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.
Everyone’s a fan of working smarter, not harder in the modern knowledge-worker economy. Well, sometimes you just have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. There are certainly ways to ensure that your activity is high quality; you can also leverage it with technology to get more in less time and higher impact out of each unit of activity. We’ll dig into that more later. But to quote Joseph Stalin (likely apocryphally), “Quantity has a quality all its own,” and internalizing that is key.
More time on the phone. More demos. More proposals sent. More emails sent. More dials. More keystrokes. All of the above is activity, and activity is the goal.
This is often in direct contravention to typical notions of quality work: Thinking deeply about the perfect response to that email. Spending five minutes to game out a call before you make it. Reading, and rereading, that email to understand every nuance. Studying up on the materials to make sure that your pitch is perfect.
No more. Just as you need to shift your mindset from scarcity to plenty, the reality is that in order to move opportunities down the pipeline and close deals, activity is job one. Jump first, prepare midair. Template all communication. Drive activity, and output will follow.
This is not to say that your activity should be crap, but simply that your mindset should be one of productivity. Ask yourself, “How can I do more of X [an input to the deal process] in a given time period?” And if you can figure out ways to systematize more quality, fantastic. This is an exercise in recognizing the point at which you reach diminishing returns on a given sales action, catching yourself, and moving on to the next. The thought should be, “Why am I not on the phone?” or, “Why am I not sending emails right now?” Your default should be activity, and lack of activity should be aberrant. This is why sales managers get skeeved out if their sales floors are quiet—a palpable lack of activity is a bad sign.
Don’t read the entire email communication history with that prospect before you call him. Just call. It’s probably going to go to voicemail anyway, and you just saved yourself five minutes of unnecessary preparation. One proofread is all that email needs. Send it, and move on to the other fifty you have to send to your pipeline today.
Don’t overthink. Just act.
Society often gets along through polite obfuscation. Through indirection. Through politesse, and circuitousness. Not in sales land, friend.
Much of sales is about getting down to brass tacks: Do you have the problem I’m trying to solve? Are you in agreement that it needs a solution? Are you prepared to spend money to solve it?
In the pursuit of efficiently attacking your account, you, as a sales professional, have full license to be direct in asking these sorts of questions. In fact, you can go all the way up to directly stating to your prospect, with full confidence, that your solution and their problem are an excellent fit and that they should buy X amount of your product to help their business. Asking for the sale is not optional, and it will quickly become second nature.