I have a dark secret I need to share with you now.
For a while, I have entertained the idea of a world without salespeople!
The product-led growth movement energized me. I grew convinced that if you build your product the right way, it will sell itself.
Free trials and feature-reduced versions would do the job of convincing users to adopt the solution at hand. All you’d need was solid marketing to feed the in-bound leads into the “funnel” to purchase.
I was wrong!
I was missing the key dimensions that only great salespeople bring to the table.
But, do “great” salespeople even exist?
Let’s start with their exact opposite, the ones you should avoid at all costs!
They’re the self-interested, pushy, or over-promising individuals. If you’re not careful, they will not take long to destroy all the hard work you put into building your products.
I’m also not talking about the majority of salespeople I’ve encountered. They were good communicators, honest, concerned for their customers. They would do anything to try to solve their customer’s challenges.
But that’s often the problem. These salespeople would not specifically go after the right audiences for our products. Their lack of targeting, along with a wrongly-applied customer-first mantra, would misuse customer problem discovery and negatively influence our product roadmap.
So what’s differentiating “great salespeople” from the rest?
They also genuinely want to help solve their customers’ problems and do proper exploration. But they do a few things differently:
- A sales process with a well-identified pipeline to bring outbound leads and clear metrics for success.
- Knowing whom to talk to and whom not to talk to, focusing on prospects facing the big hairy problems uniquely solved by the product they sell.
- Framing conversations and educating to help their customer be successful.
- Helping choose the solution that most closely meets their customer’s needs and smooth the acquisition process.
In other words, great salespeople have a method in place with predictable metrics for success. They set the right expectations and sell future reality, not the dream!
We need more of them!