inside Sales is growing at a fifteen times higher rate (7.5% versus .5% annually) over Outside Sales, to the tune of 800,000 new jobs.

More evidence: if you don’t believe it, grab a list of 10 traditional or “Outside Sales” people and call them. 7 out of 10 will be sitting in front of their computer, working in their cubicle, office, or home office—just like the Inside Sales people.

The term “Inside Sales” originally came about in the late 1980s as an attempt to differentiate “Telemarketing” (or “Telesales in the UK) from the more complex, “high-touch,” phone-based business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) selling practices.

Telemarketing is often believed to have begun in the 1950s by DialAmerica Marketing, Inc., reported to be the first company dedicated to telephone sales and services. By the 1970s telemarketing was a common phrase used to describe the process of selling over the telephone. It often included both outbound and inbound, but later became much more synonymous with the types of outbound calling we’re all familiar with—large-scale “blasts” to lists of names to try and drum up quick sales, usually while the family is sitting around the dinner table.

By the late 1990s/early 2000s, Inside Sales was the term used to differentiate the practice from Outside Sales—the traditional face-to-face sales model where salespeople went to the client’s location of business to engage in the sales process.

Companies found the new channel of Inside Sales to be undeniably effective, but often didn’t know what to do to solve the conflict between the younger, disruptive, more technically savvy upstarts who sold over the phone, and their more senior counterparts who wielded incredible political power in their organizations as the entrenched source of revenue for nearly a century.

For years Inside Sales has been relegated to generating leads for the more senior Outside Sales reps or merely closing the smaller accounts. This is now no longer the case. Many companies are already using a hybrid form of Inside Sales, with reps calling from their company’s home office, then traveling occasionally to client locations and merely calling it “sales.”

By Marc Benioff’s own admission in his book “Behind the Cloud, salesforce.com “grew their company for the first five or six years with a telesales or Inside Sales model.” They added Outside Sales or Field Sales to go upmarket when they wanted to sell to Enterprise-class companies, but the company still does a majority of their sales work remotely.

Another way of defining “Inside Sales” is to also state what it is not.

Inside Sales is not Telemarketing.

Let me repeat: Inside Sales is NOT Telemarketing. Telemarketing is a scripted, single-call-close, almost always targeting a small-ticket, business to consumer (B2C) model.

Inside Sales is not scripted. It requires multiple calls or “touches” to create a sales close, involves medium or large ticket goods and services, and targets business-to-business (B2B) or high-end business-to-consumer( B2C) transactions.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely. It is not the mindless “phone drone” that calls at dinner time and won’t hang up until you have said “no” seven times.

Inside Sales is also not Customer Service. Though Inside Sales frequently involves an element of inbound call handling like a customer service department, in its pure form it is not customer service.

Some companies erroneously describe their inbound call centers as “inside sales,” but this does not fall within the boundaries of our definition unless the agents’ primary function is selling.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely . . . it is remote sales.

Thanks to Ken Krogue for this article!

How to maximize your field reps sales potential

Field Sales is a very different type of selling. It requires a unique type of rep who has no fear and can make a great first impression. Being organized on the road has its own challenges. Here are some of the best practices we have seen for being successful as a road warrior:


1) Marketing Tool Box. To avoid papers sliding all over your car, pick up a portable filing cabinet from staples or an office store and protect your contracts, marketing slicks and paper work from heat, cold, folded corners and being trampled. This will ensure you have all the paper tools you need and will make it obvious when your quantities are low. There is nothing worse than showing up and having to show a brochure with a boot print on it or a contract that looks like it went through a wash cycle.

2) Get a Tablet. Instead of relying on paper or to augment your paper requirements, invest in a tablet. Tablets still have wow factor and you can easily show products, services on a tablet without the pomp and circumstance of booting up a computer. Your prospects will think you are tech savvy, organized and credible. It doesn’t have to be an $800 ipad. An 8g anything will do. I picked up the Blackberry Playbook when it was on sale for $199 for one of my clients reps and it has helped them tremendously – even the simple stuff like email on the road becomes faster.

3) Use a CRM for field Sales. Not all CRM’s are created equally. Many of the CRM’s are great for in office sales or reps that go back to an office in between meetings but choosing the right tool for your road warriors is important. Front Row CRM has some very cool features for field reps. It has a mapping feature that shows you other prospects/leads/customers on a physical map so you can plan your route better. If the reps enter notes as they go, the Manager can see the actual route they took to coach them on better uses of time. It also has a CRM updating feature that can be used via TEXT in the event you don’t have a tablet. This is a stand alone or a bolt on to other CRM systems. CRM that works, is easy to use, simple to populate and actually facilitates sales is key to a field reps success

4) Keeping you office clean. I believe all companies with field reps should pay for an inside and outside car wash once a week. Keeping your car clean forces you to stay organized, helps you feel professional and in the event that a customer sees your car rolling up, it doesn’t look like it’s been off roading.

5) Fuel. Fuel is important. Your body and mind need good fuel to keep you at top performance which can be challenging when you are on the road. Drink lots of water and pack fruit & veg snacks. Apples, grapes, oranges, carrots, celery will all keep for days in a cooler. Don’t over think this. Just grab an apple on the way out or hit a grocery store between meetings. If you feel good, you will sell more.

And to state the obvious - you absolutely need a GPS!

It’s little every day changes that make a long lasting positive impact.

Happy Selling!

How not to write an email

I sign up for industry emails and it appears they sell the lists so I get the odd call and or email from sales people. This is an unsolicited email and a prime example of how not to send an email.

I feel for the rep. Likely I wasn't the only potential lead he burned with this poorly cut and paste form letter.

The lesson here? Test your form emails before you send them or set your send receive to delay by a few minutes so you can catch emails before they actually get sent.

I hope this isn't an example of how Sugar CRM works!

5 Impediments to Turnaround and Growth

Mark Fuast believes that we need to adopt an attitude of “growth regardless of current success.” In the very practical Growth or Bust, he asks, “How much untapped potential lies within your business?”

In his experience as a growth and turnaround consultant, Faust has found that improving sales and profits has little to do with sales training, consulting, or other quick fixes. We already know what to do. “Fostering new growth is more about innovation than marketing angles, sales productivity, or skills; growth is more about a culture of continuous improvement than marketing blitz; growth is more about possibility-thinking than fear-fostering quotas.”

Growth or Bust shows leaders how to create a growth revolution. And it starts at the top. The first person to turnaround is you. “There is no virtue in leadership as important to accelerated growth and turnaround as that of humility.” He lists five impediments to turnaround and growth that any leader should look at:

1. Pride. Unhealthy levels of pride contribute to a leader’s failure to give credit to others, an unwillingness to listen to others, an inability to share emotional ownership of ideas or company success, and prevent a leader from admitting that they may be a contributor to any problem.
2. Abusive Relationships. Inappropriate relationships an abusive behavior intended to demean or control others creates a ripple effect throughout the company.
3. Gossiping. Repeating any report that is not positive about others to those who have no responsibility in the matter is poison. Even when a bad report is 100% factual, it is still gossip.

4. Greed. Unfair pay and entitlement at the top often becomes obvious to the employees and growth is constrained as a result.

5. Any of the Five Dysfunctions in the Principle of Authority:

• Lack of a clear authority structure. Especially in partnerships, when the chain of command is not clearly defined, chaos, dysfunction, and frustration will ultimately ensue.

• Lack of respect for the chain of command. A proper lack of respect for the chain of command creates conflict. At the same time, it shouldn’t inhibit open communication.

• The inability to communicate up the ladder without fear of retribution with legitimate appeals and a clear appeal process. Without it, bitterness and resentment will quickly grow.

• The lack of checks and balances. A titular leader with no checks and balances is bound to get into situations in which the lack thereof will stagnate growth in the team. Being a top leader requires you to constantly check your actions. Even if you feel your integrity is flawless, you’re a=subordinates might think otherwise.

• Megalomania and rebellion. A autonomous leader that is not willing to submit to anyone or anything will eventually endanger the existence of the organization. As a leader, you must show that you are truly willing to submit to some higher authority on at least some issues.

Start Up Sales Strategy

Nat Turner writes about creating a selling strategy for start ups with his experience with Invite Media which he sold to Google in 2005. Enjoy!

If you’re starting a company, you’re going to have to sell your product/service to potential customers (at least if you plan on making any money). This especially applies to enterprise software companies or B2B companies in general, as you’re selling to someone who’s job may ultimately be on the line for the “who we’re going with” decision (related post: The IBM effect). Your company’s strategy and style of how you sell your product is extremely important, and like many other things in your startup’s life cycle, is critical to be aware of and get right. It’s the first impression you make on customers, may be the deciding factor on if you get the business, and depending on the company may end up being a major part of your culture.

First, I’m going to assume you’re building a product to the best of your ability and have built an effective product management process. This post is squarely about how you put that product in customer’s faces and win deals. At Invite Media, the company I co-founded, the core concepts of sales strategy became drilled in our head as we faced the market and encountered competitors. We learned we needed to be conscious of how we sold our product and the first interactions customers had with our company, very specifically, and needed to develop a sales strategy that we could teach others as we scaled the organization. In other words, it wasn’t enough to build the greatest platform we could. We by no means perfected it and more sales-focused organizations probably can do this stuff in their sleep over time, but we definitely came to appreciate it’s importance. Over time, as our sales strategy evolved, it ultimately influenced many other functions at our company, such as how we recruited people and raised money. Overall, the day we figured out how to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes was the day we learned how to effectively sell.

My first piece of advice on sales strategy at startups is to not oversell your product. Aggressive sales tactics piss people off, and set a bad first impression. There’s nothing worse than a salesperson who doesn’t take no for an answer and talks out of his ass about the product and promises the moon, and worse is selling a shitty product to begin with. If your product sucks, fix your product. In other words, fix the root cause, don’t rely on sales to win deals. Companies who rely on aggressive sales tactics in order to win business in general are probably compensating for a weak product, at least in my experience (or are knowingly selling a scam). Even more disappointing is when a company has a great product but uses aggressive sales tactics and steps on their own toes with customers, as that’s something that was entirely avoidable. This unfortunately isn’t uncommon in startups, as many founders decide they can’t or shouldn’t sell and “check the box” by hiring a sales person, which can be extremely hit or miss and hard to do without prior experience (a topic for another day).

The reason this is important is that in ad technology (and in most spaces probably), we learned that the best platform/technology doesn’t necessarily win every deal. Like in sports, that’s why they play the games (i.e., don’t declare a winner based on who has the best team at the start of the season). In startups, sales strategy is an important part of the game. You obviously have to have a great product to ultimately be successful, but you also have to be smart about how you sell it. In other words, the winner of a deal will have a combination of both a great product and a great sales strategy, and rarely does one win being extremely heavy on one side. As an investor or acquirer, if you did have a company on one end of the spectrum and thus wasn’t properly balanced, you’d obviously love to see a company on the “great product, horrible sales strategy” side, as fixing sales strategy is way easier than fixing a shitty product. This even applies to companies with no actual sales people and a purely self-service system, whereby the sales strategy ends up becoming your accessible messaging, how you offer the product online, etc…

At Invite, our sales strategy was very simply “educate the potential customer on the Invite platform, answer any and all questions, and be confident that we have the best platform and that they’ll ultimately chose us.” As a side note, that doesn’t mean we took the initial meeting and then just sat around and hoped they emailed us back; we did our fair share of following up on next steps and checking in if we had mutual expectations to move the process along, but we made sure to never cross the line of being aggressive. Ultimately, if the customer picked someone else because the platform was lacking in an area they required, either we needed to decide to fix that in our product or decide that client wasn’t a fit for us because what they were asked for wasn’t going to be in our roadmap (and both happened a lot). That’s why things like the product feedback cycle (i.e., reducing the number of “layers” between a client’s product feedback and your engineering team) are important, which I’ll mention again later in this post. These are the kind of questions you’ll need to go through, and it took us while to get there (and still wasn’t perfect).

My second piece of advice is think extremely hard about the incentives you give your sales team. The world is run on incentives. You as a startup founder are incentivized

If you do hire sales people, hire sales people who can discern what clients are asking for in your product and can effectively work with your product and engineering teams to improve the product based on that feedback. That doesn’t mean hire a sales person who can code, as that’s a rare thing, but hire a sales person who is comfortable with technology if you’re a technology company, is smart enough to dig into basic tech details, and is a willing and capable listener but also communicator (what good is listening if you do a crappy job of explaining what you heard to the person who needs to build it?). It’s always a scary thing when you see a young company with a product that’s still evolving put a junior or incapable sales person in front of their early clients, and the customer provides all sorts of valuable product feedback that you know won’t ultimately get back to the engineering team in a meaningful way (or worse yet, doesn’t get the feedback in the first place because he didn’t know what questions to ask or didn’t given the customer a chance to speak). Customers really appreciate sales people who understand their needs, understand the product, take the time to listen, and can trust that what they’re telling them is actually being taken back to the engineering team properly. This will build confidence in your product and team that the customer can rely on. It all starts with that initial sales strategy. That’s another reason why it’s great to see founders do a lot of the initial sales, as the product feedback is never more important than then and the founder(s) should know their product better than anyone else at the company.

Another important step is to as the founder, lead and help craft a definition of and a list of characteristics of who your ideal customers are. This is especially important in B2B companies, as every company is different and can be highly complex. If your industry is small enough, this may be an actual list of potential customer names. Making mistakes here are hard to fix if you bring on a customer that isn’t a fit (for both sides). It’s kind of like a golf swing and alignment. You could have the greatest swing in the world, but if you aim at the wrong target and still make the perfect swing (or perfect sales strategy), you’ll still miss. Do you work with agencies or advertisers, or both? Each has it’s own implications for sales strategy and ultimately servicing if you win the deal. Do you only want to work with customers who have a certain number of employees? Or who are or aren’t using a particular piece of software or have previous experience with it? You can always update this definition and/or hit list, and should. The more effort you put into defining who is your ideal customer upfront, the better focused your sales team will be and the less time you’ll waste of your potential customers. Why meet with a company/prospect and confuse them and/or sell them on something you have no intention of delivering or isn’t a fit if you could have known that upfront?

My last piece of advice is to track as much as you can, as you can’t improve something you don’t measure. Figure out close rates on deals for starters. If you have multiple sales people, track performance and patterns across people. Use systems like Salesforce to organize and track stuff like this. If you have a really low deal close rate, you could either have a shitty product, a shitty sales strategy (and/or people), or you could also even be pitching the wrong clients (or all of the above). Figure out what it is. Use data to help you figure out how to adapt and evolve your sales strategy. In this process you may learn that your market is too small, or that you’re building the wrong thing, or that your definition of who an ideal customer is was too broad or too narrow, or that your sales people aren’t effectively able to sell your product. Always be learning.

As a final note, this isn’t re-inventing the wheel and hardly scratches the surface on the topic of sales strategy. There are plenty of better articles on the basics of things like aggressiveness and the concept of sales strategy as a whole that are extremely helpful and way more in-depth than this post. I highly suggest doing your research on the topic of sales strategy as much as anything else.

The dreaded "Just checking in"

Craig Rosenberg insights on the flailing attempts of sales people to move the cycle forward is worth the read. Don't be that guy! That "guy" who is just "checking in". 

Tell your sales people they are forbidden to do a  "check in" with their prospects or clients. e.g. "HI ___; just "checking in". Honestly, it has zero value to the buyer and is frankly, embarrassing.  People rarely "check in" in their personal life unless someone is sick.  The sales person is implying they have nothing to offer or they think they have the right to start the conversation off with this so the buyer can update him/her.  No thanks.

Want to know why you aren't getting a response  or moving a deal along? "Checking in" is one reason.

Here are ways to avoid the "check in":

1.  Sales Intelligence -- there is a lot of information about your clients.  Doing 5 minutes of research will provide clues into what your approach should be.  The sales reps who emailed to congratulate me when they read I won an award -- memorable.

2.  Sales Intelligence Part II: Trigger Events -- this is Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias rallying cry and it makes sense.  There are events that happen in a decision maker's business life that are reasons to not just "check in" but go sell.  Here is an example: decision maker just announced that they need to double revenue this year. 

3.  Content -- there is an un-named sales person who "checks in" with me by sending me relevant content offerings.  By the way, she sends blog posts from people unrelated to her company! She is trying to check in by offering me something that makes a difference in my life.  She is creating a trusting, memorable relationship with me.  Oh and by the way, I will sometimes write back (unlike the "check in" emails I receive).

Now, some may say "But there is a reason to 'check in' during the sales cycle".  Typically, the sales person who "checks in" has lost control of a deal.  They don't know what is going on and need to find out more. 

1.  Always mutually agree on a next step or deliverable -- if you leave a call without some type of agreement, you will be FORCED to "check in".  I have heard stories in the old days of enterprise sales reps bringing calendars into sales meetings to create a time line with the prospect.  I like that, you know have something the prospect has agreed to allow you to ask for.  If you "check in", I don't have to get back to you.  If I owe you something, then I owe you a response.

2.  Don't be such a wimp -- this is a business relationship, don't use the "check-in" as a way to be passive-aggressive. Ask for what you want. If someone is supposed to send you their requirements, ask for that. 

10 Ideas For Those Critical Early Startup Sales

This post initially appeared on Dharmesh Shah’s excellent blog, OnStartups.

Closing your initial sales at a startup is one of the most challenging parts of building a company. Many startups die before they ever close a deal.
Unless you’re entering a well established market there will be uncertainty with your product, approach, and timing until you have enough customers to prove that you have a good business model.

When Brendan and I started Wistia, we had questions about how the sales process should work, what kinds of documents we needed in place, how long things should take, and where we should look for potential customers. Through sheer will, conviction, and lots of failure, we found our way to where we are today. Here are the 10 principles we learned along the way.

1. Don’t wait to sell

You should start selling as early as you possibly can. Do not wait until your product is polished and launched. We changed direction and started heading towards Wistia about a year into startup life. How’d we know to head towards Wistia? Because we had a real potential customer that was interested when we had NO PRODUCT. We talked to them about what we thought Wistia could be. They liked the concept and we built the first version of Wistia in two weeks. A month later and we had our first customer.
We had just spent seven months building a portfolio website and four months trying to get people on board while our bank accounts shrank and our time to live decreased. In the course of a month we sold our first customer, decreased our burn, and realized that selling early was possible.

2. Do things that don’t scale

We learned an enormous amount from our first customer. That first sale gave us a benchmark for what people were willing to pay, how long it would take to close a deal, and how easy it was to use the product.

We made a point of going to our first customer’s office every couple of weeks to talk about the challenges that they were seeing and how we could make the product better suited to their needs. We could never spend as much time with every customer as we spent working with customer numero uno but we magnified all the extra learning upfront across the customer base.

Trying things that seem like they can’t scale is not just okay, it’s imperative as long as you are actively learning from every interaction.

3. Get inside your customer’s head

What books and magazines would your customers read? What conferences would they go to? What search terms would they use? Who would they follow on twitter? Once you have an idea of where your customers hang out, you need to go there. The more time you spend where your customers are, the more you’ll learn about how they think and whether or not you’re focused on the right group.

We thought some of our early customers would want to use Wistia for training, so we went to learning conferences. When that didn’t work we focused on talking to people from big companies that went to tech events. As we got better at figuring out where our customers could be we had more opportunities to learn from the right audience.

4. Focus on the buyer

Sometimes, especially with enterprise sales, the buyer of your product will be different from the user. That’s why it’s critical that you focus on the buyer.

CRMs are an excellent example of this phenomenon: a product is sold to the VP of Sales that will be used by the sales team. If you focus only on making an amazing experience for the sales team while ignoring the high level dashboards of how the sales team is doing, the VP of Sales will have trouble buying.

Look at Salesforce.com; their application can be an ardous one to setup. In fact, there are companies like OpFocus, whose main business is working with companies to optimize the Salesforce.com system already purchased. But Salesforce.com does have a great set of dashboards for the executives. The buyer, the VP of Sales, is happy and Salesforce is a $18B company with a product that has a terrible UI. All because they focus on the buyer.

5. Don’t price against cost

Cost matters when markets are mature and products are well defined. All that matters to customers is value. Should we charge our customers based on how many servers they’re using or how much video bandwidth they’re pushing because those are our costs? No.

Our customers don’t care how much we’re paying Slicehost or any of our other providers. They want to know if their videos are effective, they want to close more deals, and they want to provide a better experience for their customers. These needs could not be more divorced from our costs.

6. Position against complementary products

For some reason, competitive startups tend to think that they need to position themselves against each other. But as my good friend David Cancel likes to say:
I believe a startup only has one real competitor, indifference

People not caring enough about your product is your true competition, not some other startup.

When you’re thinking about how to position yourself, look at the complementary products, not the competitive ones. Ask yourself two questions: How much value can I create for my customer? And how much value are they getting from the other products they use?
Say your customers are spending $50 a month on Mailchimp, and they get an email platform they use every week that allows them to design, manage, and market to 5,000 recipients. Don’t try to sell them a video hosting solution for $1,000 a month that they’re going to use once a quarter to train 200 people. We made this mistake, and it’s an important one to learn from. Be honest about how much value you create and how much value your customers are getting from other products.

7. It’s only the beginning

When you first start selling a new product every new customer feels hugely important, and they are. It becomes easy to put a crippling amount of pressure on yourself to close deals and get people interested. While this can be a good motivator, it can also cause you to make mistakes.

When we were first getting going sometimes we’d say things like “Maybe we should wait a bit until feature XYZ is launched. Then they won’t be able to say no.” or “If we can just get company ABC to sign up, then it’ll be way easier to get that other guy too.” Here’s the problem with this: unless you’re dealing with a market in which there are less than 100 customers, the customers you’re trying to sign up should only be floating on the surface of your pool of potential customers.

You should not be afraid of scaring people away with a high price, the wrong messaging, or an initial email that’s too short. You need to try all of these things and more to figure out what’s going to work for your sales process. You need to be able to take risks and push forward quickly. This can be impossible if you structure your plans around closing each and every individual potential customer.

8. Focus on every customer

Even though no one customer should define your business model, you should leave yourself the flexibility to cater to each individual customers in specific ways. The most likely way to get customers to close is to spend a little time on each individual target. You need to personalize the correspondence as much as possible. This is true if you’re sending an email or if you’re meeting with someone in person. Figure out why they’re successful, what their hobbies are, and what conferences they like going to. The more you can understand them the more likely you are to speak in their language.

It takes time to prepare and learn about every target. But as you get more customers you’ll quickly learn what similarities and differences your customers have. It becomes easier to figure out where to focus and how to craft your message.

9. Act your size

When you’re first getting started it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to act bigger than you are. Common pitfalls include trying to demand exorbitantly high prices, positioning to have more customers than you have, and promising more than your product can deliver. Yes, I’ve made all these mistakes.

When you’re trying to act big, it often highlights just how small you are. Pretend like you have more customers than you do and when someone asks you who your customers are you’ll be left speechless. Position your price too highly like your more entrenched comparables and people will stop responding to you.

The secret is: the right customers will gladly pay startups for services. They’ll think they can get a deal because they’re early to the party, which is likely true. They’ll be excited about using cutting edge technology to get a leg up — again true. And if they pick right and your product rocks they get to tell the world that they were first — how can this benefit even be measured!

10. Just keep going

The hardest part of bootstrapping your sales is sticking with the process. It can take a very long time to get your first deal. But each deal comes faster with practice and more information
Your initial hit rate will probably be terrible. If it isn’t, you’re doing something right. I have some friends who run a company called Usable Health that just closed their second deal in a complex and emerging space: kiosk-style self checkout at mid-sized restaurant franchises. They’ve been selling for one and a half years and pivoted three times in the process. Now they have a pattern, happy customers, a model that looks like it could scale, and real tangible revenue.

Not giving up is the most important part. Give yourself time to build your business model. Once you’ve done that, you’re golden.

Why Everyone Should Work in Sales — at Least for a While

By Jeff Haden

Everyone should work in sales at some point in their career — the earlier the better.

My first post-college job was with a Fortune 500 company. In terms of workload, we only experienced two conditions: Busy and busier. So I never thought about the task of drumming up sales. Why would I? Work magically appeared.

Many people, especially those who work for large companies, are not exposed to the difficulties and challenges faced by sales teams. But we all should be. Why?
Sales skills are incredibly useful — in every field.

To many people the word “selling” implies manipulating, pressuring, cajoling… all the used car salesman stereotypes. If you think of selling as explaining the logic and benefits of a decision, then every job requires sales skills: Convincing coworkers your idea makes sense, showing your boss how a project will pay off, helping employees understand the benefits of a new process, etc. Communication is critical in any career; you’ll learn more about communication by working in sales than you will almost anywhere else.

Here are more reasons everyone should work in sales, at least for a period of time:

You’ll learn to negotiate. Every job involves negotiating: With peers, with other departments, even with your boss. Salespeople learn to listen, evaluate variables, identify key drivers, overcome objections, and find ways to reach agreement — without burning bridges.

You’ll learn to close. Asking for what you want is difficult for a lot of people. Closing a sale is part art, part science. Getting others to agree with you, and follow your direction, is also part art and part science. If you aspire to a leadership position, you must be able to close. Great salespeople know how to close. Great supervisors and managers do too.

You’ll learn persistence. Salespeople hear the word “no” all the time. Over time you’ll start to see “no” as a challenge, not rejection.

You’ll learn self discipline. If you work for a big company, sometimes you can sleepwalk your way through a day and still get paid. When you work on commission, “If it is to be, it’s up to me,” is your credo. Sales is a great way to permanently connect the mental dots between performance and reward.

You’ll learn to work well with a wide range of people at all levels. Plus, working in sales is the perfect cure for shyness. Learn to step forward with confidence, especially under duress or in a crisis, and you can take on any role in an organization.

If you want to own a business, you’ll always be in sales. Every business is an extension of its owner. Even if they have a sales team, a business owner is always involved in sales. (In many companies the owner still handles the major sales personally — or at the very least is brought into the process to help close the deal.) An entrepreneur who can’t sell faces a major challenge. Gaining sales skills will help you win financing, bring in investors, line up distribution deals, land customers — in the early stages of starting a company, everything involves sales.

Understanding the sales process and how to build customer relationships is incredibly important, regardless of the industry or career you choose. Spending one or two years in a sales role is an investment that will pay dividends forever.

Think of it this way: The more intimidating or scary a position in sales sounds, the more you need to take one. You’ll gain confidence and self-assurance, and the skills you gain will serve you well for the rest of your business — and personal — life.

Neil Patel’s Guide To Closing BIG Deals

When it comes to selling, I am terrible at it. If you told me to convince you to buy a red plastic cup, I wouldn’t be able to. But if you told me to sell Walmart a million of these red plastic cups, it’s very likely I would be able to.

Over the years I learned that although I suck at selling products to individuals, I am great at closing big deals with businesses. As an entrepreneur I have closed deals ranging from $240,000 a year to even $1,200,000.

Aside from knowing what you are going to sell, here are the 5 tactics you must use if you want to close big deals.

Step #1: Create a Bond

People like doing business with those they can relate to. If you are going to spend money, why not spend it on people you like, right?
The best way to get people to relate to you, and your product, is to create a bond. You can do this by telling stories, or just “shooting the shit”.

One thing I like doing is to talk about my past experiences. I tend to talk about my childhood or teenage years. Once I do this the other person usually feels comfortable enough to talk about their life experiences.

The whole purpose of doing this is to get to know the other person on an intimate level. At the same time, they’ll quickly feel like they’ve known you for years, when in fact… you’ve just met.


Step #2: Be Logical

The tactic I use most often when trying to close a big deal is logic. If a company is spending $100,000 with someone else and you can do the same thing for $50,000 while still maintaining a healthy profit margin, why not talk about how you can save them $50,000 every year?

In addition to saving others money, I always try to talk about how my services and products create better results than the competition. Through the use of case studies and testimonials, you can easily achieve this.

Another tactic you can utilize is to break down how much additional revenue you can provide a company. A logical tool I have found useful is called, “effectuation.” For example, I once did a pitch to Blue Nile and broke down how I can drive much more traffic to their website, what percentage of those visitors would convert into customers, and the average revenue/profit per new customer. This helps increase their growth rate and would potential cause their stock price to go up.

Step #3: Change Their Mood Not Their Mind

Although logic is great, not everyone bases their decisions on logic. Many people are motivated by emotional triggers. Instead of trying to change a person’s mind, start trying to change their mood.

Lets say I am offering companies a tool that helps them increase their revenue through conversion optimization. Through logic, if I am not able to convince you to use my tool, I’d figure out a way to change your mood. Changing sentiment can be as game changing as using cause/effect analysis.

Utilizing step 1, if I learned you love Madonna, I would try to find a Madonna concert I can get you tickets to. Or I would buy an autographed Madonna album on eBay and mail it to you.

It’s true that money can’t buy everything. Sometimes understanding the sentimental value of things, particularly the value individuals place on certain items, allows you to get a better understanding of how to change moods positively. Typically what people are missing isn’t work related, so you’ll have to think outside the box.

Step #4: Create a Sense of Urgency

Now that you have the other party interested in your product or service, you need them to move fast. The best way to do this is to create a sense or urgency. Playing on the idea of supply and demand can have great results. Terms like: limited supplies, limited time only, and while quantities last put pressure for you to move quick.

The pitch I usually make is that we only have one opening to take on a new enterprise customer and that it will be filled within the next 30 days.

When creating a sense of urgency make sure you aren’t lying, because it can backfire. When I tell companies that I only have one opening, I mean it! Yes, I can take on more customers in the future, but that involves scaling my company… which takes time.

Step #5: Turn the Tables

Although this is the last step, in many ways it is the most important step. Not only will it determine the size of the deal, but it also determines if you will be able to close the deal.

With most business deals you’re the one pitching, which naturally gives the other party the upper hand. And when they have the upper hand they won’t just make you earn the deal, but they’ll squeeze you on the price. This will make the deal less lucrative for you.

Leveraging step 4, by creating a sense of urgency, is the best way to turn the tables. Here is what I typically say to turn the tables:

As you already know, I only have an opening for one client. I only want to work with companies who are doing fun, exciting, and revolutionary things. Why should I choose to work with you?

Believe it or not you’ll get a response, and it’s typically one that defends how great their company is. In essence they are now pitching you on why you have to work with them. Now when you send them a proposal they’ll be more likely to sign a deal.

Conclusion

Following these steps won’t help you sell that single red cup, but it can help you close big deals. At first you may struggle at closing big deals, but with some practice you’ll get good at it.

If I was able to close 6 figure deals while I was in high school, there is no reason why you can’t do it as well. Try it out and let me know what you think.