Are you selling in the wrong order?
Sooner or later in any sale, you’ll be asked to talk about your solution. Could be on a cold call, discovery, or the first time you meet the decision maker.
I like to imagine a sort of “stock ticker” running throughout the call tracking the customer’s intent level for my product.
In this situation, many reps fall into the trap of starting with features and functionality.
Like “oh sure, yeah what we do is we track all your data, we process that data, make it available in the platform for your team and give everyone in leadership access to dashboards so they can track the impact on revenue…”
This is bad because it’s SO easy for the customer to think “oh, we already do that…” or “we can build those features on our own with Claude…”
Now you’re on your back foot. The customer is thinking negatively about the potential for this call (and your product) to be valuable.
And now you’ve created unnecessary work for yourself, you need to change their mind from negative to positive.
Instead, the most persuasive people start by talking about a problem they’re reasonably confident the customer has (if you don’t have one of these that works nearly every time in your sale, YOU have a problem 🤣).
Like if you sell Gong, you can be reasonably sure your buyer has A-players, B-players, and C-players. And further, that they’d probably love to improve the Cs to Bs, Bs to As. Right?
So if the customer says “so obviously I’m a bit familiar with Gong, but give me the story, tell me about the product…” and you start with “for sure. The kinds of problems we solve for our customers are…” and then go into C-players not being able to do what A and B players do, and that putting the 2027 revenue plan at risk, and maybe 1-2 other very quick concepts…
It’s literally that simple. You’re anchoring the conversation to something they really care about.
You’re starting with a positive. They’re probably nodding their head as you’re describing the problem.
This is a much more persuasive starting point for a sale. Try it (again, works on cold calls, discos, demos, etc). Let me know how it goes.
Reminder, (free) live sales training tomorrow: How to Sell Against “We’ll just build it with Claude”
A buyer tells you they want to try building it themselves. What do you say next? And how do you avoid it in the first place?
Luke and I are going deep on this tomorrow, Tuesday, October 20th at noon Eastern on Zoom.
It’ll mostly be six talk tracks we think help defend against Claude, some of which can almost certainly be added to your sale.
Candidates, avoid “Low EQ” moments at all costs
This is a slightly more advanced topic than we typically cover here, but it’s very important so I’m making an exception.
I posted a concise version on X/Twitter the other day and 36,000 people saw so I figured it’s probably worth mentioning to you guys too.
Asking “any hesitations with moving me forward?” at the end of an interview is a mistake.
But it isn’t bad because the topic is so bad. It’s primarily bad because it’s overly direct. It puts the interviewer on the spot. It borders on being rude or boorish.
And if the interviewer DOES have hesitations, especially if they’re in any way related to your level of awareness, exec readiness, “enterpriseness”, or similar, this question can actually tip the interview over the line AGAINST you moving forward.
The best candidates have great intuition for objections. They can just tell when the interviewer (or customer) has a potential concern.
And they’ll attack those issues proactively and naturally. They won’t ask if there are objections. They’ll simply preemptively volunteer information they believe will address the concern.
For example, if they’re worried the interviewer might be thinking they don’t have enough complex / enterprise deal experience, they might work information about the length of their sales cycle, the number of stakeholders, how they develop champions, and how they enable them to sell internally into the answer of a potentially unrelated question they’re asked.
Like if they’re asked how they ended up in their last role, they might twist their answer to include:
“… and the other thing I’ll add is I was specifically attracted to this role because the deals are actually a lot more complex than they look from the outside, like just for example, while the ACVs were only $50,000, the sales cycle length was close to four months, there were typically 5 stakeholders involved in each sale, usually ~10 total meetings…” and so on.
Pretty elegant, IMO.
And if you DO feel like you NEED to see if there are potential objections at the end of the interview, then I suggest you ask in a “high EQ” way, like:
“Well Bill, as we get to the end of the interview, I just want to say I'm very excited about this opportunity. The product seems awesome, your team seems great, I think I would really enjoy working under you and learning from you.
I suppose as we get to the end of the conversation, are there any lingering questions? Or is there anything Else I can provide quick information on before we wrap that would be helpful for you as you're thinking through next steps on your own?”
You should go to great lengths to avoid low EQ moments. Never put the interviewer rudely on the spot. Easy way to move more smoothly and consistently through interview processes.
As I mentioned above, I’m starting to tweet more at @IsaiahCrossman, mostly quick sales tips, candidate advice, and how I’m personally using AI. If that’s interesting to you, give me a follow. Appreciate you guys!
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