Amos Schwartzfarb was an English major turned rock climber who accidentally stumbled into entrepreneurship and sales.
Now, with 6 startups under his belt, and with experience advising dozens more as the head of TechStars Austin, he’s distilled major sales lessons into his book: Sell More Faster: the Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups (which was part of the Sales for Nerds bookshelf giveaway).
In this conversation, we talk about the strange path Amos took to sales (even by the standards of this podcast), and some of his early struggles with sales, and what helped him get much more effective.
We also dig into the W3 framework (who?, what?, why?) that Amos lays out in the book, including:
When to narrow or broaden your niche
The difference between customer development and sales, and when and how to do each one
Why the important part of “what?” is what are they buying, not what are you selling
The importance of “digging the hole”– doing the actual work, and what that means
The Wine
We got to enjoy some Qupe Syrah from Santa Barbara county. Highly recommended.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
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Tukan Das, CEO of LeadSift, comes from a computer science background, doing his research on sentiment analysis. He used machine learning to analyze topic-based sentiments, like “I love Steve Jobs’ vision, but I hate the latest iPhone”, which has positive and negative sentiments in the same sentence. (Tukan notes that computers have even more trouble with sarcasm than people.)
Tukan was comfortable writing code, not with sales and marketing. So when he started LeadSift, he hired a sales person. This was a mistake, because he had a “glorified idea”.
At that stage, “it’s almost impossible for an outside salesperson to sell.”
It took almost a year to realize the problem, and then Tukan had to step in, after a lot of developers building custom code based on sales requests that weren’t really the right fit. When Tukan started running sales, he first insisted that they couldn’t give anything away. People had to pay some non-zero fee. Then he switched from month-to-month to 90 day paid pilots. (They picked $99/month, almost out of thin air. One prospect insisted on paying $500. From that point on, they went with $500.)
For the first 2 years, they focused on outbound emails. In 2016, they got about 6 meetings per 100 contacts. 20% of those meetings that were a fit became customers. So they got about 1 customer per 100 contacts.
Tukan emphasizes that each contact required several emails, LinkedIn follow up, and a lot of persistence. About 30% of the emails are personalized, 70% is template. (Note that LeadSift has some capabilities to make this easier.)
They also got rid of their slide deck presentation. (Hallelujah! How much time have we all wasted in PowerPoint hell?) They would tell stories based on the specific needs of the prospect, along the lines of John Livesay’s better selling through storytelling.
Tukan also learned to not take rejection personally. Sometimes people would come back later when the timing was better. Sometimes they don’t. It’s ok.
After a seemingly successful sales meeting with a Fortune 100 prospect, followed by ghosting, one of Tukan’s advisors gave him some great advice:
Customers who do not understand your value proposition don’t owe you anything.
So now Tukan asks people to tell him upfront if there’s not a good fit.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
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Who’s better at telling the story of what you do for your clients than your clients? Social proof is a huge boost to trust and sales. (Do you want to go to an unknown restaurant, or one recommended by a friend?)
Meg Cumby started out in journalism, worked in government communications, and started freelancing (not on purpose). She realized the need that other consultants had to gather and edit testimonials and case studies. Meg attended a freelancing conference, and was talking to another attendee about the trouble with getting testimonials. Meg wanted to interview, as she did in journalism, not just write. However, initially Meg thought there wasn’t a market here.
The focus on testimonials didn’t happen overnight. Meg knew she had something during a group coaching session with Kai Davis, and another freelancer vented about how hard it was to get testimonials.
Meg tried to just have more conversations and notice when people get really interested and ask a lot of questions.
When she started consulting, her first clients came from past relationships.
When should you ask for a testimonial?
When you’ve wrapped up a project or when they’ve seen results.
After a big win in a long project.
In other words, when the client is going to be enthusiastic and able to talk about how you have helped.
Set the expectation from the beginning that you’ll do a wrap-up call for feedback and if there’s positive feedback, you may want to use some of that in a testimonial.
Meg recommends recording the call (she is a journalist, after all) and using a transcription service. Personally, I just take notes.
Video testimonials are even better– more compelling, but harder for you and the clients. It can get expensive to do this professionally, if that’s the expectation for your prospects. If you’re just getting started with testimonials, start with written testimonials. Don’t make it harder. (Meg has a ton of testimonials on her website, MegCumby.com, and they are all text.)
What makes an effective testimonial?
It’s about the client, not you. (Sound familiar?) What challenges did they face and what results did they get?
What objections or anxieties did they have before they hired you?
He has 6 questions, and Meg has massaged them for consulting and added some more.
What was the challenge that led you to engage with me?
What hesitations or concerns did you have before engaging with me?
What made your choose to work with me?
What did you find as a result of this project? (And why was that important?)
What specific feature or benefit did you like most about the service you received?
What are 2-3 other benefits?
What could have improved or done better, even with the benefit of hindsight? (Makes it easier for the client to deliver negative feedback.)
Would you recommend me to others?
Why?
Editing Testimonials
The order of the questions should provide a natural flow. Make sure you surface the objection(s) and hesitation(s) to provide a more compelling testimonial. And use real names (and company and title for B2B, location for B2C) and pictures, if you can. Try to get more than one, but any testimonial is better than no testimonials. (Meg notes that she’s working on getting headshots for her testimonials because she’s having technical challenges with her website template.)
Include relevant testimonials in proposals.
Before all else, just get a testimonial up on your site. You can always improve, add more, add video, etc.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
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Laura Briggs is a former middle school teacher, so nothing phases her. 😉 Like so many young teacher, the structure of the educational system left her burned out and she entered the digital freelancing economy as a freelance SEO writer.
She’s done TEDx talks on freelancing, and just released her first book, Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business.
In this episode, Laura pulls back the cover on the mysteries of SEO, which can seem so daunting, complicating, and time-consuming that many of us punt on it. Punting is not a great move. Here are some key things to take away:
The biggest misconception is the feeling that SEO is so complex that you have to pay someone thousands of dollars per month.
The first thing you need to do is figure out the most important keywords for your business. “For your business” means the words that your customers use to describe their problems, not the the words you might want to use to describe your offerings.
You can use tools like UberSuggest to help find keywords.
YouTube (the world’s 2nd biggest search engine) is also useful. Just start typing in the search bar and see what YouTube suggests.
What do people describe as their biggest problems, when you meet with prospects in person or on the phone.
Excluding bad fit visitors is as useful as including good fits. You can be explicit about who is a good or bad fit, right on the page.
How many keywords do you need? (Keep in mind that “keyword” is really a “key phrase”, of 3-6 words, not a single word.)
Use the “keyword” about once per 100 words. Don’t “stuff” the keyword unnaturally into content in an attempt to trick Google. Write for the human reader first.
Use specific “long tail keywords” to get more specific, and get traffic from your ideal prospects. For example, ranking for “tennis shoes” is going to be hard, because you’re competing with folks like Nike. But if you say “the best tennis shoes for marathon runners”, you can target much better.
You can link to blog posts, which can provide more variation than the “static” service pages on your site.
Post at least once per week. (!!!)
You can post about your core business, but also “complimentary content”, like “what do eat before you play tennis.”
Create a schedule that you can sustain.
Work in the medium you enjoy, and then repurpose (for example, if you are comfortable talking, then record a video and have someone transcribe it as a blog post, or vice versa).
Backlinks are hard because you don’t have control (on multiple levels). Work on the stuff you can control first. Link properly within your own site, and also link to resources that you cite in your writing. For example, in writing for attorneys, Laura might cite research from hospitals or government sources.
Remember that the human reader is the priority. Even if you can somehow trick Google into sending you traffic, what’s going to happen if you don’t write for your ideal visitor?
How much time do you need? You need to spend some time upfront. But, once you have a routine, you can batch, bimonthly or monthly, by setting up a calendar and creating a lot of posts or videos or whatever else. This should take at minimum 2 hours per week, but again, you can batch your work. Do what works for you.
For example, Laura prefers to carve out one day per month to crank on content. Even for YouTube, Laura will switch shirts between videos and crank out 4 videos. (Too bad this strategy is dangerous for Sales for Nerds.)
One awesome gem from the book, regardless of whether you’re a freelance writer: the deadlines that you commit to are up to you. Don’t drive yourself crazy.
The Wine
Laura is enjoying some red sangria (“the way I get my serving of fruit”).
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
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Steve Benson is the CEO of Badger Mapping, an app that literally helps sales reps solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, one of the canonical hard problems in computer science, and also very important in the real world. While Steve works in mapping and has a degree in geography, he’s got a background in field sales, becoming Google’s top enterprise sales rep in 2009.
Yet he didn’t have a grand plan to combine his love of geography with practical real-world careers.
He started his post-MBA career in sales at IBM, but was only passionate about the software, not the hardware and services. Joining Google and being close to the Google Maps team, he had a lot of geographical thoughts swirling in his head.
How to run a successful sales meeting:
Get in the right headspace before the meeting. Focus on value. Describe the product like you’re describing a vacation. There’s a different sound in your voice than if you’re describing a product that we’re not really excited about.
Have a pre-call before the meeting. Make sure you know the #1 thing your contact wants to get out of the meeting. Set an agenda.
Don’t just drone on about features– talk to the pain and the needs.
You’re not trying to do training– you can do that after the sale.
Wrap up, make sure you’ve covered what the prospect needs, and agree on the next steps. Set aside time to do this.
Flip the script and put your “dinosaur feature” at the beginning.
How to handle price objections (and other objections, including disagreement among your champion’s colleagues) proactively. (Also see Terry Hansen’s episode on objection prevention and handling.)
The Wine
Steve enjoyed some 2015 Smoking Loon cabernet sauvignon.
I had some 2014 Wind Gap Ni-Pente Pinot Noir.
Where to find Steve…
Badger Maps— if you spend your day driving all over the place to meet prospect, partners, and clients, mention this podcast to get 2 months free.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
Get alerted when there are new episodes (1x/month):
I got to know Sean (and his cohost, Jonathan Taylor) when I joined them on their Persuasion by the Pint podcast.
Since we are clearly kindred spirits when it comes to podcasting, and Sean happened to be visiting Austin and I hadn’t really done an episode about copywriting, we got together to give you some great stories and practical tips on writing copy, which I know is a tough challenge for a lot of people.
Sean was also a good sport and departed from his usual pint into the wine world.
In this episode, learn:
The amazingly simple way Sean made $250 in high school to buy Christmas presents for his family and girlfriend.
How Sean flunked out of school, joined the military, got a sales job, and made it into the top 30% but could never quite make it to the top.
How he started a business with his dad (“we just about killed each other”) and decided he had to do something else.
How he got down to his last $26, and how what he did with it changed the course of his life.
How he could charge double or triple what his competitors charged.
How to write copy that people actually want to read (and what people usually do instead).
Simple, practical tips that anyone can follow to create great copy, like:
Record your sales calls, transcribe them and tease out the words and phrases your prospects use.
Take a webinar or sales deck and turn each section or slide into an email.
If you have an FAQ section on your website, turn each one into an email. (Or maybe you don’t have an FAQ section, but you do get certain questions frequently.)
“If you were writing for a friend, how would you say it?”
The W.O.R.D. formula for developing copy
Win the reader’s attention.
Orchestrate the reader’s desire.
Resolve skepticism.
Determine next action. (Doesn’t have to be a sale– it might even be a “give” instead of an “ask”. You don’t have to get them all the way to the sale all at once. Make their path small, easy steps.)
Much, much more…
The Wine
Sean is a big beer drinker, but was a good sport. We did an easy drinking California Pinot, the Ampelos 2014 from Santa Rita Hills.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
Get alerted when there are new episodes (1x/month):
Rick is the VP of Sales and Marketing for National Association of Sales Professionals, so he’s like an uber meta-sales person, but that’s not how he started. He got a summer internship knocking on doors for a painting company. Learn about his journey, and hear Rick’s insights on sales psychology, including:
Why you’re a sales professional if you’re a business owner.
What he learned his first day doing door-to-door sales as an introvert, and how you can use it when dealing with your own inner psychology.
How Rick became the #1 sales rep for a Cisco integrator, outselling many people who had been there long before him.
How much time to give yourself to do research before a call.
How information gets conveyed (55% body language, 38% tone, 7% words). This is why talking on the phone loses so much information.
(Check out the show Lie to Me for more on how body language reveals a lot about us.)
The importance of finding mentors, and why it’s not as hard as you think.
Pre-framing (don’t just punt it to the prospect), re-framing (getting back on track), and de-framing (backing out gracefully if there isn’t a fit) are 3 great skills to learn.
Learn to ask questions gently, but persistently.
Sales is not about directing, it’s about aligning and redirecting. (Don’t attack someone, they will put up a wall.)
The one thing Rick would like people to fix: don’t focus on yourself.
The Wine
Rick brings some innovation to Sales for Nerds by having champagne.
I make a move to Burgundy with Chateau de Santenay Bourgogne Pinot Noir, which is definitely more earthy than the California Pinot I often drink, but still accessible and it doesn’t have the deep earth flavors some people don’t enjoy.
If you’ve ever struggled with a proposal, check out the “official” Sales for Nerds online course on Sales Proposals the Right Way (coupon link for listeners).
Get alerted when there are new episodes (1x/month):
Vanessa Van Edwards is lead investigator at the Science of People—a human behavior research lab. She is the national bestselling author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding With People, which was chosen as one of Apple’s Most Anticipated Books of the year. Her work has been featured on CNN, NPR and Fast Company. She has written columns on the science of success for Entrepreneur Magazine and the Huffington Post. Vanessa started her study of people as a shy teenager, trying to figure out how people interacted. This turned into a lifelong pursuit. When I read her book, I wanted her to come on the show. Vanessa was kind enough to take time away from her 10 week old daughter to share her story and wisdom. There’s a lot of great stuff in here, including
When to practice your new tactics (and when not to).
One of the few things Reuben did right in college, and how you can apply this technique right now to help you.
Why we subconsciously use defensive body language in work settings, and what we can do about it (another great VVE technique).
Starting a conversation vs “sparking” a conversation.
Why everyone should do 6 months in sales of some kind.
Vanessa’s sales tip– don’t focus on sales, focus on stories.
Don’t hand out your props at the beginning of the meeting.
How to let other people impress you, instead of trying to impress them.
What to say, where to stand, and what to do at networking events.
How to share stories effectively, and how to know if your stories are too long.
How to ask for advice
Bonus: A tip that Vanessa has never mentioned before when people ask if you know someone…
Howard’s End, by E.M. Forster. One of the great works of English literature (so I’m told) with a great motif: “Only connect!”
Other Tools & Resources:
Check out Vanessa’s site Science of People for all kind of goodies on improving your social interactions.
The wine
As mentioned, Vanessa had to take a rain check on the wine because she has a newborn that she’s feeding, but in her honor, I got to enjoy something from one of her favorite Oregon wineries, Argyle (it’s the 2013 Reserve Pinot Noir). It’s got a bit of fruit and bit of earth, but not whelming, and it’s got more body than a lot of Willamette pinots. Â Â Â
How do you differentiate yourself when your competitors are also experts?
And would you want to take advice on differentiated service from someone who spent over a decade working for a cable company?
It sounds crazy, but in this case, you should.
Michael Katz did in fact spend over a decade at a cable company. But then, through a series of happy accidents, he became Chief Penguin at Blue Penguin Development, helping small services companies market better. He’s also been quoted in the WSJ, the NYT, Business Week Online, Forbes, Inc, USA Today and more. Plus, he’s won an award for humor.
Hear about those happy accidents (well, they seem happy now) and more, including:
How he quit his stable job during the internet boom and failed.
How he accidentally stumbled on a niche and how that turned into a great business.
Why he doesn’t care about SEO or Google ranking.
Michael’s 3 step process for being successful in services (some of this advice may start to sound familiar to regular listeners).
Michael’s “Sports Illustrated” Rule for successful marketing newsletters.
How your marketing is like going to the gym (and Michael saves me a lot of time, right on the show)
How Seth Godin has been stealing his best ideas for years (remember the humor bit)
How being authentically yourself at work and beyond makes life so much easier.
I enjoyed a(nother) glass of 2013 Franciscan Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. A nice, up the middle of the road cab. (It’s pretty expensive on the Franciscan.com site, but you can get it for $15-18.)
Few things cause as much anxiety as pricing. I get a lot of questions about this, so I decided to do an experimental episode just to delve into this topic.
We go into:
Why pricing is important.
Why it’s easier to underprice than overprice (and what that means for your pricing now).
What better pricing can do for your business and your life.
Vanessa Van Edwards is lead investigator at the 
   
How do you differentiate yourself when your competitors are also experts?
I enjoyed a(nother) glass of 2013 Franciscan Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. A nice, up the middle of the road cab. (It’s pretty expensive on the Franciscan.com site, but you can get it for $15-18.)
.. and the beer…