A First-time Startup Founder and CEO’s Reflection on His Failure— Part II
One founder has to be good at selling, and yes you can learn it if you want
We demonstrated our MVP to a large commercial farmer in early 2019. It generated a lot of interests from them, and we thought we could sell our product or service to them in the next week. We had bi-weekly meeting with the management team. However, we just could not get a contract from them. My co-founder and I are both technical. We felt it must be because our product was not mature, so we spent even more time to build.
However, nothing moved forward for a couple of months. We were thinking about hiring professional sales. In a conversation with my other advisor Lothar Maier (previous CEO of Linear Technology), he told me it would not work at the early stage to rely on professional sales, because they can only duplicate and execute your sales receipt, which we founders need to figure out. They have no incentive and deep insight into the customers to design the sales receipt. It is a job for founders that cannot be outsourced. He pushed hard back to me to learn sales.
So I started reading lots of sales books, listened to sales books when I was driving. After a couple of weeks, I realized my advisor is correct. We made many typical sales mistakes mentioned in these sales books. After we fixed these mistakes, we got contract signed from this customer in a month. And we got another contract contingent from another large customer after a couple of weeks.
It is not because we spent more time to build product, it is because we learnt sales, fixed our sales mistakes and came up with a sales script. There are many sales books, they essentially talks about similar points from different perspective. Some books I found super helpful are listed below.
The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer — John Care
Sales Fundamentals for Technical Specialists — Janne Korhohen
The Lost Art of Closing — Anthony Iannarino
Two biggest sales mistakes we made
- We are not asking for commitment from customer, and not leading our customer through the sales process.
For a high ticket B2B sale, sales cycle is likely to be long, especially when you are selling something innovative and coupled with customer’s process. You need to keep asking for their commitment to move the deal step by step to the end. You also need to make your own commitment and achieve your commitment to get credibility during this process. How do you achieve your commitment? Just work hard? No, you need to define your commitment first.
One simple thing made a huge difference for us. We used to attend the bi-weekly meeting without meeting agenda, leave the meeting without meeting summary or very shallow summary. Realizing this as sloppy sales practice, I started to send out meeting agenda before each meeting, tell them what we would talk about during the meeting, and what they need to bring to the table for that meeting. After each meeting, I sent summary about my understanding on important notes, our commitment and work I would achieve before next meeting, lastly I told them what is the commitment and work they need to do before next meeting. The last point is a key, it sounds bossy especially to technical founders but is absolutely the right way to do.
Think about this, if a customer is not willing to make commitment for necessary steps to close the sale, are they real customers? Maybe you should just stop wasting your time. Secondly, do you think customer know what are the steps they need to achieve the transformation with your product? Probably no. Do you think they fear about the change and your promise? Probably yes to everyone. So it is your job to educate your customer and lead them go through this “scaring” process. Do not be humble, just be confident and specific about what they need to do. In our case, I received a thank you email from the top executive for my “bossy steps” that led to the final contract, which was what he wanted as well. Be “bossy” and help your customers solve their problems, they love it.
- Understand stake holders who will influence the sales, and bring them into the sales process as early as possible.
Being a junior sales person, I assume I just need to present the product/service to customers, and let them discuss internally. They are smart guys and should be able to make a wise decision as long as I am building the coolest product to solve their problem, right?
A big NO. In B2B sales, there are usually more than one stake holders. And if one person said he is the only person has the final say, be cautious. Human has the tendency to lie about this, not because they want to cheat on you, it is just part of human’s nature. A purchase decision usually involves multiple stake holders, and everyone has his/her own incentives. Make it worse, you cannot assume they discuss internally in a rational/smart way. In fact, they may not even talk after the meeting with you. It is your job to explore stakeholders, grab them to sit in the meeting, influence them to make the final decision.
A mistake we made is that we naively think there is just one stake holder, and yes, he sounds and behaves like that. Later we found out it is partially true, since he is the only stake holder who can make a decision if we only sell our service, but there are two more important stake holders if we want to sell our products. We started to engage them in a later stage of the sale process, but it is difficult because we did not engage them at early stage to establish our relationship and credibility. Our internal champion who sounded like the only stake holder, started to stay quiet and became helpless. Should I blame him? Definitely no. It is our mistake to not constantly pay attention to explore stake holders, and constantly collect commitment to close sales.
