David Skok opens this post on selling with the classic sales training mantra — customers love to buy, but hate to be sold to:
Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in marketing and sales positions don’t seem to understand this, and proceed to irritate their potential customers.
As one of the only “sales”people for the first 5 years of Fulcrum’s growth, I can attest to this working well for for myself. In my case, a natural distaste for sales and total lack of experience doing it forced me to figure out a method that worked for me. In those early days — due to both my youthful inexperience and our constrained environment — this model was the way I could get customers interested. I've since grown to have immense respect for sales done well. With size and complexity of customer, there's no way to avoid sales and maintain predictability in business growth.
But the experience with the great ones further proves to me a maxim: Great salespeople are helpful. Great salespeople bring something to the table. They aren't all about themselves, and aren’t always asking for something when they talk with a customer. The best of the best, in fact, are perfectly okay with no-strings helpfulness; they know that relationships are a long game. That paying things forward and currying relationships always pays dividends over the long haul. Those referrals, that future expansion opportunity — those aren't brought to the self-centered, unhelpful rep. This isn’t to say customers never owe something in return, of course. Relationships are a two-way street. But we don’t need to force a commitment of some kind with every interaction.
One of the biggest advantages to building a self-service product — at least if you do it well and you design the right go-to-market model around it — is how much easier it makes the sales process. Being helpful is even easier when your customer's already got some momentum.
Self-service or not, though, a customer's first transaction is often a small one. They buy your product for their team or department to address immediate pain. At that moment, the department isn't thinking about getting the whole enterprise on board: their problems are close to home. From your side as the seller, this is a huge advantage. Help them focus on the problem at-hand before pushing to scale to the remaining 5,000 people. If you can't solve a problem for 50, why do you deserve 5,000? Land-and-expand is a perfect strategy for the helper-seller. Along the way the salesperson gets the chance to learn their customer's business workflows, build relationships with the people they need to know, and establish a strong position from which to make the grand sale. With that knowledge, the relationships, the social capital, and the real-world evidence of value, the Big Deal is that much easier to attain.
In SaaS, the game is repeatability. Recurring usage, recurring revenue, recurring investment in an ever-improving product. You build everything in your company around making things repeatable. To make this work, expansion and retention are paramount. For a product company, there's no life-and-death need to maximize customer revenue right out of the gate. You need to demonstrate enough recurring value that customers not only stick around, but spread your product everywhere. In fact, the strongest customers you’ll build are the ones that grow into your product organically over time. Champion-led adoption creates incredible gravitational pull around your product if you keep improving and continue expanding the value you’re delivering.
The best thing you can do to generate expansion momentum is to help. Help prospects not only with your product, but help them with tips and tricks, help clean up their data, help connect other tools, make introductions to others in your mutual networks. And overall, be a source of expertise that they can trust.
For more on this topic, I highly recommend Bob Moesta's work, especially his 2020 book Demand-Side Sales 101. Check out my notes on the book for some of Bob's insights. Thinking of sales in terms of "demand" — what might the customer be going through that I can help them with? — is a powerful reframing of the way many think about sales.
How are you working with customers today? What kinds of sales tactics are working (or not working)? Comment with your feedback!
Hear, hear!
You'll likely be interested in Ian Altman's "Same Side Selling" philosophy. A very rewarding approach to customer engagement.
https://samesidesellingacademy.com/