The Tuesday Roundup
Today, I’m going to share some resources that will help you make the transition from discovery to selling post-launch.
Selling and discovery are completely different mindsets. There can be some overlap, but how you handle a conversation should be distinct for each. This article by Peter Kazanjy, the author of Founding Sales, highlights some mindset shifts you can make to orient around sales.
Everyone’s a fan of working “smarter not harder” these days. But you still have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Activity in equals value out.
Lack of confidence holds many founders back from making the leap to selling. A big part of building your confidence in selling is overcoming the fear of the “no.” The fear of rejection never completely goes away (you’re human, after all), but you can learn to view objections as opportunities. This article by Keith Rosen offers great tips to reframe objections as you’re conducting a sales conversation.
In other words, instead of fearing objections, embrace them. Every objection provides you with a new opportunity to share the right information with a prospect that can move them to the next stage in your sales process.
This article from Close is also a good guide to handling objections. It’s a good reminder that “no”s are a natural part of selling, but how you respond to them can actually give you an advantage in the process. Remember that volume is everything, so the more conversations you have, the more objections you’ll experience. Keep learning from them.
Find out. Dig deeper into the “no,” and embrace it as a chance to learn. See if you can extract trends and patterns from your prospects’ objections, and iterate them into improving your sales process, your product, and your business.
Handle rejection with grace. Smile. The way you deal with being told “no” is one of the best indicators of future success.
Some of your fears may come from worries about your product. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to perfect the product to sell it. This is a fallacy, though. If you’ve done the hard work of validation, you should know that your product solves a real problem. It may not do it perfectly, but as Paul Bucheit says in this blog post, it doesn’t have to be great to be good.
By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs "everything" in order to be good, then it's probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn't need to be good.
Let me know your favorite resources on this topic here or on Twitter. If you’re interested in working together, you can apply for my advisory services on my website.
Founders that are new to selling should not take an objection as a "no" right out of the gate. Think of an objection as a request for information. When you get an objection you have an opportunity at that moment to provide service to your buyer/prospect by offering information (ideally you'll be able to help them see something they aren't seeing, that they need to see). There is an old saying among sales pros - "if they aren't objecting, you aren't selling". So don't panic when you hear "no". Since a "no" is a request for information, and it's only the people that are not interested in your offering who don't request information, objections are a good thing. For myself, as a long-time seller, I'm a lot more concerned with not getting objections than with getting objections.