58. How I learned to master complex B2B sales meetings as an inexperienced startup founder

When I started as a founder, I struggled with sales meetings.

My scientific instincts worked against me. I often wanted to prove that I was right and argue my way to a sale. Fortunately, between fantastic coaching and excruciating failures, I eventually turned sales meetings into a personal strength.

I want to share some of my key learnings with you so you can avoid the whole "pain and suffering" part of the process.

Partner vs. Customer

First, and most importantly for me, was adopting the right mindset. Rather than focusing on selling solutions, I worked on solving customer problems. They then saw me as a partner more than a vendor, which changed everything about the relationship.

Obviously, you don't want to become a free consultant, but you do need to be willing to give them the information that they need, even if that means they're going to go off and try to solve the problem themselves.

In some cases, that can help your sales in the long run. A customer that tries and fails to create their own solution will appreciate and value you all the more.

Listening and Learning

It took me a long time to realize that these meetings were at least as much about learning as they were about providing information. It probably took longer than it should because not talking does not come naturally to me.

Some of the key things you want to hear from your potential customers are:

·      What are their biggest problems?

·      Are there underlying more significant issues that generate the immediate problems?

·      Where do they prioritize your capabilities against their other wants and needs?

·      What impediments do they see that could prevent the adoption of your solution?

·      How do they make purchases and purchasing decisions?

·      How have other vendors failed them in the past?

·      What criteria would they use to define success for this effort?

The question about priorities is one of the most important. Companies have limited bandwidth to pursue new initiatives. Even if they would benefit from your solution, they are likely to focus on projects with the highest impacts.

Scale

In meetings, I was often reluctant to ask about the potential scale of an opportunity. It felt pushy and presumptuous. However, you need to understand the possible size of the deal to know how much time and effort you can devote to the sales process.

It is easy to spend more closing a deal than you will make back in revenue.

The key is to frame the question in a way that does not put your customer on the spot. You are not asking for any kind of commitment, but rather a rough estimate of how much they would need were the proof of concept, pilot, or initial deployment to prove successful.

By asking this early, you know whether this customer deserves a high-touch personal process or if you need to keep things short and sweet.

Address the full context

When I started running sales meetings, I was wholly focused on my product. That seemed logical. After all, I was there to sell that product.

Eventually, I learned to look at things from the customer's perspective and to talk about the whole context within which my solution would live.

Customers needed to understand how my solution would interact with their other existing systems and fit into their established workflows. They also worried about how they would implement and roll it out within their organization.

Sometimes a clear deployment plan can be the biggest differentiator against your competitors. If you can show a well-thought-out path to success while the competitor's roadmap is a pathless swamp of uncertainty, you look like a much safer option.

Objection handling

Sales meetings frequently result in rejection. For whatever reason, the customer does not want to adopt your splendid offering.

In the beginning, my first instinct was to argue with them to show why they were wrong. In academia, I was used to there being an objective truth and actively debating about it.

This approach was not so successful in business.

I had to learn never to argue with customers about their truth. It is their truth.

As a partner, however, I could explore their reality and try to reshape their perceptions.

One thing that tripped me up was that the reason they told me "no" was not always the truth. In some cases, they were intentionally lying and in others deluding themselves.

Once someone has decided they don't want your solution, they typically want to end the conversation as quickly as possible and say anything they think will achieve that.

The result is simple and short reasons when the reality is often more complicated and messy.

If you don't continue to push your product, they may be willing to take the time to unpack their reasoning and explore the underlying drivers for their rejection.

It's not you, it's me.

Sometimes sales fail for reasons unrelated to your product.

A customer might make all their purchases for a class of goods or services through a chosen reseller that does not carry your solution.

There might be compatibility issues with other systems within the company. They might want to integrate you with a point of sale system or capture your reporting in their business intelligence tool.

Other higher priorities are often the reason. If you have a hangnail, you certainly want to fix it. However, if you have a severed femoral artery, you will address that first to the exclusion of everything else.

Sometimes the blocker is just in the customer's mind. When I started selling misattribution solutions to the US government, many customers claimed that they were not allowed to outsource that kind of capability. They believed that, if they asked, the lawyers would tell them "no." It took a long time to convince a prospect to test that assumption and discover that there was no such rule.

From there, we were able to go back to the other customers and show them this as a case study demonstrating the legality of our approach.

All of this discussion and exploration is possible when the customer sees you as a partner in solving their problems, rather than a vendor focused solely on the sale.

Socratic Method

The Socratic Method was one of my most powerful tools in sales meetings.

It completely transforms the tone of the conversation.

If you are not familiar with it, the Socratic Method involves argument by asking questions rather than making statements. Instead of trying to bludgeon your prospect with facts and figures, you lead them to the conclusion you wanted them to reach.

This is not the same as "getting to yes." Some old sales strategies would tell you to ask leading questions to which the customer would say "yes" to build a pattern. That guidance leads to high-pressure salespeople saying things like, "Do you want to save money?"

We all hate that question because it is transparently manipulative.

Ask genuine and open-ended questions. How do they think about the various problems you solve? How are they addressing foreseeable issues in the future?

Your questions also provide a fantastic opportunity to ghost your competition by asking about capabilities that you offer but that your competitor does not.

Questions can also break through some barriers in a meeting. Once, a security professional challenged me to prove that my solution was not vulnerable to some class of attacks.

I explained our security and mitigation strategies, but he still wanted absolute assurance. My problem was that it is impossible to prove a negative like that.

Once I realized that he would not accept my less than absolute answers, I asked him what answer I could give that would satisfy him.

When he admitted that nothing I could say would satisfy him, the rest of the people in the meeting largely ignored him from then on, and we were able to move forward.

Eventually, if you are, in fact, the best fit for them, they will realize that on their own. And people are always more attached to their own ideas than any you might bring to the table.

Getting feedback

While selling comes naturally to some people, it certainly did not to me or many founders I talk to. While you can learn a lot on your own, the process works far better if you have an observer in the meeting.

Assign someone the role of note-taker and ask them to observe what you do and how the customers are reacting to that. You are generally too caught up in the moment to notice or remember all those details.

After the meeting, you can debrief on what you did well and how you can improve for the next meeting. As with most things, it is not simply practice, but structured practice, that makes perfect (or at least much better).