If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.
It could come off as standoffish but when used correctly it's very effective because it gets the person on the other end to open up more and you try to get to the bottom of their objections.
But "Are you sure increasing your user retention isn't worth something to you?" or something like that maybe.
"So you have perfect user retention then?" is a better question because you know for a fact that they can't have 100% user retention and they know that as well so it forces further dialogue.
There are definitely better examples I could come up with, but now I'm stuck with this one because it's what I quickly typed out earlier.
Anecdotally, it feels as though it leans on a lot on the targets level of politeness and decorum to want to continue the conversation. I favour polite but abrupt and seemingly heartless conversation enders for this reason.
"Hello sir, would you like to help a child keep eating for $2 a month?" "No, thank you!"
Back to this specific case, I guess the trick is to deliver your question almost rhetorically with both parties knowing that it leaves an answer that is common knowledge. Kinda like safe small talk about the weather.
Keeps the conversation going buying time for another hook to be deployed.
It's not sarcastic, it's serious and that's the point.
Obviously they don't have 100% retention, so this question might open them up to talk about their retention instead of saying "no, it's fine like it is".
It doesn't matter how good your retention currently is, if the product can boost it even by a couple of percent it would probably pay for itself many times over.
I think you could make the argument that saying "no, we don't need it" before even trying to understand the value prop is just as demeaning.
Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is going to be "fuck you" followed by ending the call.
Arrogance might work in used car sales but it's not a panacea for closing the deal.
I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.
They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.
Oh please. Not every product that's applicable to a given business would necessarily be beneficial to that business.
I get it, sales people have to drink the kool aid, but some humility is needed. Your product isn't right for everyone, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you can improve the quality of your lead generation.
I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.
The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.
So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.
People hating spam will complain about it, people not hating it will not bother with commenting.
And HN may have higher share of people more affected by spam (surveys send to emails scrapped from github and so on) and more likely to be able to find needed services - what makes beneficial cold calling even more rare.
And I guess that my reaction is unusual. I moved to another phone service after previous one cold called me offering a loan on bank service operating under their brand - and that was a sole reason.
I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.
>If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.
That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No, almost certainly not. But, they might derive a massive cost savings, time savings, increased employee satisfaction, or other efficiencies by using whatever you're selling and your job in sales is to get them to listen which is the hard part.
This is a fiction that salespeople tell themselves to help them sleep at night. I use twitter not because someone from Twitter Sales sold it to me but because I sought it out of my own volition.
Only bad products need sales. Good products can thrive on marketing alone because people want good products.
I would presume that sentence is a quickly typed paraphrase. If you presume they are a competent salesperson, you can also presume that they say it less antagonistically in real life. Edit: Or perhaps they have found that antagonism is the most profitable solution for the business to turn around a “no” answer.
The comment to which I'm responding explicitly argues that the phrase, verbatim, is a good sales tactic.
i.e. when I read your comment it struck me as much more revealing about you than about the salesman, his technique, or his product.