Be Direct and Get Down to Business

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Updated August 22, 2022

Youโ€™re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Society often gets along through polite obfuscation. Through indirection. Through politesse, and circuitousness. Not in sales land, friend.

Much of sales is about getting down to brass tacks: Do you have the problem Iโ€™m trying to solve? Are you in agreement that it needs a solution? Are you prepared to spend money to solve it?

In the pursuit of efficiently attacking your account, you, as a sales professional, have full license to be direct in asking these sorts of questions. In fact, you can go all the way up to directly stating to your prospect, with full confidence, that your solution and their problem are an excellent fit and that they should buy X amount of your product to help their business. Asking for the sale is not optional, and it will quickly become second nature.

As Alec Baldwin states so entertainingly in that famous ABC scene in Glengarry Glen Ross, โ€œA guy donโ€™t walk on the lot lest he wants to buy.โ€ People go to singles bars with very specific goals in mind. Your prospects would not be on the phone with you, taking your demo, if they didnโ€™t have some buying intent.

It is imperative to respect their time and yours by being direct and getting to the heart of the matter.

Build Many Shallow Relationships

For the first-time sales pro, the scale of person-to-person interaction is a massive adjustment. Think about how many distinct people you typically interact with in a given week. If youโ€™re like most professionals, itโ€™s likely a constellation of one or two dozen people with whom you have frequent, ongoing interactions that build over time and with whom you have substantial history.

With sales, itโ€™s the opposite. If youโ€™re doing it rightโ€”see comments above about the importance of activity orientationโ€”youโ€™re having dozens of new interactions a week, and maintaining a pipeline of anywhere from a few dozen to north of a hundred ongoing, concurrent conversations.

Itโ€™s a substantial change of pace, and it also puts substantial stressors on you to be able to quickly build and maintain rapport with a new contact, while juggling key deal information, over the cycle of the sale. (Why do you think the weather and sports teams are the sales proโ€™s best friends? Instant conversation topics.) It puts the onus on the sales pro to keep readily accessible details of these individuals, their organizations, and their pains, as well as general rapport notesโ€”which, of course, is not possible for a normal human brain. It can be exhausting, and it can be taxing. Thatโ€™s why record keeping and CRM excellence (more on this later) are paramount.

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