How Fog Creek learned to do sales part 3

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.

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.

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.