Sales for Hackers

This is a great lesson from the article: "Prioritize the opportunities that are furthest along, biggest, and most likely to close. If you do that, you’ll manage your pipeline most efficiently." -> the best way to learn how to prioritize is to fill your pipeline with more sales leads than you can handle. Nothing like a 14 hour workday in sales teaches you about how a good lead for your business looks like. You can't give every sales lead an equal chance. It's basic sales triage: don't concentrate on leads who you'll win anyway or who you can never win, focus your most work on leads who need your expertise to make a decision (for you).

+1 on this

We are 3 months old startup, have ipad and tablet apps in developement, zero experience in sales, our developers are freshers except me with 10 years exp in coding. We thought of trying to get some customers and strangers feedback about our product and their interest before launching the apps on app store. When we mail the prospect about our product, they don't even reply, it may be discarded.

We then tried showing up some data about prospects in our app, attached android, ipad images, at least they could say that they are not interested at this time, or they may decide and let us know sooner. Some of them pick our call, clarify their understanding about apps. Some of them are going ahead and asked for price, how to get the apps working on their mobile device.

For each prospect, our sales rep has to spend a lot of time preparing the data that is relevant to our potential prospect, to send the screen shots.

This article is very good to target high potential prospect who can give us good business even if we spend a 2-3 days to prepare the data for them. Since we lack in sales, we don't know the best way to get this done. For each prospect we have to spend a lot of time, if they are not interested, we are losing our time.

I agree on the content, but disagree on the form of some of the points.

Example:

Budget:

Validate leads. Yes, of course. However, I don't like that asking someone how much they're willing to spend. Not under this form, at least.

This information is none of anyone's business than the prospect (speaking as a prospect). However, it's an important information, so the salesman needs to adapt to get that information. He might not ask for it, but needs to get it.

Some cues on the means of the prospect can be visible, but this can be deceiving. Bling bling people often are broke overcompensating folks.

Conversation fu can also be used indirectly to get the information, but the prospect can be good at that and drop just the right amount of hints to convey he can afford it..

Authority:

Speaking to the right person. Yes. However, this is done on two sides: Convincing the pockets, using the daughter as leverage.

Asking the father "Besides yourself, who else is involved with the purchase" isn't, in my opinion, the right form.

Because it's like asking a man "Is your wife grabbing your ?". A man will never admit someone else holds the power. Those who do, the "I won't lie to you, she's the boss.." are way beyond the point of no return, but at least, they're at peace and you can go for it.

But with those who won't admit to that, you need to be careful not to scratch the ego. The problem isn't the fact he has no power inspite him being the earner, the problem is that you mustn't know. So you always make it seem it's his decision, and won't acknowledge the fact the wife or the daughter chose. He must feel good about the decision he -someone else- made.

With this, too, observation is key. You see a man with his daughter and wife, and you know. You see how they interact, and you see who's a daddy girl or a bossy wife, who's a wimp and who's dominating and who'se domineering. These are all subtleties one observes.

Needs: Agree. How about a Cayenne ? It's fast, it's German, it's luxurious (a Porsche, after all) and it's got 4 doors. You drop the kids, and pick-up a young lady a two minutes later.

Handling objections is of paramount importance (Sometimes triggering them helps, too. I know it may sound weird, but triggering an objection on a point early on when the objection doesn't really matter (because there's no action tied to it at that time) is useful for when you go over that point later because the objection was already triggered earlier (or about another, less important point)).

I haven't sold a $100M for anyone, but let's say I have a slight knack for enabling people to do what they really want to do, but didn't find a way to.

I follow up but never a response. Do you think its good to bug them following up more and more?