My subscribers and students have been asking some great GTM questions lately, so I thought I’d use this week’s issue to share them along with answers.
Here’s what’s covered in this issue.
Should I hire a salesperson based on their network of contacts?
How do I stop monologuing on sales calls?
Is lead scoring a waste of time for startups?
I’m booking a lot of meetings but they aren’t converting into customers. What should I do differently?
I’ve got a bunch of deals in my pipeline that haven’t moved in a while. What should I do about them?
Q: Should I hire a salesperson based on their network of contacts?
A: No. The most important trait in hiring a salesperson is not their contacts. It’s their experience working in the stage of company that you’re currently in.
A salesperson who only has later stage experience is invariably going to struggle at an early-stage company regardless of their customer relationships because they are used to selling a mature product in a mature motion to later adopters.
They’ll book meetings with their contacts but the meetings won’t convert to revenue because you won’t be able to bridge your early-stage product and service gaps to meet the mature solution expectations of later adopters.
They’ll want support that you can’t afford to provide. Enablement support to build sales decks and case studies, SDRs to book meetings, sales engineers to run POCs, marketing support to generate leads etc.
It’s got zero to do with work ethic or the idea later stage sales being somehow easier than early-stage sales (which is a myth). It’s about being dropped into an unfamiliar environment and not knowing what to focus on now vs later because they don’t have a relevant mental model.
Q: How do I stop monologuing on sales calls?
A: Whenever you start speaking, have a plan to end with an open-ended question that gets your buyer to start talking again. Here are some examples:
If your buyer asks you how your product works, explain it simply and clearly without jargon or hyperbole and end with, “How does that compare to what you’re currently doing?”, or “How does that compare with what you’re looking for?”.
If you are demoing your product, break the demo into sections that are aligned with the pain points your buyer has. Start each section with a recap of the problem, show how the product solves the problem and end with, “How does that look to you?”, followed by, “Can you see yourself using it?”, followed by, “What challenges do you think we’d run into getting it in place at {company}”. For more on this, see How to give better demos
If you are presenting a proposal, send it 24 hours ahead of the meeting so that your buyer can review and digest it instead of you reading it aloud on the call. Then start the proposal review call by asking, “What questions do you have after reading the proposal?”. For more on this, see How to build an present a sales proposal