Sales conversations: How to make tight-

lipped prospects talk

Posted by Steli Efti on Mon, Mar 21, 2016

Warning: Advanced sales tactics ahead; intended for experienced salespeople

only. If you aren’t confident in your abilities, complete our free sales training
course first.

The average prospecting cycle has three steps:

1. Your prospect communicates their situation.

2. You communicate your solution.

3. Together you decide whether or not to move forward.

But what happens when your prospect won’t participate in step one? You can’t pitch
your solution if they refuse to share information about their situation. How are you
supposed to sell to someone you can’t qualify?

Why prospects keep secrets

Tight-lipped prospects aren’t trying to be difficult, they’re trying to be safe. Their silence
is a defense mechanism, not an offense strategy.
They’ve probably been the victim of buyer’s remorse in the past and fear you’ll
manipulate them into a bad deal if they give up too much information.

It comes down to a lack of trust. Before you can sell your product, you need to sell your
intentions.

How to handle prospects who won’t open

up
When you encounter prospects who won’t be open with you, confront the issue head-
on. Say something like this:

“I bet you’ve had a bad experience with a salesperson before. You might think I’m here
to take advantage of you, but I’m not.

At Close.io, we aim to create long-term, value-focused partnerships with our customers.

That requires openness and honesty from both sides, and I don’t feel like I’m getting
that from you.

I’d like to understand your situation so we can decide together whether or not our inside
sales CRM is a good solution for your needs. If I’m not 100% certain we’re a perfect
match, I’ll tell you. In fact, I’ll even refuse to sell to you.
I want you to be successful, but I need you to be open with me. Help me help you and I
promise we’ll find you a great solution, whether that’s with Close.io or someone else.

Sound fair?”

Communicate this message with friendly strength, not frustration or anger. In most

cases, your prospects won’t realize how difficult they were being until you call them out.
Many will open up once they realize that you have their best interests at heart.

But that isn’t always the case.

What to do if your prospects still won’t

open up
Sometimes you’ll encounter outrage instead of engagement. There will always be a
couple of prospects who say, “This is the way we buy. If that doesn’t work for you, we’re
through here.”

Every business needs to decide for themselves whether or not they’re willing to sell to
aggressive prospects. The Close.io policy is to walk away from prospects who are
disrespectful or overly-demanding.

When our salespeople run into this situation, they say, “I respect your position, but I
don’t think we’re going to be a good match. I can’t, in good conscience, sell you a
solution to a situation I don’t understand. Is there any other way I can be valuable to
you?”

Your prospect will say one of two things in response.

“I’m sorry, you’re right. What do you need to know?”

You called their bluff by taking your product off the table. You also demonstrated your
commitment to their success—to the point that you were willing to lose a sale—and
earned their trust. Now you can qualify your prospect properly.

“Forget it, we’ll find a different solution.”

A prospect this difficult isn’t worth the trouble. A demanding prospect is only going to
become an even more demanding customer. It’s better to lose a deal than sell to the
wrong customer, so be willing to walk away.

There's no sales without trust

Just because someone has a certain way of buying doesn’t mean that’s how you have
to sell to them. Sales should be about mutual honesty and openness. If your prospect
isn’t willing to meet you there, move on to more promising leads.

Why You Need Sales

Documentation to Build a Kick-ass
Sales Team
March 09, 2016by Steli Efti (Guest Writer)

This is a Guest post from Steli Efti, CEO of Close.io

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Your prospects are smarter than ever. Are you?

The need for a strong sales team has surpassed the need for a good marketing
team, says Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston. With 2016’s startup
reset, that’s on track to become even more true.

There was a time when a buyer’s primary source of information was a

salesperson, but that isn’t true anymore. The internet has put information (and
misinformation) in the palm of your prospect’s hands.
The tables have turned. If you want to keep up, you don’t just need
a better  sales team. You need a smarter  sales team.

And the quickest way to boost your team’s sales IQ? Kickass sales
documentation.

What is sales documentation?

Sales documentation is just a catchall term for anything you’ve written down
that provides guidance to your sales team, including things like phone scripts,
email templates and objection management guides.

Some of you are thinking, “Sales scripts are for amateurs! My reps are
seasoned pros, not mindless sales puppets. They already know how to sell and
what to say!”

I know, I’ve heard it all before. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding sales
documentation. Forget all of that for now, and let’s examine why sales scripts
aren’t just a valuable tool, they’re a necessity in today’s market.

Why you need sales documentation

The most common argument against sales scripts is that they turn salespeople
into robots without personality, passion, or connection to the customer. Effective
scripts will not have that effect on good salespeople.

With that misconception debunked, let’s take a look at the benefits of proper
sales documentation:

Polished pitches
The process of writing down your pitch is really valuable. It forces you to think
about how you present yourself and your product, and gives you the opportunity
to add clarity and structure instead of just “winging it”.

Improved teamwork

Sales documentation should be a collaborative process involving the entire

sales team. Tap into the unique strengths of each salesperson to create a well-
rounded pitch and, as that pitch evolves, the improvements will affect the entire
team.

Increased freedom

Used correctly, a sales script creates much more freedom than restrictions.
When your reps don’t have to mentally prepare what to say next, they become
better listeners who can focus on providing value in an engaging way.

How to create sales documentation

You’ve got two choices for initial creation:

 Create your documentation from scratch, or

 Use one of the many templates online (and at the bottom of this article)

Either way, here are two principles to keep in mind as you create your scripts.

1. Collaborate with the entire team

A lot of businesses have their sales manager create a script for the rest of the
team to use. Big mistake.

Half the value of sales documentation comes from the collaborative process of
creating it. Your entire team should be involved from start to finish.
Make this a priority by setting aside one hour this week for the entire team to
work together on it.

2. Don’t invest more than an hour

The first draft of your sales documentation is going to suck no matter how much
time you spend on it. It’s just the version one, don’t aim for perfection. Don’t
spend any more than an hour creating your first draft.

As you’ll learn in a moment, there’s no such thing as a “perfect” or “complete”

script. It’ll be revised over and over again, so don’t waste time upfront. Get the
basics on paper; the rest will come with time. Done is better than perfect.

How to use sales documentation

Incorporate the first drafts of your documentation into your sales process
immediately. The sooner you start using them, the sooner you can improve
them. Here are three steps to get the most out of your scripts.

Step one: Memorization

Your entire team should have the scripts memorized.

One way to help your team commit them to memory is to let them practice
amongst themselves. Assign one person to play the prospect and let the others
practice their lines.

It may be rough at first, so let your salespeople stumble in a controlled

environment.

Step two: Utilization

After (or before) everyone is comfortable with the script, get them in front of
prospects and see how they do under pressure. Then give them the freedom to
experiment.

When you have an entire sales team looking for ways to improve the sales
documentation, you’ll be on your way to a masterpiece.

Step three: Revision

A sales script isn’t a novel. It’s not something you write, publish, and never
touch again. Good sales documentation is never “done”. You and your team
should always be looking for ways to improve it.

Make that improvement a priority by holding twice-monthly meetings with your

sales team where they can ask questions, offer suggestions, and make
revisions. Then get them back on the floor with the revised copy and repeat the
process.

Use a CRM like Close.io (we’ve got a free trial!) that allows you to track your
sales data. This data will be invaluable in identifying weaknesses in your
documentation.

As your scripts become more refined, you can meet less often; but still meet.
This continuous improvement is what turns a simple piece of paper into a
highly-effective sales tool.

Need inspiration?
If you’ve never created sales documentation before, it can seem daunting.
Don’t worry: We’ve been there. Scripts are a huge part of our sales process at
Close.io so we’ve made a lot of them freely available for our readers. For
example:

 Creating phone scripts? Check out How to create a sales call script.

 Writing effective emails? Check out these five cold email
templates and these eight CRM-ready sales email templates.
 Compiling your objection management document? Check out How
to manage any sales objection successfully.

Those are a great place to start, but the rest is up to you. Set up a team
meeting, create your documentation, then get out there and crush it!

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If you want more inspiration on the types of sales documentation that is

commonly seen in sales playbooks, download our newly released Guru Guide
to Sales Enablement eBook!  100+ pages of content on how to build a
sustainable sales enablement program.

MVP your team to excellence

Posted by Steli Efti on Mon, Mar 07, 2016

When you hear “MVP” you probably think: “Ya, ya, I know, heard it all before.”

But today, I want to share with you how you can take the framework of a minimum
viable product, and apply it to things OTHER than your product.
I want to share with you a framework that we use at Close.io to work better together,
and get things done with a very small team that other companies ten times our
headcount aren't getting done.

Most people associate minimum viable product (MVP) with a quick and dirty product
release, but that overlooks the most powerful part of the concept.

Instead of building a product alone and praying people like it, with MVP,
developers actively collaborate with customers. They give them a bare-bones version of
the product, verify that it solves a real problem for them, and then work with them to
iterate on it. As Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame says, it’s an “experiment on the way to
excellence.”

That’s why you should apply MVP to everything you do at work—even in-house projects
customers will never see. The key is to recreate the company-customer collaboration
internally, with your boss and your teammates as the customer. If you test your ideas on
them and get their feedback as you work, you ensure that your project stays on track
and adds value for the company.

Don’t think of MVP as just a product development methodology. It's also an organizing
principle that empowers your team to perform better than the sum of its parts. Let’s dive
into what a project using the MVP framework looks like and why every employee needs
to make it part of their workflow.

Think geniuses work alone? You’re wrong

When they think of a “genius,” many people conjure up the image of a brilliant scientist
working in isolation on an earth-shattering discovery. But according to Cambridge
physicist Athene Donald, that idea is a myth.

She writes, “No individual can sit down at a bench and nail down the existence of the
Higgs boson.” That discovery took a team of researchers from all over the world.
Scientific progress is too complex for one person to achieve alone. It comes from
experts working together, sharing ideas, and critiquing each other’s strategies. 

Too many people undermine themselves by pursuing the genius delusion in the
workplace. They get a new project and immediately disappear into their offices, thinking
they’ll pop out a week later with the the perfect answer to everyone’s problem.

But more often than not, they come out with a dud—one that solves nothing, and only
wastes everyone’s time.

It’s not that they're inept. They just underestimate how complex these projects really
are. In their heads, they think there's a simple path to success—a smooth line from A to
B—and all they need to do is follow it. 

But things are always much more complex in reality, especially when it comes to
startups. No matter how certain you are of what direction a project needs to go, chances
are it’ll end up somewhere completely different. You actually go from A to Z with
countless twists and turns in between.

That’s what’s so thrilling about working at a startup. Sure, it can be scary not to know
what’s coming next. But that also means there could be something great around the
corner at any time. Think about Slack—its founders set out to build an online game and
ended up with a hugely popular office messaging app. But you need your teammates’
help to stay on track and navigate those big changes.

How to MVP anything

Startups need everyone working together to succeed. But even though people talk a big
game about teamwork, it doesn’t just happen magically. It takes dedication and a lot of
work to build a culture where people aren’t afraid to ask each other for help and
collaborate. That’s the beauty of MVP—collaboration is built right into it. 

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you’re in marketing, and the CEO of your company gives you a big
assignment to get done this week: create an analytics dashboard to monitor all of the
company’s inbound marketing channels.

1. Start by asking questions. What are the key ingredients this dashboard needs?
What are the most important marketing traffic stats?
2. Make a list of the information it needs to display, mock it up on a spreadsheet, a
white board, or a piece of paper, and boom—there’s your MVP. Remember,
it’s minimum, so it doesn’t need all the fancy calculations and beautiful graphs
the final version will have. You can get it done in a day.

3. Now the important part. You need to take that MVP and get feedback on
it. Send it over to the CEO and run it by the rest of the marketing team. Ask them
if it’s on the right track and how it could improve.

Take it to other departments too. A salesperson can give you insights on time through
the conversion funnel. A customer success manager can tell you how to incorporate
churn for different inbound channels. An engineer might know a shortcut for building out
the analytics. At startups, teams aren’t strictly siloed by function, so you can tap into a
diverse audience and hear ideas you never would have otherwise. 

If you keep those feedback loops going strong all week, your project will constantly
improve as you create new iterations. Any time it’s going off course, your team will help
you right the ship.

By the end, you’ll have a dashboard that delivers value and does exactly what the
company needs it to do. That’s what a climate of constant feedback does for you. Trust
me, I know—it’s how we built Close.io.

Top 3 ways MVP empowers teams

By tapping into the power of teamwork, MVP improves everything from efficiency, to
quality of work, to overall company spirit. Here are three key benefits.

1. MVP makes teams work efficiently

The best way to solve big problems is to break them down into smaller ones. Even
NASA agrees. They break every mission down into a series of small goals—every item
on that diagram is a part of the overall mission, which is in turn broken down further.
Teams can focus on manageable tasks and catch issues early before they compromise
the entire operation.
That’s what MVP does—it turns your big project into a series of smaller versions that
you complete from the bottom up. Each step of the way, the feedback you get from the
rest of your team tells you what needs to improve before you go down the rabbit hole of
working on an idea that sucks. 

Think of all the small nuances to the dashboard project you might screw up if no one’s
giving you feedback. For example, maybe you build the dashboard around revenue per
channel, but it turns out your CEO thinks conversion rate by channel is a more
important metric. If you had MVPed the project, the CEO could’ve caught your mistake
early. Instead, you spent all week on it only to hear her say, “This isn’t what I wanted,”
and now have to start over.

2. The more brainpower, the better

Science shows that teams achieve better problem solving results in less time than
individuals. For example, a team of psychologists at the University of Illinois found that
three to five person teams solved complex letter to number coding
problems significantly faster than even the highest-performing individuals. 

You might think the group members would trip each other up, but the study found they
succeeded because they could “work together to generate and adopt correct responses,
reject erroneous responses, and effectively process information.” Interestingly, the
advantage didn’t hold for two-person groups—more collaboration meant better results. 

Teams solve problems faster by bouncing ideas around and continuously iterating new
solutions. That’s exactly what MVP taps into. When you get a talented group of people
together with unique expertise, experiences, and perspectives, they feed off each other.
There’s a bigger pool of ideas to pull from, and the team’s collective efforts go to
developing the best ones.

3. MVP improves team morale

In a recent article for the Harvard Business Review, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter
argues that the most important factor in employee morale is what the author calls “OPI
—opportunity for positive impact.” Surprisingly, the desire to progress toward goals and
contribute real value outweighs money when it comes to workplace motivation. 
MVP taps into that by exponentially increasing the OPI for every team member. It
creates a progress-oriented environment where people take pride in contributing to
each other’s projects. Remember all the people who made an impact on your
dashboard? No doubt they all felt a sense of accomplishment and ownership knowing
their feedback added value.

MVP is like putting a startup on steroids

MVP is all about people working together. It epitomizes the collaborative, all-hands-on-
deck, get-shit-done mentality that startups are built on. Instead of wasting time trying to
make something perfect, you get the rest of your team to help you do it faster. 

On the surface, it might look like a cheap shortcut, but that couldn’t be further from the
truth. It saves time andachieves the best possible results by getting scrutiny and
insights from a bigger crowd.

The unbottleneck hack

Posted by Steli Efti on Thu, Oct 09, 2014

If you're a founder, or managing a team, you're probably overwhelmed by requests from

people who rely on you for feedback, comments, input and approval. Every day, there's
a new barrage of emails in your inbox, requiring you to respond, so that somebody else
is able to do their job.

It can slow down your whole operation if other people in the organization are stuck in
the bottleneck you created. Before you know it, you're a small bootstrapped startup
team, moving as slow as a large corporation.

You need to get things done and get shit shipped. Speed is crucial.
What's more, if you keep your people waiting, it's demotivating and disempowering.
Now you're not just a slow-moving bootstrapped startup, morale is also dwindling away
and you're running low on that magic energy that makes startups spark.

Chances are it won't get to that point, since it's really an extreme case. But nonetheless,
the problem is real. How do you solve it?

I'm sure you could hire a consultant who'd charge you and arm and a leg and then tell
you: Empower people and give them more autonomy! Help them to grow into leaders.
Place more trust in them!

All this sounds good on paper, but how do you actually do it?

How do you unblock a bottleneck?

I want to share a much simpler approach with you. You don't need to learn a new
management technique or transform your personality: tell people to send you tasks
with specific deadlines.

If you don't respond within the set deadline, they automatically have your permission to
move ahead any way they see fit.

The deadline that works best for me is 24 hours (for urgent tasks) to 48 hours (for non-
urgent tasks).

It's a simple system that you can start using right away. In fact, if you're super busy and
stressed out, you could just copy & paste this and send it to your team members:

I realize that you sometimes require my input, feedback or responses and I often have
been slow in responding. I've been thinking about how I can remove myself as a
bottleneck, and here's what I came up with: 

From now on, whenever you send me an email that requires my input, response,
feedback or comment, please send it to me at least 48 hours in advance.

(If it's urgent, shorten that deadline to 24 hours, but state so in the beginning of the
email).
If I don't respond within the deadline, you have my full permission to move ahead any
way you see fit.

What can you expect when you put this

system in place?
There's a bunch of advantages to doing things this way, that we've experienced at
Close.io:

 Team productivity goes up.

 There's less stress in your life.

 Your team members will appreciate you a lot more.

 Once this rule is established, people will adjust their expectations. They won't
expect you to reply within four hours of receiving your email in the midst of a
busy day. And if there's occasionally something really urgent, they'll now make it
very clear that this urgently requires your attention.

 You will make better judgment calls. Does this really require your input or not?
It's now a lot easier to just say no, and let others figure it out.

 You empower your team members to move forward and accomplish things when
they don't hear back from you within a reasonable amount of time.

Overall, things move a lot smoother and happen a lot faster. Working together is more
fun, and you'll achieve a lot more as a team.

I've shared this tip with many founders and executives, and have gotten a lot of great
feedback on it. You can also check my podcast episode on "feeling
overwhelmed" where I shared this tip with my friend and co-host Hiten Shah.
Effective entrepreneurship: The not to-do
list
Posted by Steli Efti on Tue, Aug 26, 2014

Every founder, every entrepreneur, everybody who works in a startup knows the burden
of the to-do list. I love to-do lists. They are a beautiful thing. They help me get things
done.

But recently I discovered the power of the not to-do list, and it's made such a huge
difference for myself and our company that I want to share it with you.

I started my days with writing a to-do list. It helped me to become more productive, but
there was always one challenge: Keeping that list focused. Over the course of each
day, the list inevitably grew. 

I'm too ambitious to keep my to-do list small. I always feel like I can add one more thing,
squeeze another commitment into my day, get just one more task done. 
The result? Overwhelmed and stressed
More often than not, this strategy led to stress and emotional turmoil. Sometimes my to-
do list would have the exact opposite effect of what I want it to do: instead of creating
more focus, it created more distraction. Instead of clarity, it created complexity.

And then one day I went the other way.

The not to-do list

I now start every day with writing my not to-do list, rather than my to-do list. What goes
on my not to-do list? All the things that:

 I want to work on
 I would like to work on

 I think I need to work on

 But today, I'm not going to take the time to do that. Not do, not think, not
worry about today.

Once my not to-do list is done, I get start with my to-do list—which is very short and
usually only contains one or two items.

Free up mental RAM

Every time when something new comes up, I put it on my day's not to-do list.

New idea?

Not to-do list.

Reminded of something I wanted to take care of?

Not to-do list.

Somebody else asks me to do something?

Not to-do list.

Something cool I want to try or learn more about?

Not to-do list.

This important thing that wants to be taken care of?

Here, let me put you on my not to-do list.

(This is what my not to-do list looks like today at the beginning of the day. Keep it
simple.)

Distracted? Grasshopper mind?

Whenever I get distracted, whenever I lose my focus and my brain goes into attention
deficit mode, I stop and look at my not to-do list.
Is that stuff on my not to-do list? If yes, I stop working on it immediately.

And if it is not on my not to-do list, I ask myself: should it be?

The result?
I don't know how long this little productivity hack will serve me, but what I do know is
this: Since starting my days with my not to-do list, my productivity has gone up
significantly!

Not to-dos for teams

We've now applied this to the entire business. We already had a product roadmap. But
now we also have a anti-roadmap. The anti-roadmap contains all the things we're not
going to do. 

If you plan on creating a not to-do list with your team, be prepared for some heated
discussions. Because different people will have different priorities, and they'll be willing
to fight to keep things they consider important off the not to-do list. But these kinds of
discussions are important, because they lead to more clarity and align the vision of your
product among different team members.

Managing complexity
At Close.io, we're only six people, but our little startup is growing fast, serving
thousands of customers all over the world. As your company matures and scales, you'll
have to be able to deal with a larger number of issues.

The more complicated your company becomes, the more important it is that you can
filter out the noise, and focus on what matters.

What are your productivity hacks?

What helped you to become more productive? If you try the not to-do list, share what it
did (or did not) do for you. I'd love to read your comments on this.
Update: A reader pointed out Warren Buffett's "Avoid At All Cost" list, which I think
complements this post very well. It's not a daily list, but a long-term one.

1. You list your 25 top goals and dreams that you want to accomplish.
2. You select the five most important ones and plan how to accomplish them.

3. You avoid working on the remaining 20 goals at all cost ... until you have
accomplished your five most important ones! 

It's based on the same principle: don't let an avalanche of little tasks bury your big
goals.

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really
successful people say no to almost everything.”—Warren Buffett

Thanks to Luke Thomas for reading and commenting on the draft for this.

Topics: startup culture, startups, sales productivity

Conflict resolution 101 for startups

Posted by Steli Efti on Fri, May 23, 2014
“Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've
funded have had a founder leave.”—Paul Graham, The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Running a startup is hard. All the enthusiasm you bring into it when you begin can turn
into frustration when things don’t work out as planned. And they almost never work out
as planned.

It’s easy to start blaming other members of your team or your co-founders. Resentment
starts to rear its ugly head. And before you know it, you loath to see the faces of your
co-founders and team members.

Startups are high pressure environments

Working long hours with few resources. Uncertain outcomes.

Conflict is unavoidable. You’re building something. Creating something from nothing.

There will be friction.

It’s how you deal with it that matters.

Ignore it? Ticking time bomb.

Fight it out? That can escalate, rather than resolve the conflict and damage the
relationship with your team members.

Here’s a simple but powerful method to resolve conflicts and keep the entire team
morale up during times when everything goes down badly. 

Conflict resolution step-by-step

#1. The Trigger

Someone irritates or frustrates you, makes you feel angry, upset, disappointed or hurt.

#2. Relax

Calm down. Let your emotions cool down for a second.

Usually, when the bad feelings subside people tend to brush over it. “I’m not that angry
anymore, so let’s not talk about it.” That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Because this is
the perfect time to talk about it. It’s still fresh on your mind and you remember it clearly,
but not so fresh that you’re caught up in anger.

#3. Feel good

Put yourself in a positive emotional state.

#4. Initiate a conversation

Take that person aside and say: "Hey, I want to talk to you about something important
for a minute. Can we do this now?"

#5. State the facts

Objectively describe the situation that caused you to feel bad. Be neutral and detached
when you explain exactly what happened.

"Look, yesterday you said in front of the whole team, 'Oh yeah, we should totally let our
sales guy design the interface, and later I’ll ask my hairstylist to do a root-canal
treatment for me.'”

You objectively stated the facts and kept your own interpretation out of it.

#6. Express your feelings

Now you describe how that made you feel. Do this in a non-accusatory way. The goal is
to clean the situation up, not to battle this out. Tempt them to explain themselves, not to
defend themselves.

“I felt really belittled by that. I felt bad and humiliated in front of the others. I felt like you
diminished my input and made me look stupid.”

You’ve described your subjective experience. And being so open about your emotions
is disarming. It lowers their guard, which helps to clear the conflict quicker.

#7. Show them you value them

Before they respond, put it on top of their mind that this is not about winning or being
right. This is about maintaining a good working relationship together.

“I really value you and enjoy working with you. That’s why I bring this up—I don’t want
anything to stand between us. I want to talk this out with you so there are no hard
feelings left. So I wanted to give you a chance to tell me how you saw the situation, and
let’s clear this thing up.”

You’ve invited them to resolve this conflict with you in a positive way and lowered their
defenses.

#8. Listen

There are three kinds of responses you get. The most common response will be:

1. Sorry!

“Oh shit, sorry for that! That wasn’t my intention at all. I just said that because we were
all stressed out and tense. I was just trying to loosen things up with a little laughter. I
didn’t realize it made you feel like that, I didn’t mean to ridicule you at all. I’m super sorry
pal!”

When you know the person didn’t mean it that way, it takes the emotion out of it. You
also understand the other person better and get why s/he’s making that joke. And s/he’s
understanding you better too and has more awareness of how this kind of joke makes
others feel.

2. You had that coming!

“You know what? I’m glad you're saying this! Because I kind of felt like you’re a
douchebag. I made that joke because I was really pissed at you at that moment. You
missed the deadline five times in a row and that morning I just was fucking frustrated.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have said it in a joke, but it just came out that way, I don’t want you to
feel like that, but I felt so upset about it.

Now you realize this isn’t just about a stupid joke. There’s an actual underlying conflict.
You have done something to upset the other person as well. Give them the chance to
explain what caused it and what made them feel negative towards you so that it came
out in this kind of passive aggressive way. Now you have a chance to talk about the real
issue and resolve that rather than haggling about a stupid joke.

3. You felt stupid because you are stupid!

“Yeah, I said that to put you in your place. I’m glad your slow-mo brain is finally getting
the message.”

Now you know you’re dealing with a real idiot. Just walk away. Don’t waste your energy
trying to build a relationship with them. This almost never happens. Hopefully you are
selective enough about choosing the people you surround yourself with to never get into
this situation. If you do, file it under lessons learned’.

#9. Shake hands

When you cleared this thing up, shake hands. Celebrate that you’ve resolved this
conflict together. You’ll often find that the other person is grateful you brought this whole
thing up.

No conflict is too small

Do this with tiny conflicts too. In fact, the tinier the conflict, the better. Practice dealing
with small conflicts so that you’re better prepared for more serious ones.

Avoid the kind of situation where you become so emotionally charged that you’re caught
up in your own interpretations and escalate a conflict like this:

You: “You made a stupid joke about me. In fact, you always make stupid jokes, and you
know why? Because you’re a stupid asshole!”

Other person: “What the fuck is wrong with you? If you don’t have any sense of humor
and have zero self-confidence, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.”

Cause once you’re at that point, things are a lot harder to resolve.

Don’t pretend conflict isn’t there

Most people prefer to avoid or ignore conflict. Because it’s unpleasant. Because it’s
scary. Because they don’t know how to turn conflicts into opportunities.

If you evade an issue, the negative emotions will keep simmering inside. These
emotions will find a way to resurface in one of these two ways:

 The "Suppress it and it comes out somewhere else" syndrome

This causes a metastatic growth of petty conflicts. Engaging in these trivial
arguments is pointless and destructive if you don’t address the real issue.
Sometimes the other person isn’t even aware of the underlying concern, and it’s
important to probe deep enough to unearth what’s really bothering them.
 Clique building
One person starts bad-mouthing the other behind their back to build an alliance
against that person. Teamwork turns into politics, and from there on it’s a
downward spiral.

That’s why it’s important to sort things out as soon as possible. Don’t let conflicts spread
and grow.

Use conflict constructively

Resolving conflicts can be a strong bonding experience, because it unites your team.
You’ve faced and overcame a challenge together. You’ve fostered a better
understanding between your team members. You don’t just solve a problem, but you
enhance the communication in your startup, which is one of the most important things
you can do when building a company.

Topics: entrepreneurship, conflict resolution, communication, startup cultu

An Argument for Specialized
Sales Teams — An Interview
with Aaron Ross
By David Skok 86

 2.6k


In this article I interview Aaron Ross, co-author of a new book, Predictable

Revenue. Aaron discusses his experience at Salesforce.com starting a new
group that used an innovative outbound prospecting approach (involving no
cold calls) to create new leads. Aaron’s group came up with several important
breakthroughs which enabled them add over $100m in incremental recurring revenues
over a few short years. This article reviews some of those best practices which provide
a recipe for others to make outbound prospecting a repeatable and predictable revenue
generator.
As most of my readers know I am a huge fan of using marketing to develop the lead
flow for sales people so they don’t have to do cold calling. The main reason for this is
the high cost of salespeople, and as a result, the high cost per lead that is created using
this technique. However in certain situations, it does make sense to augment marketing
with outbound cold calling.

The right situation is likely to have the following characteristics:

 Marketing is not producing the right kinds of leads, or enough leads.

 You have a clear set of target customers that are likely to be the biggest, or best suited,
customers for your particular product
 Reasonably high lifetime value of customer that will justify the higher cost per lead. (If
you can make $10k in the first year from a customer, this can be very profitable.)

Many companies expect their sales people

to do their own prospecting, which can be
thought of as doing their own lead
generation. You are very clear that this is
the wrong approach. Tell us why?
One of the biggest productivity killers is lumping together a mix of different
responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, and
account management) into one general “sales” role. This creates significant
inefficiencies:

 Lack of Motivation: Experienced sales people hate to prospect, and are usually terrible
at it.
 Lack of Focus: Even if a salesperson does do some prospecting successfully, as soon
as they generate some pipeline, they become too busy to prospect. It’s not sustainable. Any
individual that tries to juggle too many responsibilities, will have a much lower ability to get
things done.
Sales people have a reputation for being ADD – how does adding more responsibilities help
that? For example, qualifying web leads is a much lower value distraction for sales people
than managing current clients. And managing a large current client base is a distraction
from closing new clients!
 Lack of proper training and support: Their company doesn’t train them on how to
prospect effectively, give them helpful tools or reasonable goals. Usually the guidance is
along the lines of “make more calls!” Wow, that’s helpful.
 Unclear Metrics: It’s harder to break out and keep track of key metrics (inbound leads,
qualification and conversion rates, customer success rates…) if all the functions are lumped
into single areas. Different roles makes it much easier to break out different steps in your
processes, which means better metrics.
 Less Visibility Into Problems: When things aren’t working, lumped responsibilities
obscure what’s happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with
accountable follow through.

What do you recommend as an alternative?

I believe in dividing up the roles into specialized functions. Here are the four basic
functions or themes:
1. “Inbound” Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify
marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800 number. The sources of these
leads are either marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.
2. “Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or
New Business Development Reps, this function prospects into lists of target accounts to
develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team dedicated to
proactive business development.Highly efficient Outbound reps and teams do NOT close
deals, but create & qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account
Executives to close.
3. “Account Executives” or “Sales”, are quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be
either inside or out in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account
Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay in touch with
new customers they close past the close until the new customer is deployed and launched.
4. Account Management/Customer Success: Client deployment and success, ongoing
client management, and renewals. In today’s world of “frictionless karma”, someone needs
to be dedicated to making customers successful–and that is NOT the salesperson!
As an organization gets larger, it is possible to get even more specialized. For example,
it can often make sense to have different reps for different vertical industries that get to
know and understand the customer problems, terminology, and specific vertical
messaging. Another type of specialization that can make sense is based on customer
size: one group for large accounts, and another for smaller, as their problems and
required solutions and messaging are different.

When should companies consider

specialization? Are startups too small for
this?
I frequently hear “We’re too small to specialize yet.” It is always “sooner than you think,”
even if you just have a handful of Account Executives. The second person you hire, after
a salesperson who can close, should be a sales rep who is dedicated just to generating
leads for your first closer.

A second rule of thumb is the 80/20 rule. When your reps, as a group, are spending
more than 20% of their time on a secondary function, break out that function into a new
role.

For example, if someone whose primary role is to generate outbound leads begins
spending more than 20% of their time qualifying inbound leads, it’s time to look at
specializing and creating a separate role just for responding to inbound leads.

Tell us how you uncovered your

breakthroughs that led to success in cold
calling
In early 2003 I was experimenting with cold calling, to see if it would work. It did – but
far too slowly. I had been able to generate 2 qualified leads in a month. To meet my
goals I needed to be able to generate 8 qualified opportunities. (This may sound low, but
remember that a core principle is to generate fewer opportunities that are much higher
quality.)

The First Breakthrough

The first breakthrough I had was realizing that the biggest bottleneck in prospecting into
companies isn’t selling the decision maker/influencer/point person…it’s finding them in
the first place!

Oftentimes the ultimate decision maker – such as the CEO or VP Sales in the case of
Salesforce.com, is not the best person for your initial conversations. I learned this
through hard work – cold calling, cold emailing, plugging away. I realized I spent most of
my time hunting for the right person – not trying to sell or qualify them.

If I could find the right person, I could usually have a productive business conversation
with them. It was just a pain in the ass to find them, especially in the F5000 size
companies!

In Desperation, I Tried An Experiment: I’d always assumed that mass emailing

executives wouldn’t work. Don’t I need to carefully craft each email to them to make it
personal?

 I wrote one email that was a classic salesy cold calling letter: “Do you have these
challenges? X, Y Z…”.
 I also wrote a totally “short and sweet” different email simply asking for a referral to the
right person at the company. (I won’t be sharing email templates in this book for two
reasons, which I will describe in a section just on email).
I remember my experiment like it was yesterday. On a Friday afternoon, I sent two mass
emails from Salesforce.com:

 100 of the “classic salesy” emails to F5000 executives, and

 100 of the “short and sweet” emails to the same kind of list.

Out of 200 emails I sent, I had 10 responses back! Again, these were from C-level and
VP-level executives at large companies.

 Response rate for the “salesy” email: 0%.

 Response rate for the “short and sweet” email: 10%.

And at least five of the emails I received from the short and sweet campaign were
positive, referring me to other people in the organization as the best person for a
conversation about sales force automation.

The Second Breakthrough

I discovered that mass emailing C-level F5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails,
can generate 9%+ response rates.  Those high response rates (8-10% or more) from
high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients in 2010,
seven years later.

The Result: A 500% Increase

In the next month, April 2003, I increased my results by 500% and generated 11 qualified
sales opportunities!

Hence the tipping point of the Cold Calling 2.0 process was born: sending mass emails
to high level executives to ask for referrals to the best person in their organization for a
first conversation.
What does the Cold Calling 2.0 Funnel look
like?
This diagram from the book shows a sample funnel that breaks out the prospecting
stages:

Here is another way to look at the Cold Calling 2.0 process that a sales development rep
should be following:
Give us your thoughts on the Ideal
Customer Profile (ICP)?
Getting clear on your Ideal Customer Profile, including how to describe them and what
their core challenges are, is the most important exercise to maximize the effectiveness
of your marketing and sales functions. It helps you:

 Find great prospects more easily through smart targeting

 Disqualifying poor prospects more quickly

…both of which lead us to faster sales cycles and higher win rates. If you are going to
implement a cold calling 2.0 process, this is an critically important starting point.
The result of this should be a list of criteria that you want, with an explanation of the reasons
why. For an example of one criterion:

Criteria We Why
Want
25-250 Employees Our customers have to be large enough
to need our service. However, if they are
too large, they tend to hire someone in-
house to do it full-time.

The book provides some great examples of how to work through this exercise, and what
the output should look like.
What are some more of your guidelines for
writing these referral emails?
 It’s important to make it short and sweet
 Don’t sell
 You want to make sure you are asking for just  one thing, which is a referral
 Give people enough information, but in a short way. The trick is to being specific enough
about who you should talk to, or what you do, in a very short way.

The variables that make this successful:

 Who you are sending it to ?

 What is the subject line?
 How are you asking for the referral?
o How are you describing the person you want to talk to?
o How are you describing what you do?

To get this right will likely require experimentation using A/B testing to optimize.

Don’t Sell

There is always some salesperson or executive who wants to throw in a bunch of salesy
stuff (our value, bullet points, attached PDFs) – You have to prevent that. Just keep
them away from the process. Trying to sell at this stage will wreck the conversion rate
of these emails. It’s like going for coffee with someone on your first date, and you are
leaning in for the kiss before you have said hello.  (Note from David Skok: I wrote on this
topic here:  When selling is the worst way to win customers.)

What is the profile of a person who would

be good as an SDR?
If you don’t yet have someone doing this already, and you are looking for a person to set
it up, you want to find someone who is a problem solver, and who is entrepreneurial.
Ideally you want to have someone in your company who  would like the opportunity to
do this. Best is if you can have two people starting this at the same time, so they
leverage the buddy system.

After that, you really just want smart people who can figure things out, who know
something about business. Some of my best people didn’t start as salespeople, they
had other business experience. They were able to learn sales. They were good at having
business conversations. They also need to be able to develop trust, and have high
integrity.

They should have a good sense of process, because if you are disorganized, it is not
going to be effective. And you’re going to have to like them.

Tell us about your ‘Layers of the Onion’

thinking

The Layers of the Onion idea is all about how

to lead a prospect through to becoming a
customer. You have to realize that
customers want to get to know you in small
steps. And they want to feel like they are in
control of that process. Think of them as a squirrel. Your job is to lay out tempting morsels one
after the other to get them to take another step forward. You can also think of that as being like
peeling  back the layers of an onion.
The high level concept here is that people need to take multiple steps to get to know
you.  Sales people need to relax, and stop trying to go for the close so fast. There is not
enough patience in the world.  This is all about patience and baby steps.

The Internet has drastically shifted power from sellers to buyers. The old way of
marketing and selling involved pushing information onto prospects and then working to
control their steps along a sales process. Buyers had limited access to information,
which they had to negotiate out of sellers. Now, buyers can do more research on their
own before they ever talk to a human at a company (if they ever do talk to a human!)

Go with it – let prospects do the work!

Instead of resisting this trend and staying attached to how potential customers used to,
or “should” get to know your company, go with it and give the prospects the control over
how theywant to get to know you.

Present them with a couple of logical next steps and let them decide how and when to
move forward (of course, with some helpful reminders now and then if they’ve stalled).

Setting up progressive layers of the onion is key to “receiving sales” or “pulling sales”
(much easier than pushing sales). Let the prospects do the work for you!

The layers are mutual – get to know your prospects as

they get to know you

The layers enable prospects and vendors to test mutual compatibility with progressive
steps of increasing trust and commitment, to minimize the risk and costs of a bad fit to
both parties. With the layers of the onion, a prospect can engage right away at the level
they feel comfortable with, and then can work their way up the trust & commitment
layers as they and you see fit.

As a seller, now you can more easily test out how much of a fit the customer is for you,
before you commit extra time or resources to them! Committing to a bad-fit customer is
an enormous cost, and the right layers can help you avoid those landmines.

Let go

Give up trying to control how long someone takes to move forward. You’ll have to
accept that most prospects that initially sign up for a blog, trial or demo just won’t be
ready to do anything. That’s ok – don’t try to force them. But consider if there’s another
onion layer you can create to offer to make it easier for them to take another step.

If you see prospects getting stuck somewhere in your “layers”, consider redesigning
your next-step offers. What is the next “juicy morsel” they would want if you showed it to
them, that would help them take another step forward? What new layers, content or
products can you create that are compelling and relevant to who the prospect is and
where they are in their evaluation & buying cycle?

Let go of trying to control prospects, and trust that if it’s a good mutual fit, and you keep
nurturing them and your “layers” are relevant & useful, they will become a customer
someday!

Can you summarize your thoughts?

 You MUST specialize your salespeople, and have, at a minimum, at least one (better is
two) outbound reps focused 100% on prospecting – and that means NO CLOSING or
inbound lead qualification. If you can’t specialize today, make a plan on how and when you
can. You don’t need to be big to begin to specialize; all you need is two people in sales.
 Use a referral/researching approach rather than cold calling people directly. You can
generate quality referrals from cold contacts who have never heard of you via short and
sweet email templates.
 Focus on QUALITY, not quantity, of actions, calls and leads (fewer, bigger, better).
Measure results-based activities (“# Scoping Calls Completed”) as opposed to metrics like
dials.
 Train your outbound salespeople to be “businesspeople who can sell”, rather than
salespeople. Not only do they need to have a multi-step outbound sales process that works,
they also must be able to have an intelligent conversation with high-level executives,
whether via email or phone. You can train young people (even out of college) to do this.
 SIMPLIFY what you track in your CRM/SFA system (such as a Salesforce.com),
focusing on your few, best metrics (like new $ pipeline created per month, qualified leads
 per month, etc.) You have to get rid of all your extra junk tracking fields that clutter
everything, and simplify your dashboards.

Unfortunately, too many companies won’t take the single most important step to make
prospecting work – dedicating an inside sales team or role 100% to prospecting and
generating opportunities to pass on to the Account Executives/closers. This is always
priority #1!

Sell Ideas, Not Stuff

Aaron says that, in their marketing and prospecting, companies and people do way too
muchselling. Clients don’t want to buy products, they want help. The best way to help
them is with both your product & your expertise So, you must educate rather than sell…
as he talks about in this short video:

Selling Your Idea, Not Just Your Product

Conclusion
I have recently posted a slide deck that talks more about this topic here: Using
Outbound Prospecting to reach highly targeted prospects.
If you found Aaron’s ideas above interesting, I recommend that you purchase the book.
It has a great deal more detail than is covered in this short interview. Aaron was kind
enough to share a sizeable sample of the book (the first three chapters) for our readers,
which you can download by clicking here. Aaron and his co-author Mary Lou Tyler also
run a consulting company Predictable Revenue, Inc. that is willing to help startups work
through getting a program like this off the ground.