B2B Sales for Startups Strategies, Tactics & Tradecraft - Session 1 || Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs

we're going to get started on time we have a really awesome session today our guest kent summers uh he's founded and successfully exit exited three startups over a 16 year period kent teaches b2b sales for startups and iap course at mit and is a visiting lecturer at harvard business school kent is an executive leadership coach at the harvard advanced leadership initiative ali on the teaching faculty of thai boston and the mastering sales program at kellogg northwestern kellogg and he serves on the board of sigma labs a nasdaq company as well as iq3 connect so welcome kent to our session uh just some housekeeping items uh if you have uh really specific questions about your business uh please try to keep them more general uh so that we don't spend a lot of time answering your specific questions and i'm going to hand it over to kent and we'll we'll leave the questions to the end but feel free to send them by private message to me so that we can uh moderate them uh kent over to you uh joe thank you um hello everyone um i've got you for an hour today and i think it out another hour on thursday it's um very nice to um to be with you today um we're gonna cover a very small select set of material from my full lecture series here i've chosen um some material intentionally that i think will help help you improve your your sales performance and your efficiency um i'm i i don't have a lot of patience for theory um i'm really all about tactics and trade craft and skills and knowledge so my goal here uh today and over thursday is that um you walk away with a better understanding and maybe a a better mindset and a few skills that you can apply uh to your startup or your scale up to help improve uh your sales so with that um i'll start by sharing some good news um is my experience as a founder there's only two things you need to worry about uh and that's revenue and everything else and uh i figured that out early after i started running out of uh runway and spending more time are you are you sharing your screen can't see your screen yes i am can you can you see me i can see you but not your screen um hang on a second here yeah that good news i was sharing with you it's revenue and everything else it turns out if you're unable to get revenue flowing everything else doesn't matter however once you get cash in the door um then all the other things the myriad things that you do as a founder all of a sudden seem manageable so if you're unable to figure out at some point in your startup journey how to acquire customers cost-effectively game over so that's really what i want to help you with i focus on b2b sales i assume uh presume most of you here are uh in in the b2b marketplace uh which is a completely different animal from from b to c sales uh what is b2b sales uh well it's you as a smaller business selling to a larger business and you are solving um necessarily goals problems needs that are complex if they weren't complex they wouldn't be problems or they would probably already be solved and it's typically solved by you thinking about a different uh better faster cheaper way um leveraging innovation to solve those problems which involves people doing something differently enterprise sales involves higher priced offerings and it's not necessarily related to your cogs what it takes you to build and deliver and service your product uh the higher price offerings uh more based upon the scale of the problem that you're solving so for example if you're solving a one dollar problem for a million people it's a million dollar problem that you're solving enterprise sales almost always involves unknowns and uncertainties and understanding from a sales perspective how to manage those is very very important in addition um enterprise sales b2b sales almost always replaces something or someone inside or outside the organization it's critically important to understand who or what or both your solution displaces as part of the sales process enterprise sales are also involved because people are involved a lot's hidden agenda in forces and so part of the skills as a salesperson is to have the ability and the understanding of asking the right questions of people to surface those agendas and forces so that you can manage them head-on versus uh deal with them um deal with the outcome of those um it's very seldom than an enterprise sale the same person will evaluate the offering make the decision and write the check it's almost always the case that enterprise sales involves a team purchasing decision where the uh those aspects of the sale are distributed amongst uh four five six people in the organization and because of all this b2b sales is a much longer expensive sales cycle sales is your most expensive investment in terms of real cost and in terms of opportunity costs um it's expensive to get right but it's very expensive if you get it wrong so a little bit about the mindset in sales um and and this is a really important uh part of sales it's not just tools it's not just skills it's about having a proper mindset uh which might be a little bit different than how you think about the sales profession or sales people um so contrary to what you uh might have understood um sales is not about chasing people down to close deals it's about helping people achieve a goal solve a problem or satisfy a need by coincidentally purchasing your product or service and it turns out that if you're successful helping people transactions will naturally occur so think about transactions or sales is an outcome measure and that your your attitude and your behavior with people in in your competence and helping people solve their problem as the leading indicators of that outcome measure sales is also not about picking winners and losers we learned a long time ago and working for the past 20 years at mit that we're not very good at that it's about helping people shape and navigate and pivot and change in the successful companies that leave mit bear very little resemblance to what they look like when we first started working with them so if you were to pick uh winning customers or customers that you think are going to close um and those that you do not think uh are going to close um you're probably wasting a lot of your time and you're missing out on opportunities so just like startups sales are not about picking winners and losers it's about feeding a process where at the end of the day there's only two things that you control as a founder your attitude and your behavior so i'm going to be these are sort of overriding themes that i'm going to be talking about over the course of the next hour is you know how do you how do you modify how do you control um your attitude and your behaviors and use them wisely to improve your sales performance and it turns out that sales people are not born with a sales gene it's not something that you learn in school it's something that you learn through practice in in repetition just like anything else and most technical founders can be very very good at sales and of course the ones that survive always figure it out the sales role itself is the business profession closest to a full contact sport and like an athlete they require talent coaching team play and great execution skills uh the sales profession is also a numbers game with a very unattractive win-loss ratio enterprise sales is a 90 percent plus failure driven activity um i'd like to share with you is a failure driven activity everybody at mit has their own formulas and algorithms and so of course i had to come up with one on my own here for sales i call it sw cubed over n you know for sales people in a failure driven profession this stands for some will some won't so what next there's your attitude for selling into a failure driven profession let me share with you that if you only fail 10 in the in sales you will be an extremely um successful entrepreneur and you will be the exception the reality is in sales um that the failure rate is closer to 97 or 98 um a lot of sales books will tell you and you've probably heard before if you've read any of them that sales is always about qualifying customers always be qualifying um i i disagree with that um strongly i believe that qualified customers are really really easy to spot i think that effective sales is about disqualifying people with the appearance of real and helping people to opt in and opt out of your process by asking questions not by making statements so failure uh is the name of the game it's not about failure avoidance it's about failure recovery and in the sales profession unlike a professional baseball coach you can you can lose 90 percent of your your games and still keep your job the founder is always the first salesperson why well you have intimate knowledge of the offering the customer the need the problem uh you also uh and and of course the value that you're uh delivering people you also have this skewed view of the world right you have a different way of of looking at things uh this distorted uh view of reality it helps you overcome this is your vision here this is this is why you founded your company um and importantly you as a founder need to understand firsthand all the blocking issues that prevent customers from writing you a check right all this early product market feedback this is really essential especially as you transition from a sort of a vision whiteboard view of things through your product market fit where you start to influence your product roadmap more so from trends and patterns that you see from talking with many many different customers and it's these feature requests and rejections here that that give you that afford you that that precious fuel for your your product roadmap now in case um uh some or many of you have not already experienced this already um one of the things that um i've uh that's become clear to me uh over the past 20 years working with founders is that if you really want your your company to fail go out and hire a professional salesperson we see this time and time again where startups fail when the founder believes that bringing in a salesperson will solve the sales dilemma to the contrary this is usually an accelerant to failure and it becomes a very expensive learning uh exercise for for the founder and very very rarely works out so um in my my normal um lecture material i have a whole bunch of material at this point where i talk about the successful personality and skill traits of a salesperson what makes them tick what makes them successful again i had to really limit what what i covered with you in a short time period today so i thought what might be more impactful is that we just jump straight into uh the scale uh sales toolkit and mechanics so with that um is a failure driven profession in a numbers game it's really uh about prospecting right and when you're playing a numbers game you have to have a tools you have to have a game plan you have to have tools and a methodology which are essential for your focus in your efficiency and answering the question that you have every morning when you wake up when you're looking at many more opportunities than you have time to address and that is what's the most productive use of my time today so there's two tools that can help you with the first is the customer profile and this is the criteria very specific criteria that you rely on to focus your daily sales activity and then secondly once you figure that out uh your sales pipeline also called your funnel and this is your methodology that you use to drive focus and efficiency this is a time management tool for you so let's start with the profile um the profile is what you rely on to focus your sales activity it consists of three components at the outside ring here is your company profile this is your target customer and they exist within a specific industry a type of company within that industry size and geography so for example i'm targeting financial services company of type family offices with over 100 million under management within 25 miles of boston it would be a very good example of a well-defined company profile the company profile if it's well defined one of the acid tests there is you should be able to get companies addresses from this if you have a good profile you should be able to with a good search um come up with a long list of companies uh in their specific sp street address that needs that inside the company profile is the buyer profile this is the person inside that company that stands to gain the most or lose the most from your offering so the buyer profile is determined by a job title or role with resp specific responsibilities and unmet needs often expressed in the form of a of a use case so in the prior example here this would be a a research analyst who's responsible for vetting investment opportunities and is using very old outdated inefficient and error-prone research methods and then lastly uh at the center of your profile is the decision-making unit and this is the the folks inside that organization that make decisions they influence the decisions and they have access to a checkbook and it's very different in every organization depending upon the people their culture etc and especially in in much larger companies so these are the three components of a customer profile and it's really really important that as you go and figure this out this is not just something that comes out of your business plan this is something that you learn and fine-tune after talking with 100 or 200 prospects and you eventually get it down to where it's fairly chiseled down and i recommend if you go through this process if you do have a co-founder or other people on your team to engage everybody on your team while figuring this out some recommendations uh in terms of questions that you ask people in figuring this out that have helped me in the past gather facts not opinions um a lot of people fail in their in their custer customer profile development by asking people if they would do something if or would they do something if and people love to share their opinions and theory and so forth but that's not helpful um i recommend that you gather facts uh against what you're selling into don't ask people would you do something but ask them do you do something so facts not opinions and facts related to pain and cost not theoretical or implied gains right which is very difficult to measure so figure out where the pain and the cost is related to those facts and facts pain and cost related to a single use case right now of course early on pursuing multiple scenarios is necessary as you're sort of figuring out your product market fit but many founders if you ask them well who your customer is they may give you two or three or four different use case scenarios i strongly recommend focusing on on one um because trying to chase down three or four in parallel can be hugely dilutive uh to your to your focus and at the end of the day there's only one validate validation of a customer profile and that is you receive purchase orders from different companies to solve a similar problem so different companies solve a similar problem and by the way this is actually from an investor perspective the bona fide definition of mvp right you do not have mvp if you do not have three or four or six companies that are different where you're solving a similar problem so this is your um your customer profile once you um once you figure out and fine-tune your customer profile now you've got basically the framework from which you can go out and you can procure leads which are the raw material of sales so i'm going to talk about the pipeline process now from from lead to close where those leads come from how they're managed throughout the sales process and how you think about the sales process um you know from uh from a stage to stage perspective so sales pipeline here also called a funnel it looks like a funnel you've got leads coming in the top to suspects prospects opportunities and customers suspects are where you um you take leads and you filter them to meet your specific customer profile criteria not all leads are going to meet that criteria you need to winnow out the ones that don't meet that specific criteria the tighter the criteria the better moving on prospects are suspects who you've contacted and confirmed that the buyer profile exists within that customer profile and of the few prospects that you talk to that meet that profile that also express genuine interest and that the problem that you're solving is a priority they become opportunities that you these are folks that are actively engaged in your sales process where you're developing and closing them the length of time it takes you to do this is your sales cycle and there's these things that occur between these stages called conversion metrics um i'll explain in just a minute why they're they're very important to you they help you in sales uh and there's two things that occur as part of the sales process that actually shape this into a funnel there's triage in attrition triage is uh you moving people out of the final because you don't believe they're qualified to take your time and attrition is people leaving your life kicking you out of their funnel because they don't believe you're qualified to take their time after you've figured out your customer uh profile with your team this is not uh the top end of your funnel uh the suspects and prospects is not where you want to engage your team they they're very barely qualified to take your time let alone people on your team's time so this is your job as a founder as a salesperson is to move people through the suspect prospect conversion conversely when they make it to opportunities the opposite is true this is exactly where you need to invest your team's time and exposure to the customer for lots of reasons that'll explain um later on today uh and that is expanding beyond the one-on-one conversation getting getting away from having a conversation with a single person uh a prospective customer and successful successful sales is rather your ability to connect people on your team with people on the buyer's team and the better you get it that the more likely you will be having a paying customer now in a mature company each one of these stages is actually a formal highly specialized business discipline so for example you'll have marketing people who are responsible for not only building awareness but also generating leads and when they generate leads which meet the company profile they hand those over to inside sales people also called sales development representatives or sdrs and um sdrs they get you know this is your a right of passage as a salesperson as a young sales person you get on the phone and you just start ambushing people on the phone and cold calling them and you know most of your life you're getting your teeth kicked in but every once in a while you'll you'll get somebody where uh it resonates and when you find somebody that meets your qualification criteria the sdr hands that that person off to field sales who has a much better well-developed set of skills to um develop that opportunity and close that opportunity and of course field sales cannot be burdened by on ongoing customer retention and satisfaction so as soon as practical they transition the primary relationship in that account over to an account manager and uh the field salesperson is the hunter and the account manager is the farmer completely different sales sales uh skill sets and personalities um the field sales person is about nuke new account acquisition where the farmer the account manager their job is to maximize the yield within the account now for um for founders uh fortunately this is a lot more simple for you you don't have to think about all these roles you get to do them all yourself uh but i think it's important to understand here that behind the scenes here uh of all these things that you need to do as a founder as a small team this is how you eventually scale your go to market team into separate distinct professional skill sets and roles well the sales pipeline defines the sequential named steps of your sales process that help you organize and focus your time and also balance your sales activity and i'll i'm gonna i'm gonna double back on that balance here in a moment because uh it's a very important uh part of a successful sales skill set suspects are filtered leads that meet your company profile also called mqls are marketing qualified leads prospects are uh initial contact with that customer verifies that the buyer profile and the buyer interest exists this is also called sales qualified leads or sqls opportunities are in your pipeline these are qualified prospects that are actively engaged in your sales process where you are developing the decision making unit and of course we all know what customers are these are the conversion metrics i was talking about before generally speaking these are good rule of thumb metrics here in other words uh one out of ten suspect becomes a prospect um and one in you know one and a half uh prospect becomes an opportunity or well maybe uh 15 of the time and about a third of the time you should close an opportunity as a customer the point here is they increase they should intentionally increase increase left to right right um if they are not increasing left to right significantly um the criteria that you're employing to allow people to take up your valuable time is uh not well defined enough it's too broad and you need to tighten down your uh your your criteria um so this will help you debug your sales process um and conversion metrics are also uh one of the few if any objective metrics uh for sales forecasting and i'll uh i'll cover that in just a moment so a lot of people tend to get um there's a little confusion um between mqls and sqls and sales in interaction between sales and marketing so i think about it like how would somebody how would i want somebody to explain the difference between these things to somebody like me right and the answer here is um mqls they want to know what kind of cookies you have and sqls you verified that they have a ten dollar budget and they're deciding between thin mints and oreos so that's the difference between mqls and sqls the law sales starts with the lead um and in b2c sales by contrast the websites do all the heavy lifting where the salesperson supports that and in b2b sales it's exactly the opposite um the the the the b2b salesperson does all the heavy lifting and the website is just to support um websites never close deals in b2b sales but they're really really good at preventing them from happening and i can't tell you how many times that i've seen early stage entrepreneurs over build their website and talk about um their solution in excruciating detail to whereas people visit um and they there's so much information there um they're overwhelmed and they don't really walk away with a clear understanding of what you do or worse um they're they overemphasize the tool and the capabilities and the features and they forget about the the why and the problem and the outcome measures um there's lots of reasons why websites um are good at preventing b2b sales so a couple of things to keep in mind here you know diminishing return on people's attention in sales occurs very early so you've got basically 30 seconds to make it really really clear to people what you sell and how it fits into their world speak to their world and just make them curious to learn more don't go over engineer the website with more information because you're never ever going to have a chance to talk to them if you provide too much information on the website right so it's about your clarity of thinking here right uh more concepts illustration very very crisp uh messaging right um and think about your customer right think about their world who who are they right is it really really clear from your messaging um that the person visiting your website is exactly the type of person that you're serving here and show this person within 10 seconds how it directly benefits them right uh and it's benefits supported by features and capabilities not the reverse so your goal here is within two or three or maybe five minutes on the website is to create somebody who is going to champion you to bring you back to the organization in the context of an initiative or a project that's relevant to your offering here and say hey this is one of the things we need to look at here help them sell that story but make them come back to you for detail the leads of the raw material of sales uh there's uh fundamentally there's two methods there's outbound leads and these are um outreach programs uh two targeted company profiles groups of prospects to solicit their interest right there's lots of different very traditional ways of doing this and with the advent of the internet and especially the development of lots more advanced sales and marketing tools especially over the last 10 years there's actually a much more efficient method of gathering leads called inbound where search engine optimization and pay-per-click are how you acquire new leads they're fundamentally different approaches outbound the the prospective seller initiates the contract uh the contact with the buyer and uh in um in inbound seo and ppc uh the reverse is true the buyer thinks they reap they find you they reach out to you they contact you um because of this people's needs attention and priorities is established in inbound lead generation where it is not established and outbound so what kind of skills do you need depending upon how you're generating leads you have to be very good at direct marketing uh if you're relying on outbound for primarily for your lead generation if you're relying on seo and ppc has to be your skills for inbound you have to learn about search engine optimization and keyword density and metadata and all the campaigns and obscurities of figuring out the big black box of google and how they run their algorithms and and all the all the um the tricks in in with getting better at driving people to your website without spending more money and at the end of the day it does come down to money your sales economics and that's why um i'm a big fan of inbound is because inbound lead gen once you figure it out and it will require quite a bit of the experimentation but once you figure it out the cost to um continue and grow your company and grow your revenues the cost of seo and ppc does not grow proportionate to your revenue right it tends to flatten off in which case your cost of sales goes down over time wherein outbound direct marketing the um the cost of sales tends to be fairly proportionate to your to your revenue is a percentage so um these are the big uh difference here between the two in terms of who initiates the contact and whether people's needs and priorities are established outbound uh email campaigns etc um the the big thing today is to outsource your your sdr functions there's actually quite a few organizations now in the us uh that will perform this sdr function for you as a virtual sdr function if you are going to bring it in-house you know their job is to find qualified prospects and to have meetings with those people with your sales people and to have those meetings convert into paying customers just a rule of thumb here on compensating sdrs in-house is um you um you you compensate sdrs for both meetings but you also compensate them for conversions and a 1 to 10 ratio so if you're paying an sdr 25 dollars every time they get a meeting with your sales rep they get 250 every time one of those converts to a paying customer inbound seo and pay-per-click uh it requires a significant upfront investment in my experience and a lot of ongoing experimentation to figure out how you can optimize your spend here if you have a unique highly innovative offering and i run into these all the time at mit uh it's really important that you optimize your website and your seo and ppc spend around the problem you solve not your solution people don't know what your solution is but they're searching on their problem so you have to think about it a little bit differently if you have a highly innovative offering and these are dramatically different approaches inbound and outbound right especially in terms of the buyer seller dynamics they're both expensive but the opportunity cost is more expensive you just have to get in there a lot of companies experiment with both the more successful companies that i've worked with and developed over the years eventually become centered on seo and ppc uh just because of the the sales economics so a couple of basic rules for customer prospecting um keep your your communication brief and to the point in sales as i mentioned before um diminishing returns on people attention occurs very uh quickly in sales so be very very brief and to the point and keep your interaction your interaction with people in sales narrow and well-defined right um a big mistake i see a lot of people make is a founder will get somebody that shows good interest and meets all their buying criteria on the phone and just wears them out over the course of an hour an hour and a half covering every one every aspect of their business right try to resist the temptation of stuffing multiple steps of your sales process into a single interaction lead room for relationship building very important also another common mistake you get an email from somebody that you don't know asking you to solve their problem and it's exactly the type of problem that you solve do you send them an email um solving their problem or show telling them how you would solve their problem why is that a lose-lose proposition well lots of reasons one is it turns out that despite years of english class in writing through grade school and college not too many people are great at communicating uh and writing especially or people are in hurry and they give you half the story or worse they give you the whole story and you solve it and they have no reason to contact you right you miss the opportunity for the person-to-person interaction so my recommendation is whenever you get an email and i don't care what they're asking for if it's remotely related to sales send the same response hey you know what this sounds like something we can help you with please send me days times you're available give them your time zone and you will confirm a phone call to discuss if it's a legitimate interest in your company a legitimate prospective buyer 90 of the time you'll get people to respond back to you affirmatively with days and times in the following week this works very very well right so don't try to don't try to sell over email get people on zoom get people on the phone people have different preferences for that by the way try to understand early on what their preference is and if you have trouble reaching people try a little bit inside and outside of ordinary hours right um or five minutes before the hour people tend to be hanging around their phones if they're playing to make a call obviously you're not going to be selling something to people in five minutes but you can't get on their calendar this is a pet peeve of mine as a founder um especially important when you're small companies use the word we instead of i it's very subtle but it's a very powerful word you want people you want to give people the perception they're working with a company not an individual so it's very important that you appear bigger and more professional than you actually are and by using the term we you can actually accomplish that when you're prospecting it's very important to be sensitive to other people's time and pressures on the job sales a lot of sales is about ambushing people's calendars and getting on people's calendars where it's unplanned and you have to be very mindful and very gracious about getting on people's calendars thanking them and just saying hey listen we just need 20 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever but it's about getting people on their calendars and respecting the fact that they're busy and they're they have lots of different priorities and making sure that when you do show up on their calendar and when you do have an interaction with them that you add value with every interaction right take those phone calls to ask good questions but offer people help offer them guidance offer them insight right if you provide value in these conversations people are going to want to talk to you right they're not going to talk to you out of obligation they're not going to talk to you out of courtesy they're going to talk to you because you've been helpful um and it's important to be serious about your business it's important to be serious about your product just don't take yourself too seriously in sales right um sales can be anxious enough right try to keep your manner your tone light um i call this the behavioral equivalent of office casual dress code right um you know be a little bit more relaxed i think helps other people uh become relaxed and you can be very formal and professional about your knowledge and your competence and the information you share to help people but you don't have to be so formal in terms of your manner in your in your tone and always afford people and out and see if they take it i'm a big fan of this i think on thursday we're going to be talking a lot about some very specific skills um what i call off ramps to help people opt-in or opt out of your sales process to actually solicit clear buying installing signals that are actionable by you because otherwise people may have their own agenda and not wish to send you these signals so it's important for you as a salesperson to have these skills and ability to to um to help people either opt in or opt out of your your process now of course we all have bad days and um you know as it turns out when you're working uh in sales um the further you go in the conversation the more expensive they come and sometimes you arrive at work uh and you just feel like well you've got to get the job done but you're not quite on that day my my another strong recommendation that i've learned just from my own experience doing sales is you know when you're having those bad days don't interact with people in sales you know go to the movies don't interact with any humans and when you're having those positive mojo days that's when you make those important calls so a couple of basic rules of customer prospecting law number one you're going to interact with a hundred prospects for every one of the three that close and at the outset they all appear the same and there are no shortcuts right you must touch everyone determine who's real and to my earlier point prospects who are great fit they're easy to spot it's the ones that are not a good fit that are more difficult to spot so there's a couple of things to think about there in terms of how you how you go about that prospecting law 4 you're always going to have to make decisions in sales with an incomplete set of information right which is anathema to the engineering mindset if you don't have a complete set of information it won't compile right in sales over analyzing something belaboring incomplete knowledge will not help you you must learn to trust your instinct and take action on what you feel is important you have to feel confident about moving as confident about moving people out of your pipeline as you do forward in your pipeline and you've been working on a deal for a while it doesn't they've decided to go in a different direction you just don't dwell upon them you've got your little uh w3 c cubed over n uh poster in your office there and you're just like no no problem um timing is also a big challenge in sales here and it's actually an enigma in sales because it's very very different difficult to manage one of the ways that i've developed over years as a way of thinking about timing is is treating your expensive opportunities in your pipeline like perishable food so for example there's these deals that you know are going to make a decision in the next days or weeks inside a month these have to be out on your kitchen table they're going to be a meal for somebody they're going to make a decision they're going to buy from somebody maybe not you but this meal is going to get eaten right and you need to pay attention to it and they get more touches more more of your time versus those things in the refrigerator where the decision um date might be a little bit further out next couple months the next next couple quarters right where instead of two to three touches a week it's more one to two touches a month versus those things that are in the freezer that are not actively driving toward a decision date but you may be helping to influence something in the next year's budget where you need to you need to touch base with them every three to six months certainly not months and certainly not weeks or days so these are all fully quali these are all fully qualified opportunity the only difference here is timing right and the frequency of your sales activity so highly perishable deals two to three a week one to two a month and three to six months so the reality in sales is you're getting up in the morning you're looking at your pipeline first thing you do is you open the refrigerator you say okay what are we going to eat this week or next week and what belongs in the freezer stuff you've been you've been pawn through in your pipeline for too long it's not closing uh you put that in your freezer for your drip campaign or something else it's still a qualified deal it's just a timing issue maybe they pushed it off a year uh and always you're alert to those things which are sending short-term buying signals where you have to really focus your attention on you you'll do the best job you possibly can in sort of organizing your deals around timing but the reality is you're going to uncover a lot of opportunities that send you strong buying signals and go nowhere and to the contrary you're going to encounter opportunities that you swear are a perfect fit or are not a perfect fit um and you scratch their head and they decide that they want to become your customer and the timing of course is a mystery right uh especially when you don't have a way of thinking about a way of managing it so in sales there's only so much on your influence and control and it much is up much in sales is up to many other things way outside your control you just can't fret over the unpredictable nature of sales because you have to control your attitude and your behavior so with the few minutes left that we have here today i want to just talk about a little bit about um attitude and behavior and give you some examples uh for team sales and communication here and then um i don't know what people's time frames are but i'm kind of um i'm going to run over the time here and give you some time to ask some q a at the end here joe so in case that's uh needed so um in my experience working with and at many startups in my career um in sales attitude and behavior are the two best predictors of sales success and you know the um the uh efficiency uh and performance are the are basically mutually exclu exclusive uh in in most professions the faster you do it the uh the lower the quality and vice versa sales is the same you want to be very efficient but you get diminishing returns on efficiency on your performance so the most efficient sales person is the pusher this person they drive aggressively toward a yes or no and they're extremely efficient at doing that they're not very helpful in fact well they'll help you they'll help you borrow their pen to sign an agreement uh i i checked that that's about it the extent to which they'll help you right but they're all about driving people to purpose uh to purchase their performance is is lousy but they're the most efficient sales people on the planet next ball on the line is what i call the dreamer the hoper and the dreamer this is the person that uh active they're not quite sure how to help people but they're always hopeful and optimistic um and you can tell a hoper and dreamer because they have a bloated pipeline right so instead of uh you know a hundred um prospects in opportunities they're working they may have 400 people in the pipeline because they're too afraid to throw something out for it not uh they're wishing and hoping versus being proactive the mechanic is the next step in the process this is the person that is more skilled and that will recognize the absence of buying signals and feel quite comfortable about moving on and put putting somebody outside of their their scope of activity and then lastly is the facilitator and this is the person that's mastered in helping prospects sell themselves or opt out this is not a sales person this is a facilitator this is somebody that's working with people and asking the right questions and people either sell themselves or they don't that's a very different type of sales animal so attitude and behavior the two best predictors of sales success remember it's not b2b it's not b2c sales is about p2p person to person people buy from people not from companies right and because of that salespeople often make a huge error of jumping directly into problem solving mode by impressing people of their knowledge and how they good are good at solving their problems right buyers however often can find that threatening and are reluctant to have you solve their problem until that empathy and trust and establish and i don't know how many folks on the online here are married this is a lesson i learned from my wife 20 years ago it was a hard lesson that when she would explain a problem to me if i jumped into fix mode it usually had a really really horrible outcome and all i had to sit back when and just say i really understand your pain and i was in a much better position doing that than trying to fix it sales is very similar right resist the temptation to fix people's problems and convince them that you really understand their problem and that you have their best interests in mind so i'm going to talk about that the four pillars of building a successful buyer seller relationship starts with empathy convincing people you truly understand their need and their pain which leads to trust right you have their best interest in mind which means as part of the sales process hey listen i'm going to ask you some questions uh you know if it turns out that i don't think we can help you or you're not the best fit for me believe me i will be the first to raise my hand and if i can i'm going to point you in another direction i know a lot of other vendors in this space or other people i just want to make sure you get something that's the best for you right you have to convince people that um you are serving their best interest empathy and trust is the foundation of sales once you establish that foundation then you can begin to express the value of their offering in their terms in their world not your value proposition but their value proposition how is your product valuable what is the outcome measure of your offering in their word world and their terms and then finally if they buy into that and they say yeah that's exactly the outcome that we're looking for then you can move on to competence right you can talk about your product and your team and how you're capable and you're up to the task these are the four pillars of building a successful buyer relationship too often i i see people uh going in the reverse direction and attempting to build a relationship backwards by trying to convince people of um how knowledgeable they are or talking feature function and value prop and whatever that's backwards that's a fatal error in sales start with empathy and trust build toward value in their terms and earn the right uh to share how competent you are jumping straight to the fix for your capabilities it's often viewed as dismissive of their unique circumstances think about it right so your strengths right become a gift only after people are convinced that you really understand their specific unique needs and have their best interest in mind and in the absence of that trust right your competence understand your competence can be viewed as insulting or aggressive right you mean oh i've been suffering over this for nine months and you're gonna solve it in two minutes how dumb am i or you know what i haven't told you the whole story yet you're trying to fix it you've only got a quarter of the story right so think about your approach here in sales competence is always valued but it's usually measured last after several interactions look for a shift in the prospect's attitude from selmy to let's solve this together and if you've attempted and you've established trust and you've established empathy but still fail to win the deal don't personalize the rejection right it's a numbers driven game it's not a referendum on your knowledge or ability it's just the wrong company wrong person bad timing take your pick i've got a couple more slides here joe then we can move to some q a is that all right sure sure go ahead go okay um i said at the outset here that sales is not about picking winners or losers and i'll i'll give you a couple of examples why uh if you're a top opportunity focus salesperson you spend 90 to 100 of your time chasing down the two or three deals that you feel are most likely to close and you're ignoring everything else in your funnel you're ignoring new leads or ignoring developing leads and opportunities and this is what your life is going to look like it's going to look like groundhog day right because by the time you put all the effort in to close that deal you'll disremember everything else in your pipeline or it's gone in another direction so you get you you get the deal you win some you lose some but it's up and down and it's groundhog versus a balanced sales activity where you invest half your time in those top deals and you distribute the other half your time amongst the other different areas of your pipeline developing the rest of the funnel qualifying moving prospects to suspects nurturing other people in your pipeline uh and when you are disciplined to balance your sales activity this is what your cash flow this is what your life will look like you're not going to have those huge peaks that you will if you were to invest 100 of your time but eventually what you're giving up here is the first six months of those peaks for a sustainable revenue performance over time and there's one thing i learned very early in startups there's this cool thing called running out of money that's a great reminder that um chasing uh deals 100 of the time is not a good idea so balance your sales activity across each stage of the pipeline unbalanced sales activity is risky and unsustainable don't assume who will close come up with your own sales discipline and rhythm and what happens is this very cool thing in pipelines when you start to invest all your positive energy into that pipeline without any misconception or preconception of what might win and what might not is the deals that come out come out of the strangest places that you never expect and it's the result of this positive value that accumulates in your pipeline over time so it's kind of like watching grass grow or paint drying right it's hard to observe but they both always do lastly for today i want to talk about evangelism i see a lot of people especially with highly innovative offerings evangelizing people over their product i don't believe that evangelism is part of sales i like to leave that up to marketing here so if you find yourself educating somebody in the very basics of what you uh do they are not qualified to take your time don't invest your time training people by the way people will give you buying signals just to get trained for free and then walk away if the business case how your product fits into their organization from a workflow or use case perspective is not obvious they're not qualified to take your time don't attempt to reinvent their business if the scale of the problem does not support your price they're not qualified to take your time you could be solving a problem for an individual or a small group or a department but if that doesn't support your time uh your price then they're not qualified and then lastly is it a priority do they believe the problem is worth solving don't attempt to change people's priorities so do not invest your precious time educating the ill-informed or convincing skeptics invest your time converting knowledgeable people into customers when a prospect does not readily understand the value the problem you solve move up or move on um i think that's uh i could continue here joe i've got some other stuff uh thanks so much ken that was i mean amazing so many great comments in the chat and uh some some folks that have listened to you in the past that came back to again i listened to someone from mass challenge so i think we can we can stop here there's a lot of questions i mean we could have a whole session on just uh you know the participants questions but i'll pick i'll pick three uh maybe if you have a couple minutes uh to just go through them so uh kwame is asking he's saying the viral network and network effects are buzzwords in b2c marketing what are some in b2b examples well guess what the same thing occurs in business to businesses it does the viral sort of the network effect you know you go into an industry and especially as a startup you're in awe of how big and vast the industry is and then what you discover over a career is how small and tight-knit it really is right so the word gets around right on best practices great vendors that you can trust etc etc so even companies people in different cultures you know hr people hang out with hr people operations people hang out with ops people and other companies same thing with sales and marketing industries are much smaller than you might think they they appear huge but in the reputation uh that you establish within an industry through reference customers and great partner relationships uh is is just is visceral just as real as the um the the networking effect that you get in b2c it just happens a different way great uh next question from christopher he's asking what are some signals that someone is just looking for competitive intelligence oh uh i call that peter the pocket picker right right uh and christopher how are you dushane i recognize you um so uh yeah so um when you run into somebody that's picking your pocket for competitive intelligence you know they're asking you great questions and they're very knowledgeable but you don't think they're going to be a buyer you have to draw the line there and you have to ask them questions about their project and their project timeline and what they're actually doing and is it a real project or are they just picking your picking your pocket uh ask them questions about um you know what well when uh when was the last um project like this that um they they led and who did they work with um also it's time to draw a line in the sand with listen we can we can go on continuing help you but we'd really like to help you in the context of your specific needs and your specific data so i'd like to recommend a proof of concept or a pilot here to get the better answers to all these and we can do a low-cost low-risk pilot draw the line in the sand and if they're not willing to spend five to twenty thousand dollars you're talking to somebody that's picking your pocket or not qualified to take your time draw a line great so many great comments here the best presentation in b2b awesome talk the best h.a.e session i've ever attended someone has been in sale dave and sales for 40 years and great frameworks and so many affirmational comments here thank you so much kent uh maybe the last um the last question you did mention that the founder is the most important uh you know first sales person at what point do you get uh try to get you know outside help is it a product market fits or is it at a certain metric so that's a great question i'm going to give you a very short answer to that depends no no you are ready tire your first sales person when you can say go out and get me a hundred more customers just like these 12 not go out and figure out who our customer is awesome okay great way to end it regina any uh closing words i'm sure everyone's excited for the session on thursday um this is just tremendous and i took lots of notes and i i think you're right uh joe this is the preamble to thursday uh people will leave this session today really thinking hard about um what you've been saying and how to apply it so thanks so much and i'm really excited that thursday is a couple of days away yeah great questions everyone thanks for your time um hope you walk away with a couple things that help you and i look forward to connecting with you again on thursday thank you joe thank you thank you ken thank you rodney ximena everyone attending

Channel: Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs

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Keywords: Hae, harvard, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, education, business, harvard alumni entrepreneurs, harvard alumni association, business ideas, harvard alumni benefits, business plans, business motivation, harvard alumni, harvard university, harvard business review, harvard business school, harvard lecture, harvard student, entrepreneurship course, entrepreneurship motivation, entrepreneurship crash course, entrepreneurship 101, entrepreneurship ideas

Id: OaNi0dntHfU

Length: 70min 35sec (4235 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021