Don't enjoy doing sales calls? Why?
Hey all!
If there's one thing a lot of technical founders have in common, it's that they don't enjoy or look forward to doing sales calls.
I talked a bit about how to get into a mindset that makes doing sales 'fun' in my latest Sales for Founders podcast episode.
But I thought it'd be interesting to open up to the group here, too...
What is it about doing sales calls that you don't like?
Not confident because I feel like my product does not have product-market fit
kanrails.com
Interesting!
WHy do you feel like that?
And how are you planning on changing it?
The product is currently very general, like Trello/Asana/Monday/Pipefy, though nowhere near their feature maturity and traction.
I am slowly steering the product toward solving a particular specific problem, e.g. talent pipeline, customer support handling. But problem is that the product started as a general workflow tool. So the product itself is the problem now, and trying to change it is a lot of work and rethinking
I don't know if I would say I don't like sales calls. I would say that I do not feel I know enough to do it right.
There are different types of sales calls too.
Cold calling/Prospecting - check out the sales subreddit, even professional sales people dreaded doing these and treat these as the "necessary evil"
Demos - these are much easier because the prospect is at least interested in checking out your product
Discovery calls - if there is a services component or more enterprise-y sales, these could be energy draining because you might have to do a lot of prep and the meeting can go in many different directions
For me personally, I found that it's mostly the self talk. When a 5% success rate for cold calling could be a huge success, it's difficult to translate that in the engineering world where you aim to have 100% of your tests passing. I find that I swing between the extremes of, I just want to be as helpful as possible regardless of the prospects buying to I need to make quota and full on Tony Robbin mode. 😅