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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Martell
Read between
November 23 - December 13, 2024
In sales, as in medicine…if you prescribe without diagnosing, it’s malpractice.
When you show up and word-vomit about your features for an hour and a half, it feels good to you—and feels horrible to your prospect.
When you’re talking about the prospect and their business, it’s creating energy. When you’re talking about you and your software, it’s consuming energy.
Professionals have a process for selling. If you don’t have one, your prospect will show you their process for not buying.
Your sales process starts when the call is booked—not when the call takes place.
Before the call, your job is to learn as much as you can about the person you’re talking to, what their business actually does, the reason(s) they reached out for the demo, and how you might be able to help them.
Researching them on LinkedIn Cruising their personal social profiles Reading their company website, blog, and reviews
RESEARCH: James McAllister Founder / CEO of Centsical, in business 8 years Lives in Boise, Idaho—married w/ kids 42 team members, raised $14 million Series A two years ago Pain Points: Global workforce compliance issues / payroll tax in multiple countries. Wants to reduce HR spend and consolidate tech stack. Worried about legal liability.
Your prospects don’t want to talk about sports. They want to know that you did the work.
The first person who needs to be sold is the person doing the selling.
Appreciate: Let them know you value their time, and lead with information about them and their company (instead of asking them for it)
Check: Confirm the information you have about the pain points and reason for the call—confirm what you’ve learned but make no assumptions. Ask them explicitly if it’s accurate and if there’s anything they want to add.
End Goal: Reinforce that the goal of the call is for you to learn about their business, assess whether or not you can help them, and if it’s...
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Your opener should make the prospect feel like this is the only call that you have today—and that you’ve spent the whole morning preparing for it.
You’re selling from your heels, stretching the gap, and positioning from a place of service—which means you’re halfway to victory before you’ve opened a single browser tab.
My goal here is to walk through how our product can help you solve the problems we just talked about. By the end of the call today, we’ll get you in a position where you can make a decision to move forward.
You need to seed decision that you want the prospect to make.
Repeat after me: “I only need to show my three best features in order to close a deal.”
Pick the first pain point from the list and show the prospect the one key feature in your platform that solves it. That’s the “feature” part. Once you’ve done that for the first feature, transition right into the “ask,” which is made up of three key questions: Does what I just showed you solve the problem you have? What do you think the impact on your business would be if you implemented this? Is this something that you can see you and your team using?
Importante cierre venta . Preguntas
Ask these questions with a sense of purpose and curiosity—and be quiet in between each one to let the prospect actually respond. Silence is the most powerful tool a salesperson has—and a good question is what makes the space for silence.
You want to zoom-in on your customers’ pain points, showing them what the world looks like after you make that pain go away.
Ask the prospect to move forward. Out loud. On the call.
The Virtual Close is a dry run of what the buying process will look like. It’s simple—just ask the person on your demo to walk you through how they think the purchase would work. Common questions for a virtual close include: Who would be the other people involved in making this decision? What do you think is important to them? How did the process work when you purchased software similar to ours in the past?
Hanging up a sales call without the next call booked is a cardinal sin.
Aaron Ross said in Predictable Revenue: “There is ALWAYS a way to move forward, even without money.”
Being great at sales has everything to do with understanding what drives human beings to action. It has to do with acknowledging that everyone has their own self interests at heart, and they will run to you if you can truly solve their problems and help them achieve their own goals.
But here’s the truth about scaling a SaaS company: Once you’ve got customers rolling in, you’re at the starting line—not the finish line.
Stretch the gap: Your job isn’t just to ask about your customers’ pain. You need to dig the hole even deeper—so you can then show them the way out. The sale is made in the space between the pain and the promise. Never forget that.
Give demos not tours: No more ninety-minute-long feature-fest demos where you don’t let the prospect get a word in. You’re there to solve problems and get the deal done—so stick to the plan.
Run the Feature-Ask Flow: After every feature you show a prospect, ask these three questions to “lock in the solution” and to proactively surface objections: Does what I just showed you solve the problem you have? What do you think the impact on your business would be if you imp...
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Ask for The Close: Don’t shy away from making the ask at the most important moment! Your job is to help your prospect make a decision, and you’re doing them a disservice if you fail to do that simply because it’s uncomfortable for you.
Have a repeatable process: Do your research the same way every time. Preload tabs with commonly used features. Complete the worksheet for every call. Record and review your calls. Figure out what’s working and what’s not. Professionals have a process that they run every time—and with this chapter, you’ve now got the foundations of a process, too.
“If our customers aren’t successful, neither are we.”17 DAVID NEVOGT, co-founder of Hubstaff
Until a customer has visited 3 times, they’re unlikely to return—even if the experience is amazing.
Your mission is to drive each new user to the “aha moment”—where they use that key feature, see it fix their pain point, and get excited to do more.
Jon figured out this moment for restaurants—it was the third meal. After the third time a guest sat down, after their last bite of free cheesecake, they were considered “fully activated.”
Do you know your “activation moment” with this same ...
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If you don’t do this well, things will get bad…fast. A customer will come in, get confused, and churn within a month or two.
If you’re seeing behaviors that confuse you, your next move should be to talk to your customers—NOT to try and explain it on your own.
This happens all the time—we end up focusing so much on the mechanics of the product that we don’t focus on what the user actually needs, in that moment, in order to get the value we promised them.
User activation can be boiled down to a single moment in time. Find it and get your users there as quickly as possible.
“without a single killer core use case, product/market fit is just a dream diluted by features.”
And when you obsess over your user activation, and make sure that your shiny new customers are all hitting that First Value moment quickly and consistently, you’ll be well on your way to conquering churn—forever.
Strangely enough, for a group of data-driven tech entrepreneurs, we’re incredibly good at ignoring similar signs in our own businesses. We’ve created a software that we believe is somehow the world’s next wonder drug, and we just keep selling it to the public. We’ll ignore massive issues—in this case, churn—and just try to sell more of our wonder drug. All the while, our customers will grow resistant to our incredible platform, and we’ll just keep selling more and more, hoping the downstream problems will go away.
More sales will not solve your activation problem…more sales will make it worse.
Customer success
Don’t build a growth strategy based on feelings. Build one based on math.
Trying to outpace a solvable churn problem with new sales means you’re literally spending more money to let people down.
Ever said any of these? “I have no idea why our users aren’t smart enough to figure this out.” “If they’d just read the docs, they’d know exactly how to use it.” “There’s no way these people can’t figure out how to get set up—it’s so obvious.” There’s a reason for this: Johnny calls it the “Expert’s Dilemma.” The Expert’s Dilemma occurs when you’ve spent so much time solving a problem that you forget how to explain it to a beginner.
