Even Incoming Sales Calls Are Dead
Just after getting off a call with a potential client today, I happened across Seth Godin’s post about sales calls:
I wonder if the sales call has a lot of life left in it.
Before you faint, let me get my terms straight: I think a sales call is a meeting (in person or on the phone) when a salesperson endeavors to sell something to a prospect, and where the prospect is doing the salesperson some sort of service by being there.
He is absolutely right, and I am willing to take it one step further. Not only are outgoing sales calls dying, but (in our space at least) so are incoming sales calls.
What I mean by this is the old way of transferring any sales calls over to a true “Sales Guy” that can answer every question to a T and truly sell the caller on the product every time is dying quickly.
My call today was a consultancy that called me to ask about training. A genuinely interested buyer called and had his colleague on the speaker phone. They proceeded to pepper me with very common questions for businesses evaluating a potential vendor:
- Do you offer onsite training sessions?
- What are some of your larger customers? Would I have heard of any of them?
- How can I be sure you will be around in the future?
- etc. etc.
If I was a slick sales guy I would have great well-rehearsed answers to all these questions because they are very common in the software industry, but alas I am a developer/operations/business/support/integrations/sales guy and I really don’t have time to B.S. our customers. Therefore, I responded with reasonable and truthful answers, that perhaps this person did not want to hear:
- There are no onsite training sessions, just an easy to use application with good online help
- Most of our customers are small consultancies that you would not have heard of
- Our application has been live for over two years, our business has been here for over three and we are here running the business and answering the phone from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Eastern
Most of my answers came down to the fact that we run a business focused exclusively on running and improving this application. We have designed it to be easy to use and to sell itself, so please give it a try.
I hope they do try it out and I hope they weren’t turned off by my answers, but if they were – so be it.
Copyright © 2000-2009
9:37 pm
Did you get the sale?
You might consider not answering his questions. Instead, ask him why he is asking these questions and why it is important to him or his company.
Although your ASP service might solve his problems, he will probably not be able to convince superiors to use a service that isn’t used by company’s like his.
Of course, if you don’t want these big companies to use it, than that’s fine. But, your sales approach just disqualified you. Instead, you should be disqualifying your prospects.
11:41 pm
[...] I was reading through some of the archives on the FreshBooks blog and found a great response to Seth Godin’s post about the death of the sales call. It sounds like the guys at FreshBooks are getting some of the typical inquiries that most small business software companies dread. [...]
4:32 pm
FreshBooks’ niche is probably not the enterprise customer that has been around for 50 years. Those businesses already have processes that are fairly rigid. The prospective client with whom you spoke sounds like such a customer… one which would expect FreshBooks to adapt and conform to its existing processes. Freshbooks’ niche, in my opinion, is the smaller company that lacks an in-house billing department and can effectively utilize a good billing platform without any preconceived notions about how that platform might operate.
What is disconcerting is that the consultancy felt that your product was suitable for the prospective client. The prospective client, being uneducated began asking the standard “I have no idea what your product does, so tell me about your business” questions. The prospective client put you on the defensive and that’s where you stayed. Here are some responses you might have given, instead of telling the client what he/ she didn’t want to hear (and I don’t think that it’s any less truthful than how you responded):
Do you offer onsite training sessions?
In an effort to keep our service pricing down, we do not generally supply on-site training. Instead, we provide a very intuitive, user-friendly product that is unlikely to require any special training. We do offer on-line training materials, however. For larger customers, we do make exceptions. Depending upon the size of your business, we could schedule on-site training, provided that you are willing to commit to x,y,z (surely for $10,000-$20.000 someone familiar enough with your service would be willing to provide an on-site training session).
What are some of your larger customers? Would I have heard of any of them?
A better question would be whether we service any customers similar to yourself. What is your industry, how many customers would you need to invoice, and how many employees do you have? Many of our clients find that the enterprise-class one-size-fits-all approach that you allude to are unwieldy and productivity sapping. Why would you want a solution that requires 5-10 full-time employees to run when you only have 1 employee that will be using it?
How can I be sure you will be around in the future?
How can you be sure any company will be around in the future. This is the 21st century, where mergers are common, and size does not equate with security. We are a privately-held company and thus somewhat insulated from mergers and buyouts that leave customers out in the cold. We have been profitable for the last x years and have a rapidly growing customer base, currently numbering 60,000.
I am not sure that sales calls are dead. I think that the traditional “sales person” is being redefined in the IT world, as that “sales person” is often likely to be the CEO, a developer, or even a client that is making a commission on the sale. What took place was most definitely a sales call. You were the salesman (with perhaps some help from the consultancy) and the call didn’t go well. As businesses without vast (or possibly any) sales departments, it is our responsibility as company representatives to improve our selling ability even if that is outside the traditional job scope. If a properly educated customer decides that your service doesn’t suit their needs, that’s fine. I blame myself, however, when a poorly educated customer makes that same decision since I failed to educate the customer.