90 Seconds on "Smarter Prospects"

Originallly published in "For New Products Prospect Objections Are Valuable Data"

Here is a transcript:

We have always talked about "early customers, early revenue."

The new product introduction problem, the new product sales problem is a distinct problem from the scale up problem.

Getting those first six to twelve B2B sales is a very different problem from scaling.

Whether you want to it call it an exploratory approach or discovery driven sales, it's a very different sales process than most sales guys are used to.

Very early on I got called in by a guy that I had worked with who had been VP of sales at a billion dollar software company who had gone to a startup. He had gone through 30 sales calls.

We sat down and he took me through the demo. He had two other engineers working with him and they some interesting technology. It was a little bit of a kitchen sink product but it was in an area where VP of sales had connections and they had had 30 visits to prospects.

And the demo went on for about 90 minutes. Afterward I said, "Can you show me the first version of this demo that you gave to the first prospect?"

They asked "What do you mean?"

I said, "Can you tell me how the demo has changed since you started showing it."

He looked at me and said "That's the problem! We need to find smarter prospects!"

True story. I realized that when he had worked in sales at large companies they didn't a sales pitch that doesn't work. So most sales guys assume that what they need to do is handle objections not change the basic pitch.

For the most part for early stage entrepreneurs the objections are actually data: they offer insights for how to improve the pitch.