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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Approach your sales conversations with the stance that the prospect will inevitably be a customer. This is more applicable when you’re at the scaling stage, when it is now clear that the solution that you’re presenting has product-market fit. But it can be helpful even at the earlier stages of your go-to-market period.
What do I mean by a mindset of inevitability? If you have indeed qualified an account as a good fit, then the mindset should look something like this: “This is going to happen. It makes sense for you. This solution is the future, and it will make you more successful now and going forward. So we can do it now or we can do it later, but it’s going to happen, either with me or with a competitor of mine.”
A few helpful things come out of this mindset: First, it frames the conversation as when instead of if. This naturally makes the conversation more consultative and focused around business needs—“This solution exists to solve this problem, and we have validated that you have this problem, so clearly this solution makes sense. Let’s figure out when and how it should be implemented.” Second, it provides a confidence boost to the sales professional, related to the necessary expertness and fearlessness that we’ll talk about next. Third, it sets the groundwork for an ongoing relationship with the prospect; even if they don’t close this time through the funnel (and odds are, they won’t), they will be prepped for the next pass. It will also reinforce your own record-keeping processes, since you’ll know that recording these interactions will enable your future self the next time this prospect passes through the funnel.
It may feel odd to take on such a presumptuous mindset, and by no means is this a suggestion to be arrogant or off-putting in your dealings. But approaching each interaction with certainty will drive success in your conversations.
In most of your professional interactions, you probably achieve some semblance of your goal most of the time, largely because you wouldn’t be engaged in the activity in question if you didn’t think you had a reasonable expectation of success.
This is definitely not the case in sales. You’re going to get shot down most of the time—you will not close the deal on that particular pass through the pipeline. For whatever reason: there won’t be enough budget, the timing will be off, the prospect will be happy with their current tools, a competitor will win the deal, the prospect will just disappear, and so on. It happens. Depending on your industry, and the point at which sales gets a prospect in the funnel, if yours is a new, innovative solution, a 20–30% win rate is solid.
The mindset change required to contend with this is the ability to hold what are essentially two seemingly opposed ideas in your head at once. You need to have and project full confidence that you’re going to win the deal but at the same time be unfazed when you do not. Being unfazed by rejection, and not internalizing it as a negative reflection on you or your offering, is key to maintaining the tempo and confidence required for sales success.