editione1.0.1
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.
One way I like to think about sales persuasion is in terms of a formula: the potential value to the organization crossed with the level of value comprehension the prospect has achieved (did they get it?) crossed with the extent to which they believe they will achieve the promised value. Prospects will typically apply a risk discount—they’ll discount what they believe your solution is worth based on their incredulity that they’ll achieve all the promised value.
You can visualize the formula like this:
Your goal is to maximize all these terms. You can maximize the potential value to the organization by targeting those accounts that have the greatest need for your solution. You can maximize comprehension of that value through effective presentation, materials, and tooling. And you can maximize believability via proof points, demonstrations of the product, customization of those demos, and even proof of concept and pilots.
There is no way you will be able to maximize each of these terms in every deal. But if you focus on organizations with high levels of business pain, and do a good job ensuring comprehension, you may be able to surmount skepticism—as in, “Wow, based on what I see here, we can potentially save fifty thousand dollars a month by implementing this solution. Even if we only see half of that savings, that’s still awesome.”
Keep this mental model front of mind, and it will help you push each of those levers higher in your pitching process.
The decision to sell a solution in person, face-to-face with the decision-maker in a conference room, or over the phone with presentation and screen-sharing software is typically based on the complexity of the solution crossed with average deal size.
The number of meetings that you can have in person in a given day is far lower than the number of digital presentations you can do, just by virtue of transit times. A field sales rep getting two in-person presentations done in a day is pretty good, and three would be really pushing it. An inside sales rep who presents via phone and screen share, on the other hand, could easily do five or six 45-minute presentations a day and still have ample time for follow-up and pipeline maintenance.
Given that revenue is simply the number of opportunities attacked multiplied by your win rate (what proportion of opportunities result in a sale) multiplied by the average deal size, generally speaking, more opportunities attacked is a good thing. But that is often balanced by the higher win rate you can see from face-to-face interaction, as well as the increased comprehension, believability, and trust that it engenders. Also, some solutions are so involved and mission-critical that in-person is really the only way to go about it.