There is no such thing as a sales call

A reframe, whether or not you like sales

I don’t know about you, but I used to feel super stressed in sales calls.

I thought my job was to probe, find pain points, persuade, unveil my product, nail messaging.

Finding PMF, and keeping PMF, requires the exact opposite approach. As I’ve written before, persuasion is the enemy of product-market fit.

Founders have a hard time with this idea. When we have a call with a prospective customer, the “I need to convince them my product is good” switch goes on in our minds, and we wind up blathering on about our story and vision and product and… wind up getting ghosted.

Here’s how you turn that switch off: There is NO SUCH THING as a sales call.

In a conversation that we would normally think of as a sales call, there are two options:

1. They have demand, in which case they pull for more information about our product (in which case, it’s not really a sales call, it’s more a “help them make progress” call)

2. They don’t have demand, in which our attempts at persuading or pushing are almost certainly counterproductive (in which case, we can call this a “research” call)

So… it’s either a “help them make progress” call or a “research” call. No such thing as a sales call.

This might seem minor, but it really isn’t. Here’s why:

When you stop thinking it’s a sales call, your approach to generating meetings changes. Instead of sending 0.2% response-rate spammy salesy messages based on templates from some stupid 2017 HubSpot blog post, you can pretty much reach out under any pretense. Because it’s never a sales call.

As you find people with demand, you can adjust your targeting for who exactly you speak with. So more of your calls wind up being “help them make progress” calls.

So go have 10-20+ non-sales-calls per week. No excuses.

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