Your Sales Team Cannot Save You

  • July 3, 2024
  • Nathan Blew
  • 2 min read

In talking with prospective clients, we encounter a good number that have trouble getting – or keeping – traction with customers. In many cases the founder developed an idea after talking to a number of target customers, acquired some capital, and turned the idea into a solution that, in the early stages, they were able to sell.

Then they got stuck. They started hearing from prospects, “We love what you’re doing, but…” or “Tell us when you’re have x…” but no one buys. Their win rates are dismally low and their sales cycles long.

In many cases the leadership team then decides they either 1) need sales staff to help them grow revenues, or 2) they believe they can stubbornly work through the problem, so in the meantime they start preparing the engineering team to scale. Both of these moves burn critical capital and don’t address the actual issue: they do not understand the target customers’ problems.

We cannot create value for customers without deeply understanding their problems. How do we do this? By listening to our customers every week.

It’s usually at this point that we hear, “But that’s what my sales team is for!”

Sales professionals aren’t typically trained to get prospects talking about their problems. In the overwhelming majority of sales meetings we attend for clients, the sales team does almost all of the talking. To excavate customer problems it’s necessary to listen, not to talk about solutions.

Ask customers and prospects about the times when they are frustrated, when they feel they look foolish, or when they feel they’re screwing up or wasting time.

Get them to tell their stories. Take detailed notes and distill them into digestible insights to share with the rest of your team. Revise the map of all opportunities you discover. Repeat.

A business cannot succeed if it doesn’t deeply understand its target customers. In our experience, this means doing discovery every week.