
How Fog Creek learned to do sales part 3 - buzzcut
http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most-basic-things-your-company-needs-to-know-about-sales-part-3-of-4/?fccmp=HNsls3
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bmccormack
One thing Dan didn't mention (but perhaps alluded to), is that an objection
does not immediately translate into a request to engineering to add feature X.
For example, in Dan's discussion of priority and severity, he didn't go
running to the development team telling them they needed to add severity to
FogBugz in order to nail a big client. This allows developers to focus on good
long-term design decisions that hopefully make the product better.

Granted, if you hear enough of the same objection, it may be something that
you want to add to your product, but you want to keep that as part of an
existing engineering workflow instead of treating every object as an urgent
request to help get a sale.

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ry0ohki
A crucial part about "closing"... don't allow them to give you an open ended
"thanks we'll run this by our boss" type response. People usually just want to
end the sales process, but do not want to reject you outright. You should
always get concrete next steps. If they have to "ask their boss", then setup a
call the next week to find out the bosses answer. It's much better to wiggle a
firm "no" out of a prospect then to get a definite "maybe". "Maybe" ties up
the sales funnel with junk leads.

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leftnode
This is a really good article for developers to transition into salesmen.

When I first started selling my software and services, I ran into the problem
of: "What if they get mad because component X doesn't work like they thought
it did and want a refund? What if they yell at me? What if something goes
wrong!?"

Tons of different avenues you can convince yourself will happen. First, chill
out, they haven't happened yet. Second, deal with them when they do.

I once worked for a company that trained it's salespeople to be hard sellers
and gave tons of ways to try to do this (it was for a gym and I was a personal
trainer; gyms are notorious for this sales tactic). Because I didn't feel
comfortable with that (since I hate it when people do it to me), I did the
exact opposite. I was the softest salesperson around, but would find other
non-threatening hacks to try to get people to buy personal training. Within a
month I was the number personal trainer (in sales) for Dallas/Ft. Worth using
my tactics. My clients loved me.

We'd probably all be a lot better off using softer sales tactics.

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anamax
> I did the exact opposite. ... My clients loved me.

Yes.

> We'd probably all be a lot better off using softer sales tactics.

That doesn't follow.

Suppose that 10% of the population responds best to soft sales tactics and
that the other 100 sales folk are using hard tactics. You got that 10% to
yourself while the other 100 folks are sharing 90% of the sales. Your numbers
will be better despite using the "wrong" technique for the majority of the
population.

The correct strategy is to find an underserved subpopulation. If enough
"everyone else" is using a given strategy, the exact opposite is likely to
work well. If a mix of strategies are being used, you need more information.

