sales – Page 7 – Sales for Nerds

Networking for Nerds

Of all the uncomfortable sales and marketing activities you suddenly have to handle, networking is probably the least favorite for introverts. Trying to make small talk is painful. You know some people can “work a room” without apparent effort, but that’s not you.

Here are some tips to make the experience more fun and more productive.

Know why you’re there. It’s not just to eat lunch or make sales. (More on that in a moment.) Are you there to find contacts for your pipeline? To hire employees? Meet experts who can help you with key business tasks? Meet people who have expertise you want to gain? Knowing the purpose lets you target the right events. If you’re targeting prospects, visiting with your peers may not be helpful. But if you need expertise and a sounding board, your peers will be more useful than your customers.
Don’t try to sell. The power of the network grows exponentially with its members. If you try to sell everyone you meet, you’ll not only not make (m)any sales, you’ll shut down sales to those peoples’ networks, which is where the real opportunity is.
Meet people, not opportunities. Don’t treat people just as dollar signs. If there was no business involved– say you’re at your kid’s soccer game, talking to other parents– you’ll establish a human connection, not an economic connection. Do the same thing at business networking events. Of course, the central topic of conversation may be business, instead of excessive homework, but talk to people like people. Ask people about themselves. Be interested. Not just “what do you do?”, but “this may be a silly question, but is that like X?” or “Why does someone hire you instead of doing it themselves/using popular alternative/etc?” Ask questions to get a real understand of who they are and how their business works. People love to talk about this stuff, and I always learn more by listening than by talking.
Offer to help. When you make a connection with someone you like, ask who is their ideal customer? If you know someone who is struggling with the problem they solve, offer to introduce them. (Depending on how comfortable you are, you can always ask the person already in your network if they want the introduction. If they do, obviously make the introduction. If not, just explain that the timing or the fit isn’t as good as you thought. The new contact will still appreciate that you tried.) Often, people are not good at describing their ideal customer. I have met people who say “any business” or “anyone with a website”, and stubbornly resist my attempts to get more specific. Unfortunately, these people don’t get introductions, because I am not confident in their ability to help people more than anyone else in the market. But if they say, “we help dentists get more patients from their websites”, then I know who might be a good fit, and I have a good reason to make an introduction to dentists. (The flip side of this is that people will often ask you the same question, and you should be ready with a very crisp answer.) Beyond introductions, if there’s something simple that you can do without cost, offer to do that. (Maybe you can’t optimize the dentist’s website, but you can offer to take a look at it and make some suggestions.) Keep in mind that the people who will be most eager to get your free help may be the least likely to pay you to actually solve their problems. It’s up to you have a way to be helpful that doesn’t take too much time.
Follow up. So many good opportunities die because people get busy. If you’re organized and disciplined about following up, you can get much more out of networking than the people who work the room and collect all the cards and never follow up. I’ve had opportunities materialize years after meeting people, because I stayed in touch with people, because I introduced people, because I tried to be helpful. Don’t think of the goal as “get X business cards at this event”, but instead, “make X introductions over the next 3 months based on people I meet at this event.”

Networking is a long game. Don’t be one of those people who thrusts business cards at everyone they meet and doesn’t make a single actual connection. Be helpful to the network, and let the network work for you. You’ll take a lot of pressure off yourself and a lot of awkwardness out of the events. You’ll have more fun, and, before you know it, get more business.

What traits does it really take to sell?

Picture a sales rep in your mind. What traits do you see? Someone confident, maybe even brash, maybe even with questionable honesty. Whether this is a fair stereotype, we all know it.

For a lot of people coming from technical backgrounds into sales, this is a problem. We may not think we fit the mold for sales success.

So, how well does the stereotype correlate with sales results?

Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot came to Austin recently and talked about how they built a scalable, predictable revenue engine. They used metrics to figure out what worked for and what attributes they should look for in sales reps. What did they find?

The “traditional” sales skills– closing, objection handling, and pushiness, correlated negatively with results. What did correlate with success? The number one factor was coach-ability. Curiosity and conscientiousness also helped a lot. This doesn’t sound like such a personality mismatch now, does it?

(Roberge notes that different situations may call for different characteristics. His point is that you want a process for figuring out what those characteristics are for your organization. My point is that in many cases, what leads to success is actually what you have, and not what you think of as the stereotypical sales profile.

Don’t Fight the Customer’s Buying Process

When we start selling, we often find a blog post, a book, a CRM tool, etc that gives us a “sales process”. Then we implement the process. As engineers, this feels good. There’s a system with defined inputs, activities, and outputs. We get excited and start (gasp!) making phone calls. However, something feels off.

We’re fighting with the customer’s buying process. So we’re working very hard with little to who for it. Because we have defined success exclusively in our own terms– moving prospects through the stages in our funnel– we have a hard time with prospects who don’t move through the funnel as quickly as we would like.

Yet, when we buy something, we hate pushy sales people who are more focused on closing the deal than helping us.

It is important to have a sales process (and we’ll get into that in later posts), but your sales process can’t (shouldn’t) fight the prospect’s buying process.

Mike Wilner, co-founder of hellocompass.com, has a great post called “How Our Customers Taught Us How to Sell“.

We did this by waving goodbye to the “always be closing” mentality and stepping outside of the vacuum where our first sales process was created. Instead, we let our customers teach us how to sell to them and designed a new sales process to reflect that.

Check it out, and think about how your customers want to buy. Then design your sales process to support your goals and theirs.

Oh Crap, Now I Have to Do Sales?!?!?

Engineers often don’t trust sales. There are good reasons for this. We’ve all encountered sales people who have been less than honest. Sales people who have pushed what’s good for them, rather than what’s good for us. The kind of people who become engineers often insist on accuracy in representing products. We also have found ourselves on the receiving end of commitments that “optimistic” sales people made to win the deal.

(“Of course it integrates with your abacus-based accounting system. No problem!” Who has to make things actually integrate? The engineers. Then, when the project is late and you didn’t get your bonus, while the sales rep buys a BMW and takes his family to Tahiti with his commission, your resentment deepens.)

Then, when you start your own consulting business, you suddenly realize how important sales is. Not that you’d ever promise things that you can’t do, but you need to close business. How can you win deals without turning into the very caricature you hated? How do you grow without putting yourself and your team in the same impossible situations that made you miss your bonus?

This site is for people who didn’t mean to end up doing sales (and marketing), but somehow did. Maybe you started your own company, or got promoted to a position that requires sales. I’ll share some of my stories (many hilariously awful), and stories of people who have succeeded in sales from unlikely backgrounds. As I’ve talked about my journey, I realized a lot of people are on a similar journey, and we could help each other learn the easy way instead of the hard way (at least some of the time).

Welcome to Sales for Nerds! Leave a comment with your stories, challenges, and questions.