From "advice" to "sales"

A simple trick that helps founders sell

Hi all —

Reframe PSA → Getting solid traction on the Fractional GTM Cofounder offering (link here). Have availability for 1 more company in July - reach out if you know someone who would be a good fit!

As a founder, you’re (probably) able to schedule a lot of “advice calls” with potential customers.

You reach out with an email like this:

Hi {name},

Saw your recent LinkedIn post about {topic} and would love to get your advice on what I’m building! Looks like we both worked at McKinsey too!

You schedule the call, then have a bunch of mental angst because you’re a nice person: “I don’t want this person to think I catfished them into a sales meeting!”

You then do one of two things:

1. Go hard into the sales pitch, because life’s short and YOLO

2. Spend the entire time asking for advice & praying they try to buy your product.

Option 1 tends to work better than Option 2, but neither works great.

Here I give to you the ultimate phrase to transition from an advice call to a sales call:

“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask…”

After that phrase, you can say just about anything… and it won’t come across as salesy and off-putting.

Here’s how it works → You ask a few good advice questions, get solid feedback, and then say:

“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask this - it sounds like this could be very helpful to you, would you be open to exploring buying this for your organization?”

Or:

“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask this - would you be willing to put me in touch with Jim from your org?”

Or, as a friend plans to attempt:

“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask - do you have a spare $100k in your budget to do me a solid?”