A few weeks back David Cummings wrote about The Double Sale. A sales rep he was speaking with about selling the different softwares he has been selling through his career quipped about his latest job: “now, I don’t have to make the double sale”.
The Double Sale – Cummings goes on to explain – “is when you have to first sell the prospect on why they even need your product, and then the second sale is your actual product.” This is true for product that is tracking early developments in a market (Drift and Intercom in Conversational Marketing for instance) or any AI driven product where the usefulness or availability of big data to train the algorithms are in early stage. However while riding the right trend the double sale will make way for single sale in due course.
So what do you, as a startup founder, do to tackle this obvious challenge that your sales team / process will face? You need to lead with content and education as a core thrust, remove all gated content and build awareness through Smarketing and ensure your early users become your ambassadors using all tricks and tools in the PLG arsenal. Do not use your expensive sales resource to educate your market even if you can afford (you raised VC money). Sales people become sales people because they like to solve prospects problems and enjoy the adrenaline of a close. Making a teacher out of her is a bad idea.
If you think you are shadowing an early trend (like we are, with our Buyer Seller Engagement Platform Pitch.Link is tracking the shift of the transaction initiative from the Seller(supply) to the Buyer(demand)) your first sales hire should be a Marketing hand.
Link to David’s post here :
The Double Sales https://davidcummings.org/2019/04/13/the-double-sale/
