I’m a Steve Blank fan. His book 4 Steps of the Epiphany is required reading for any entrepreneur starting a business. Steve blogs about a range of topics, and his best posts are about the blocking and tackling of building startup companies.
The other day I was discussing one of his posts with a friend of mine. In this post he discusses how startup founders need to be ruthless in sales. In response to reading this post, my friend responded “isn’t this just BANT?”
It’s a great question, and the answer is no! While BANT is a fabulous sales process, it’s not good at helping you be ruthless. Let’s look at a few examples:
- Why won’t you buy my product this [ month / year ]?
Every sales person gets excited by a good meeting. When the prospect “gets it” – they asked the right questions, understand the value prop, seemed to be in lock step with you on how it all fits – these are amazing meetings.
However, no sales process ever goes from that first amazing meeting directly to a deal. It’s rare to escape a proof of concept, additional meetings with other stakeholders, and meetings with procurement. At every step of the sales process there are landmines you need to be aware of and address. Yet it happens every time -, we always get excited about these first great meetings and don’t ask about what could go wrong and derail a deal from getting done.
The best salespeople help their prospects lean into “failure mode” – thinking about where things can go wrong. You can do this without being overly negative too – simply asking “how do deals typically get done here?” can illuminate a lot of these potential potholes. - Sign something – NOW
I have done many NDA’s in my career. However, I’m not actually a big fan of NDA’s – I have always built my reputation and businesses based on trust, and I typically won’t share confidential information with someone until I can trust them, NDA or not.
With that said, an NDA is a great way to test the process of how your stakeholder gets administrative work done. If the NDA takes weeks to get done, be ready for a very drawn out procurement process. If the NDA is super quick, that’s ideal, but does not sufficiently rule out future hurdles. My recommendation is to keep giving your prospects future “tests” to learn how they operate on the administrative side of a deal, not just the technical side. The more, and the sooner, they loop in other people in their organization, the better.
One other idea that I am a fan of is the “fully cancellable order”. As a sales person you won’t get commission until it turns into a full commitment, however there’s no better way to measure a prospects interest in that commitment than a cancellable order. So why not offer this early in the process versus entering a free POC where you take on all the risk? - How does your budget process really work?
Budgeting has changed post-Covid. Today, budgets change at the drop of a hat. Over the past 4 years, I’ve had more prospects tell me that the budget was pulled than in all my prior years of sales combined.
Today people are looking to “level up” their prior purchases, meaning they won’t invest in something new until their old product is up for renewal. One technique to address this is to offer to pay off the remainder of their existing contracts to move the deal along faster. If they won’t even consider this, they may not be as serious as you thought. This signals that the incumbent product is a formidable competitor.
In order to be truly successful in Sales, you have to turn down your happy ears and make sure you are (a) asking the correct, and often tough questions, and (b) always closing on something every step of the way. It may feel awkward or pushy, but it’s simply good sales hygiene. Get into this habit. These habits will increase your rate of success and save you and your prospects a lot of wasted time.
