Most Founders suck at selling
I made every single mistake in this article.
Creating a product from nothing, that people will actually use and eventually pay for, is incredibly challenging. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. This article walk through some of the key sales mistakes I made during my time running Gondola.
Selling, for most founders, is a puzzle turned upside down. They often assume that offering any solution capable of addressing a business owner's problem would automatically be the right solution. This mindset believes that if founders perceive a superior solution, the business owner will see it the same way and adopt it eagerly. The expectation is that showcasing one more feature will trigger an immediate desire to sign up.
Let's Set the Record Straight
In reality, prospects are indifferent to your product. They aren't interested in your founder's story, your background, the customers you serve, or the team you've assembled.
All they truly care about are themselves and the problems they're striving to solve. This harsh reality is often misunderstood by many founders, leading to incorrect sales approaches.This post aims to dispel common misconceptions that early-stage founders have about sales and closing deals with new customers.
All of these key learnings came from my own experience as a founder. i.e. I made every single one of these mistakes.
Reality #1: Your prospect doesn’t care about your product
Whenever I meet with a founder for the first time, this is the most common recurring issue I see throughout their sales process. The common belief is that showcasing their platform or product will naturally attract prospects. However, the brutal truth is that prospects are indifferent to your product's specifics, its features, or the order you present them.
Prospects primarily care about themselves, the issues they're trying to solve, and maybe… how you can make their daily lives more efficient and effective.
Recognizing this, your primary focus during initial conversations with potential buyers should revolve around grasping their current operations, understanding the changes planned within the next 90 days, and the sequence in which they intend to address these challenges. Exceptional sales skills involve understanding why they prioritize certain problems, along with the potential gains or losses tied to solving them. The most effective sellers I’ve worked with can quantify the monetary impact of these issues and the potential benefits of resolution.
To help with your discovery call process, I created an outline below of how mine typically go.
Discovery Call Outline:
Introduction and Agenda
Understand current operations
Identify current challenges with operations and reasons
Understand their approach to solving the problem
High-Level product overview - verbal explanation or live product demo.
Next Steps
The above Discovery call outline places considerable emphasis on comprehending your buyers by asking thoughtful questions about their current operations, desired improvements, and strategies for tackling issues. Following this, you provide a high-level product overview aligned with their challenges and future resolutions.
Reality #2: Prospects solutions > your solutions
As sellers, we encounter buyers facing similar problems. Due to this familiarity, we assume that buyers want to address issues in a particular manner. However, this assumption can lead to incorrect assumptions and steer you off course.
After grasping the buyer's current operations, your next objective is to understand their intended changes and how they aim to solve the problem.
While some buyers have a clear solution in mind, others seek expert suggestions on addressing the issue. Your role involves categorizing these buyers and tailoring your approach accordingly. If buyers have a clear solution, your goal is to grasp their approach and rationale. This will allow you to frame your product through their “ideal solution” lens and draw parallels to your solution. It’ll allow you to emphasize certain points and deemphasize other parts of your solution.
Selling is about discovering a need that you can solve. Not selling someone something they don’t need.
Here is exactly how not to sell:
“I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell
I am a hustler, baby, I'll sell water to a well“
— Jay-Z
Reality #3: Focus on 2-3 features that solve their problems
Your job is to uncover a customer’s problems and/or needs and identify which parts of your solution can solve it.
Founders naturally take pride in what they’ve created. After all, they have spent hundreds or thousands of hours working on it. This pride often translates into showcasing the product extensively, under the assumption that demonstrating more will lead to stronger alignment with buyer problems and more closures.
However, this assumption is flawed.
After conducting proper discovery, your role as a seller is to spotlight two or three features that distinctly address the problems identified during the discovery phase. Clear connections between your solution and their problems enhance internal communication when buyers present to decision-makers. Overloading buyers with all product features may confuse them and dilute your value proposition.
A good practice is to focus on demonstrating two or three key features, and allowing room for follow-up questions after each feature you’ve presented. This balanced approach maintains engagement and prevents lengthy monologues, aligning with Gong's finding that demos exceeding 76 seconds of uninterrupted pitching (i.e. monologues) rarely lead to closed deals.
This chart illustrates that:
You can see that AVERAGE reps ask all their questions at the beginning of the call. They frontload discovery. It’s as if they’re completing a to-do list of questions before launching into their pitch. To them, discovery is a static event.
The top performers spread their discovery questions for sales evenly across their sales calls. To them, discovery is an ongoing process, not an event.
Reality #4: Always be Discovering
When a founder finally gains a grasp on a solid discovery process, one prevalent mistake they’ll make is treating discovery as a one-time event rather than an ongoing process.
Discovery is an ongoing process. Discovery should span the entire sales cycle, not just the initial call.
As you receive new information from prospects, be ready to ask further questions for clarity and to understand its impact. This applies to new insights about security requirements, workflows, and involved personnel.
Here are examples of situations where founders forget to ask further questions:
Mid-demo: founders frequently forget to ask digging follow-up questions after they've shown feature X or y. It is incredibly important to ask questions outside of “did that make sense” or “do you have any questions”.
New person joins the call: At times, our buyers will bring in additional parties from their team to help with the evaluation. An important part to remember is to ask this person new discovery questions, understand how you can make the call meaningful to them, and what they might think a good solution to the problem might be.
Feature requests: Many times prospects will ask if your product can do X or y. Most often this is not a sincere feature request but more just exploring the capabilities of your product. As opposed to answering the question directly, it can frequently be useful to ask follow-up diligence questions to that Prospect about why that feature is important, what they expect to gain from it, Etc.
Nailing the discovery phase is crucial for sales success.
Consistently practicing thorough discovery enhances your understanding of customer needs and timelines, separating genuine opportunities from exploratory inquiries. You may consider reevaluating your discovery process if you're experiencing deal stagnation or unresponsiveness post-product demonstrations.
At StairStep Strategies, we specialize in crafting effective Discovery call templates that allow you to close successful customers, faster. If you require assistance in optimizing your sales approach, feel free to reach out and explore how our solutions can accelerate your sales journey.
