Help me with sales calls
By: Madhavan Malolan
Tags: Startup, Journal, Founders, Sales, Entrepreneurship

Help me with sales calls

I’ve been doing sales for the last 4 months. We still have no clue how to do sales well. My team is now a solid sales team. They’re not scared of calling. They don’t shy from new ideas.

A little background. We do B2B kind of sales. We are trying to reach out to people who have some digital content like videos, ebooks and podcasts to sell. We package their content and make it sellable.

How do we do sales?

The first thing to do was to figure out a sales channel. I’m intrigued by Gabriel Weinberg’s Traction model. I charted out various possible channels including content marketing, social media marketing, engineering marketing and cold calls and emails.

The decision was, however, a no brainer. We needed to talk to people and really understand what they need. The sales calls are intended to be the product validation too. We keep iterating our pitch, pricing and target audience.

We manually hunt down phone numbers from Youtube channels, Facebook pages and Google searches. We write some scripts now and then, to automate some of this, but by and large it is a manual effort.

We pick a person or business we want to call and dig their phone number from various sources. We try to prepare a mental visual of how the client might use our product and then make the phone call.

We work only on phone calls. Our email campaign had poor click rates.

We stopped telling how the client would use our product

We figured out our product is still open ended. Our clients would be using our product in different situations for different use cases. So, by picturing the client’s requirements is a bad way to sell.

We now try to not sell anything. We just get on a call give a brief one liner of what we do and quickly get into questioning mode.

To the point

Our sales call now revolves around clearly communicating what we do in the first 10 seconds. We practice this one sentence really hard. The entire team knows the tone of each word by heart. We are by no means perfect with this one liner. We just know it is important. We keep iterating.

Gratefulness

We decided to optimize for one emotion. We thought it should be gratefulness. Our client should feel grateful within the first 10–15 seconds of the call. The entire call tries to revolve around this one emotion.

We needed to do this because we were all over the place on a call. We didn’t know what we’re trying to drive the conversation towards. It would have been easier to say, we need to drive the call towards a sale. But it quickly started feeling pushy. To top it up, we have an open ended product.

Having an emotion to focus around helps us stay on track.

Questions

All meetings and calls now are inspired by How to win friends and influence people. We don’t make many statements in a call. We don’t even tell what our product is upfront. We try to dig for the problems the client is facing. We have a set of problems that we solve.

These questions if asked well make the sale really simple. If they need what we offer, we just have to say ‘Great, we have a solution for that’. If not, it helps us decide that this isn’t a potential client.

Optimizing to find people who need us. Real bad.

If we’re not able to get the other person to feel grateful within the first 15 seconds. It means one of the following.

They don’t need what we offer

We weren’t able to communicate clearly what we have

We try to judge the intensity of the need of the person with the response they give to our questions. If the person doesn’t need us, we need to quickly hang up. Politely.

We have only so many hours in a day when we can make calls. We’d rather fight a new battle than a losing one.

We get no’s much faster. Average nos per day has gone up. It feels bad.

We’re optimizing to talk to as many people who need us as soon as possible.