How to Sell Anything to Anyone – Mike Taber – MicroConf 2013

0:00[Music]

0:07[Music] so as Rob said my name is Mike Faber and to give you a little bit of background because I know that there's a lot of people have asked me this over the past couple of days see there's these are some of the things that I'm involved in I own in three different companies I own Moon River software which is an S corporation and then I own Moon River consulting which kind of spun off of that because I started doing a lot of consulting work and I really needed to separate the two so that's the second S corporation that I own and then I also and co-owned the

0:35microphone or Academy with Rob in terms of the things that I work on obviously auto shark as Rob said Altiris training ComNet forum I have my blog we work on the microphone or Academy with Rob and then the podcast and then micro comp and then as Rob said October 5th and 6th of this year we'll be doing micro comp Europe and Prague so beyond that and speaking with a couple of people last night I realized that I'm also known as something else because I hand out all the drinks the drink tickets so I'm apparently known as the liquor fairy so I wanted to share this with you it's

1:18not just funny but in many ways it's true it really rings true to the things that we go through and we talk about here at micro comp but the fact is that a lot of the things that you do and you try you know you just have to try and fail at them to figure out whether it's going to work or not and you go through that process and sometimes it's painful it really can be but the intent here is of course to help educate people and help them learn from other people's mistakes so that you don't have to go through them yourself so I'm going to talk about three

1:49different things today first one I want to talk about is why people buy things so my presentation is largely geared towards sales just quick show of hands here how many people actually just sell stuff like her they're directly involved in sales okay how many people talk to customers more hands what about you have you ever emailed a customer or just answered a support ticket or fixed a bug for them every single one of you who just raised your hand is in some way involved in the sales process and it's not necessarily obvious at all times but just by touching a customer in some way shape or form you are involved in the

2:29sales process you do affect them you do affect what they think and you also affect the impressions that they have of the things that you're working on the second thing I'm going to talk about is why you should stop selling software and that'll be a little controversial I'll get into that a little bit more and then the third thing is the importance of iterating on your sales process and I have a little I don't want to call it a skit but I'll definitely needed some volunteers to help me out with that so a few caveats on this first one is that sales is a learned skill just like

3:03anything else just like programming just like learning how to do marketing it is a skill that you can learn if you think that you're not good at sales you're probably wrong the fact is that it is a learned skill you can get better at it over time the second thing is that it is a process just much like software development you have to go through this process there's a lot of different steps a lot of people do it in different and there's not necessarily a right way to do sales for any given product there's a lot of things that you can do wrong but there's not necessarily hard

3:33and fast rules I said says you absolutely have to do these steps or it's not going to work sales can also be used for good or evil you can sell things you can be very good sales rep and sell some great products to people and they will love them and they will find them valuable you can also sell some pretty shady things so obviously take some of this with a grain of salt please try to sell stuff that actually improves people's lives there's a lot of stuff that you can sell that doesn't or you know in in no way shape or form makes the world better and the

4:02last thing is that it's never too late to iterate on your sales pitch because you can always tweak things you can always make modifications that will improve it or change the type of audience that you're going to get in touch with and they will resonate with them so as your product matures as you start to grow your market grow your business you iterate on your sales pitch because you're appealing to different people so those are important things to keep in mind so the first thing I want to talk about is is why do people buy things and there are six emotional triggers that people use to buy things

4:35and this is pretty much anything doesn't really matter whether it's b2b or b2c type you know products but there's two different ways that people look at those things there are things that well we'll take a look at them the the first one is making a decision based on greed if I make a decision now if I decide to buy this I will be rewarded my kids have got this down pat so they'll be to the store it's like can we get a Skylander and I swear if I ever get the cans on the guy who created those things I will murder him however they've got this down they

5:09understand that if they ask for it it might happen they might be able to get a Skylander the second one is altruism has anyone here heard of TOMS shoes yes so if you're not familiar with them basically what they do you buy shoes from them and they will take a second set of shoes and they will donate it to a third world developing country where people don't necessarily have shoes because shoes tend to be the primary way that people get infected and then they can't work they can't do anything brings the whole economy down basically terrible for everybody but the vast the big problem with this is that they don't

5:43have shoes so they get all these infections and lots of things lots of bad things happen but Tom's is really geared towards you know getting promoting people to buy through them and and evoking that sense of altruism the third one is if I decide if I make a decision now I'm gonna be seen as smart how many people here bought their microcon ticket within the first 48 hours virtually everyone it sold out in 52 hours so it was probably a very smart decision to buy that ticket quickly because if you didn't then chances are you ended up and down a waiting list or you need to you know win a ticket or

6:22talk to a sponsor there's lots of different reasons that you can make or there's lots of different of products that you can buy that are essentially sold through this this emotion of pride now I'm going to talk about some of the negative ones if I do not make a decision now then bad things will happen the entire insurance industry is sold on this any sort of security software if you're in insurance or you're in selling security software you have to be comfortable being able to sell your products based on fear it's just a fact I mean there's there are very few ways to sell certain products and fear and in

6:57many cases works next one whoops that's not good next one is envy your competitors are doing this so you should too otherwise you're gonna fall behind it's a very powerful way to position your products to your customers and in such a way that they're gonna look at that and say well if I don't make a decision now that my competition is going to win then the last one is shame if I don't make a decision now I'm going to look or feel stupid about this so those are the six core emotional triggers that you can use to key off of to try and sell your products and pretty much every single

7:39product falls into at least one of these categories now some of them can be can be kind of tied together you know you can you can create and create some opposite effects between them you know maybe you can do shame in Pride together or shame and fear there's lots of different ways to tie these together it really depends a lot on the type of products that you have and the market that you're going into so the next thing I'm going to talk about is the power of first impressions and I looked at some research from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and they did a study where

8:13they looked at a lot of different data and here's some of the here's a summary of some of the data and it shows you that based on different parts of your website for example over on the right-hand side it shows you the approximate amount of time that somebody spends looking at that particular piece of your website I think the most interesting part of this isn't necessarily that people spend six seconds six full seconds looking at a search box but the fact that if you look down here at written content it's five and a half seconds they spend more time looking at your navigation and your logo

8:43than they do on anything that you've written on your website that's kind of scary the reason that's scary which kind of leads into the next piece is that they also found as part of this study that when somebody brings up a website within two-tenths of a second they come up with a first impression that will be reinforced within 2.6 seconds by something else that they find on the page so what happens is their brain makes this very split decision that says I have this impression of your website and then their eyes will look on your website for something that finds that it will eventually find and reinforce that

9:18decision so it's something you have to be really careful about because that first impression is going to be very influential so it's kind of put that in perspective that 2/10 of a second is 200 milliseconds what happens if your website doesn't load for three seconds I think Josh Kaufman had mentioned yesterday that people who were looking at visual studio all they did was they put in a 30 second delay in the start time and they swore up and down that that product performed slower for the rest of the time and statistically that's just not possible because they made it so that that just couldn't happen but that first impression was

9:54reinforced and they just thought about it and it carried on with them another study by Google showed that if they were to increase the time that it took for search results to come back from about 100 to 400 milliseconds and they varied it a little bit what would happen is that they people would perform fewer searches and this was measurable they did it over millions and millions of searches there's I have some when these slides go public you guys can take a look at some of the the research behind it but Google goes into a lot of analysis and details on this and you know they're very

10:28systematic about it they want to make sure that they're getting these things right but this these numbers are kind of scary because it tells you that be based on the first impressions that people have and the fact that you know speed matters to people it can have a serious impact on your business Bertram gawronski from Western University has a different study where she essentially picked a bunch of people she gave them a first impression that was very specific and geared towards what she was trying to accomplish and then over the course of subsequent weeks she would give them conflicting information and what she found was that statistically people who

11:08received a specific first impression were far less likely to change that unless they were presented with multiple forms of conflicting information so what she would do is she would say you know here's a I know here's a picture and it's a meant to evoke some emotion and here's some here's some context about what's going on and it might be a happy you know some kids riding their bicycles or something like that and what she would do is then she would then take that and put it in context with other people who would have some sort of an opposite effect and what she found is that people did not change their minds

11:49about whatever the pictures were that she was presenting whatever the text was whatever the story whatever the context was if she showed a person and she said that they were evil later on she it was very very difficult for her to convince them that they no longer were evil so there's a lot of different resources there or a lot of a lot of research that goes along with that but the one thing that I took away from that was that if you can change if you have a bad first impression with somebody you can change it over time as long as you do it multiple content

12:17so if somebody comes your website they have a bad experience it loads slow or doesn't do what they're expecting you can overcome in that using like newsletters email follow-ups you know phone calls all sorts of different things you can get them to change their mind you know if they had a bad first impression but it does take time it's not gonna be overnight and it's gonna be work so here's the controversial controversial part is I'm going to tell you guys to stop selling software and the premise here is that people don't buy software and I'll come back to that in just a minute but I want to go

12:57through a different slide first this is Billy and his mom they live in Colorado they go skiing and Billy's mom wants him to be safe so she decides she takes him to the to the to the mountain goes into the shop it's to goes to look to buy him me a ski helmet and he's looking at all these different things and he sees this you know brand new ski helmet that he wants to buy it's like 200 bucks and she's like no no I really don't want to get that it's really expensive but he's like well you know it's for my safety and check it out

13:26bluetooth I can listen to music make phone calls while I'm skiing down the mountain at 80 miles an hour cuz that's safe and basically what he's looking for is he's looking for a self-esteem boost he's looking for a way to talk to his friends and say look I got this awesome helmet it's red it's got Bluetooth I can listen to music I can try to kill myself and it'll be awesome so of course you know she finally relents let's inhabit and then he says the mom you're skiing - shouldn't you be safe so of course she's like all right so she starts and goes and and looks through all the different

14:01helmets and then she finally decides that she's gonna get the same helmet now she's looking at the exact same features it's got bluetooth she can listen to music and make phone calls but the difference is that her valued end state is different than Billy's she's looking for peace of mind because she wants to be able to know that she can make a phone call from anywhere on that mountain and get in touch with Billy where's Billy he wants to be respected by his friends as a cool person it's the same product same features different end means for each of them they're looking for different things so

14:37you can your products to people in different ways you can sell the same products to different people and they will view it differently it will solve their problem whatever that problem may be even if they have different problems so the first example if people don't buy shampoo for example they buy clean and manageable hair they don't buy themes for their website they buy higher profits and better branding and they also don't buy KISSmetrics they buy processes to measure the results from their websites people hire you because of what you do for them not what you do people don't buy software they buy solutions to their problems

15:23whatever those problems may be you're not selling software you're selling a solution to somebody's problem you are selling a solution that will help them make their business better you're selling a solution that will help them analyze their business processes and execute on them better you will help them reach those emotional states where they will be able to get better profits better branding you know reinforce to those senses of greed that I think we all have because we want to have successful businesses we want to be successful so how do you go about this amazingly enough to figure out what it is that you are actually solving for

16:01people is you talk to your customers I don't know who thought of that but in talking to your customers it really creates two different problems and the first one is too much information and the second one is not enough so how do you go about solving that well the two the types of people that you have to talk to are the people who have just started using your product and the people who have just stopped using your product if you're not on a SAS model then people who stop using your product is much more difficult so I would advise getting into a SAS model very quickly if

16:32you have not launched your product there are other ways around it you can go to your competitor so you can ask them why they use their products you can ask them why they stopped using their product there are ways to basically hack those to make sure that you are getting the information that you need now notice the people you're not talking to you're not talking to the people who have used your product since Britney Spears was popular because quite frankly they're about as relevant they're not going to give you any information that you need they're not gonna tell you the stuff that you need to know in order to grow because

17:01they purchased your software when you were in a different place after six months year three years if they've been using their software for that long they purchase for completely different reasons that you're probably not focused on anymore because you were at a different point in your business at that point so the single most important question that you need to answer is what job does your products do - what does it do for the customer what problem is it solving for them has anyone heard of a Clayton Christensen okay he's a he's a Harvard professor he spoke at the business off for about two or three years ago and he gave an example

17:38of of essentially a mechanism or a EGIS was a case study where there was there was a fast-food restaurant who wanted to sell Mitch milkshakes and they wanted to sell more milk chase because they have high margins on and they want to be able to you know drive those milkshake sales so what they did was they did what everybody else would do and they brought in a bunch of people who were button were who were buying their milkshakes and they said well why do you buy our milkshakes and they said well this is why and they said well how can we make our milkshakes better well add more

18:06chocolate take out some chocolate you know make more flavors do this do that all these different things to make this this product butter so of course the fast-food chain goes back and does all these things throw it out there no effect in sales and they do it again and they do it again so of course you know big company does what any company does at that point and they bring in consultants and the consultant comes in and says okay well let me take a look at your data figure out what it is that people are buying when they're buying it and he found that 50% of their milkshake

18:35sales were before noon which is kind of bizarre I mean you figure most people are off between this 18 hour window between 6:00 and midnight but 50% of their sales were before noon he's like huh that's interesting so he goes and he starts finding these people who are buying their milkshakes before Newton and what he what he realizes is that the people who are buying these milkshakes generally had long so what they would do is they were essentially buying this milkshake to accomplish a job and that job was too full to basically make them fall in the morning he found out that their the a milkshake most people like it in the

19:08morning because it's not messy it's not like a you know egg McMuffin or anything like that where you have to fiddle with it while you're trying to drive at 85 miles an hour and there's all these different benefits that they found that he found that those are the reasons why people bought it that was the job that that milkshake was fulfilling second thing you have to look at is why are people moving towards your product what other things have they tried why didn't those things work because you're really trying to get at the core of whatever problem they're trying to solve whatever job it is that they're trying to

19:43accomplish why that's what they need the product for they don't need the product they need that particular problem solve for them so as I said people don't buy software they buy ways to overcome pain they are outsourcing processes so for example I said before KISSmetrics they're outsourcing all the complexities of all those different measurements so that they don't have to do it they don't want to build those things they're choosing to allow other people to build the things that they need those are the roles that your product fulfills and they don't prescribe to the not invented here syndrome last they're buying end result they're not buying your product

20:23they're buying an end result that's what you're selling you are selling an end result to them you're not selling software you're not selling a product you're selling a desired end result to that customer so we're gonna talk a little bit about iterating on your sales pitch this will probably be a little awkward but I'm gonna need some volunteers here so one two three one two three and of course they'll like write down the ends here all three of you three so anyone know what these are these are kazoos I'm not gonna make you guys use them you don't have to wear and over there in a line you to zuly come on

21:02yep lilia you how much do you guys think that these things cost how much are they worth like if I were to buy this how much would it be worth three bucks it's pretty close I bought this for I think three dollars and fifty cents so that's about I don't know something like a quarter for each of these if you go out and Amazon or Ebay you can find like packages of a hundred of them for like a dollar it's really ridiculous so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to try to sell these to these people over here so what I'm gonna have you do is I'm gonna stand

21:35over here and what I want you to do is walk by me as if I was trying to sell them - it'll mall or something like that so just one at a time just come on just walk by hey would you like to buy a kazoo for a dollar no exactly go sit down so how about you would you like to buy this kazoo for a dollar and help camp good days would you like to buy a kazoo for a dollar so notice right there that what I did was I instead of just letting him walk by me I get rated a little bit I started

22:01backing up which gives me more time remember the first impressions that I talked about you only have a few seconds to make that first impression when you're in a mall or something like that so you're you're walking towards somebody you got something in your hand they're like oh boy no that's that's the immediate reaction to Alton so of course you you need to figure out what it is that's going to work and what's not going to work so once ya go ahead and walk to him would you like to help little kids with cancer by a kazoo for a dollar so the thing is I guess you guys could probably

22:43sit down at this point but the point that I'm trying to make with that though is that I was told no before I even got to the end of my sales pitch my entire sales pitch was supposed to be would you like to buy a kazoo for a dollar and help camp good days they support families with cancer and of course that's not going to work very well the problem is that it's too long nobody is gonna sit around and pay or pay attention to that so it was a while ago but I hope to an organization called camp good days which as I said they have

23:15this thing called kazoo fest and essentially what it is is they get volunteers to help them in a mall and they you know they have the volunteers go around and sell these kazoos and you're supposed to sell these kazoos for a dollar which are yeah terrible I mean there's there's a lot of problems with this thing so let's just look at them I mean we've already basically said that this thing is worthless so to start with with my sales pitch the fact is what the hell is camp good days nobody knows what that is so when I started out I tried saying would you like to buy a kazoo for a

23:50dollar helps support camp good days and unfortunately because of all that stuff is mostly about the sale mostly about the product mostly about what it is that you're doing it's just too long nobody cares people are conditioned to say no thanks I was walking through the airport the other day and I think it was in Philly and somebody says hey do you have a US Airways you know car your Silver Star Alliance member I'm like yep I'm already set and he's like hey who stopped over here I can give you you know ten thousand points or whatever and I'm just like nope bye and of course

24:21shortly after that I regretted it because there was some guy walking around in just his boxers I won't go into that but it was a little scary I'm like I'm not even in Vegas yet but the fact it's kazoos are also pretty worthless nobody cares about a kazoo it's just not you know it's annoying to be perfectly honest I mean you can try to sell it based on that annoying factor say hey grandparents would you like to buy a kazoo you know I've actually get back at your kids for all the things they did but you also have no relationship with the customer you don't have I mean you've got that

24:52couple of seconds that first impression is would you like to buy X no I don't I don't want to buy anything from you but if you change it around and you say would you like to help little kids with cancer you're revoking that shame and especially if you have two people walking walking together and I know this is gonna be stereotypical it is a little bit sexist but if you have two people walking together and a guy and a girl you you don't look at the guy you look at the girl I say would you like to buy this and she's the first reaction is she's gonna to look at him and what's

25:23gonna happen is he's gonna pull out his wallet he's gonna give you a dollar and I know this because I did it and over the course of four hours I sold over 250 kazoos 250 worse worthless pieces of plastic for $1 apiece now I do the math on that it's about a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a year in sales it's crazy now how do you do that there were other people there who did you know it was the same place they sold maybe 30 50 something like that but by entering on that sales pitch you can dramatically increase your sales you have to be able to say the right

26:01things up front and make sure that that first impression gets across to them what is important to them not what's important to you what's important to you is getting the money what is important to them is whatever emotion it is that you're trying to evoke in this case evoking shame would you like to help little kids with cancer who wouldn't you know you don't want to look stupid so of course they're gonna give you money you can use these emotions and make sure that you put them upfront and whatever your sales pitches this could be in your marketing copy it can be on your website it could be in what you talk to so I

26:31talk to people about so how do you iterate quickly on your sales pitch in a generic sense you can you can do a lot of things on your website you can use Google Adwords drive traffic you can use remarketing you can drive just to drive the traffic quickly to your website talk to people obviously that's a little bit slower it's a lot more labor-intensive but there are ways to test that you can just you know have everybody kind of get together you have to manage the process while you're doing it and you can also do a/b testing on it to figure out what works what doesn't

27:00now when you're talking to people and trying to do a/b testing it is far more labor-intensive but it can be done so I'm gonna back up a little bit and talk a little bit more about actionable stuff so the some of the stuff is more conceptual but we're going to talk about some of the enterprise tactics and these are more I've talked to several people over the past couple of days who have said hey how do you sell into an enterprise account how do you get them to listen to you how do you talk to them about what their budget is how do you figure out how much money they have how

27:29much I should charge them so I have a blog post on this you can read it on single founder com but I'll go over it very briefly the first thing that you need to ask them is do they have a budget for this if they don't have a budget why are you talking to them because the fact is the enterprise sales are month long experiences so they can be they don't have to be but by-and-large an enterprise account wants to take a long time because they want to make sure that they're buying the right thing so you have to ask them upfront do you have a

27:56budget for this is this project budget it and it's not a bad thing to ask that they will answer because the fact is it's not their money they don't care they have a money they have the money if they don't spend it they don't get it the next year so they want to spend it just ask them if they have a budget for this project the second thing is who has the authority to make this decision am I talking to the right person because if I'm gonna walk into some developer he doesn't actually have the authority to make a decision a purchasing decision why am I talking to him not that you

28:25don't want to give him information so that he can kind of feed it up the chain but you want to say do you have the authority to make this decision who does and there's a lot of different ways you can ask ask it but you know you say well first do you have it do you have a budget for this project yes okay great what what is it oh it's a hundred thousand dollars okay excellent I think we can work with you on that and don't feel bad about asking what that budget is because they will probably tell you some of them will some won't but you can

28:50at least ask what the budget is and if they if you get pushed back on that you tell them well we need to know because if you're asking for something that we can't provide with this we may as well just not talk and I don't want to waste your time so I need to know that you have the budget and that you have enough of a budget to be able to make this project happen and there's consultant services there's the software there's everything else service agreements there's a lot of different reasons you can give them to get exact numbers for that budget and then magically your two

29:16dollars under that budget and they're happy I'm not kidding I've seen I've seen enterprise sales reps discount software by ninety five percent to land a sale so back to the authority you ask them who makes the purchasing decision who's going to decide that is it the person you're talking to is that their manager is a committee those are things that you want to know and once you find that out ask to talk to them you want to make sure that you're inserted into that process you want to be the person who's talking to them who's driving that sale second thing is the third thing is do

29:48they have a need for it if they're just exploring options that they're just trying to figure it out you know you want to make sure that you're selling them something that they need as opposed to something they're just like well you know we think that we would like to do this well why would you like to do that what is the need behind it are you trying to save money are you trying to save support costs are you trying to drive profits or revenue those are all things that you really really need to find out before you start you know going too far down this path the last thing is

30:15timeline what is the expected timeline from their end as to how long it's going to take to make this purchasing decision and asking that upfront help set your own expectations you want to know when is it that they need to make a decision by oh you need to make a decision by December 31st because that's when your budgets close okay well I can ramp things up I can make sure that I'm pushing things along as opposed to somebody who says well we need to do something by June because that's when the regulations kick in that we have to follow you'll give that one a little bit

30:43less priority until you know April May something along those lines so this basically sells spells out the acronym bants VA NT you can look it up it's you know it's it's it's not like I came up with this I don't want to take credit for it but it is one of many different sales techniques that you can use in the enterprise a lot of different techniques work you know you can certainly do the research on it if you have questions about it certainly ask me I've done enterprise sales before and they do some screwy things but do never - never feel bad about asking them blunt

31:15questions what is your budget how much you know how much authority do you have who makes the decision so we're going to talk about a couple of other tactics which are a little bit more generic one of the things that really works when you're trying to sell your solutions to people is providing them with market data so for example if you're selling carpet cleaning services and you only do a carpet cleaning for a customer like once every three years or something like that you can use market data and say hey well did you know that after six months there's this much human hair buildup in your carpets do you really want that and

31:50you know you're basically kind of gross in them out at that point with that specific example but there's a lot of market data market data is extremely powerful and you can use that market data to essentially lead them to a yes you talk through that you see you ask them questions well what about the you know how often you clean your carpets well I do it every two or three years well did you know that X you know there's there's you know human residue build-up there's just you know people shouting the dogs and everything else and it's like well that's kind of disgusting and it builds

32:19up very very quickly in the all the pathogens leads to 95% more bacteria etcetera oh well I didn't know that and they and what you do is you start shrinking that timeline down to sell them more more services more quickly and as I said there's a magic Enterprise pricing where yes what their budget is and magically everything comes in just under their budget I cannot count the number of times I've seen this exact same thing happen the other thing is we're dealing with quarters you know since most of the time enterprises are public companies you can find out when they're quarterly in fiscal years and and you can leverage those to try and

32:54figure out to make sure that they're there setting aside money or that they have a budget for those things I kind of want to close with this as I said it before talked a little bit about experience experience might be the best teacher but the tuition rates are really really high you want to make sure you learn from other people try and figure it out you can do certain things on your own but some of them are extremely time-consuming talk to other people here talk to myself any of the speakers do the research yourself learn from other people you can't do everything yourself primarily because there's simply not

33:28enough time in life to be able to do everything learn what works learn what doesn't iterate on the things and make small improvements what's that so you've talked about a lot of stuff that we should be doing but I mean I from my own experience in enterprise sales what are specific things that you want to avoid doing good question being too pushy and too aggressive can be a really big turn-off for a lot of enterprise customers you know the reverse is true as well if you're not pushy enough if you don't set timelines I mean that's at I would say that's a big one if you're if you're not setting

34:11expectations with them about when you're gonna follow up when you're you know why you want to follow up what you're going to talk about at that time those are big things that will help kill up pretty much any sale because if you if you're if you're calling them every day for example there they're just gonna stop answering your calls I mean everybody's got caller ID these days they're gonna they're gonna know that it's you there's not gonna answer and they're they're gonna end up not taking your calls and going with your competitor for the sole fact that you're too pushy but if you've set expectations and you say hey it's all

34:40right if I call you next Tuesday and we talked a little bit more about this oh yeah yeah sure or no I'm a little too busy can we schedule some other time sure so those are things I'd probably keep in mind aside from that I can't think of too many egregious mistakes other than things you know the obvious in any sales situation you know you don't want to come in dressed like a bum you want to make sure that you're trying to be professional those kinds of things it's if you have a product that people want it can be hard to screw up the sale the other thing you want to ask for is

35:12whether or not they are looking at competing products so that you know how to present yourself you know how to pitch it to them and definitely ask why they need it because all of your sales presentations should be geared around addressing the need that they have versus what your product does any others over here

35:39I don't have a lot of enterprise sales myself and one of the things I find hard with Enterprises is managing subscriptions because they we need to handle enterprises there are lot of politics mold and politics are different from enterprise to enterprise so I find it hot so to automate that mm-hmm do you have any solution for that you have to establish relationship of the people who are cutting the checks some of them will come to you and will just flat out ask you to cut your price if you know what their budget is you can kind of push back on that a little bit and say look oh you know I'm sorry

36:18there's only so much I can do but part of that falls into whether or not you know about what other you know competitors are looking at if you're already entrenched if you've already got a subscription with them the bar for them to change is much higher but you also have to make sure that you're following up with people at least 60 to 90 days in advance of when you want that subscription to renew because if you're not you know most enterprises do not turn around a P o and like a day I mean I could turn around P o in a day for anything I do not that I even issue a

36:44POS but the fact is with an enterprise they have to go through a lot of different approvals sometimes if it's above a certain dollar amount they've got to get sign-off from multiple people there's all this different you know regulations and internal red tape that they have to deal with so you have to give them enough time to do that and you have to follow up with them consistently to find out you know where are they in the process it's very good to ask early on what the process is because you're right I mean every customer is different so if you don't know what that process is it's really hard to you know you're

37:14basically working with a black hole so you know it's maybe it's three steps in but how many steps are there there might be 10 or 15 if you don't ask the questions you don't know you could say well after you get done with this what then what happens you know where does it go and you can find out a lot more about the sit the the internal sales process was within that company and if you can do that when an enterprise account you can tend to sell them more stuff because you know what the process is and you can use that as an upsell for you versus

37:38some competitor selling a different solution because you already know what that process is you know already know the different people to talk to to help push that process through for your product versus somebody else's so in any way when it gets to procurement you know they choose they ultimately choose yours because they enterprises are kind of screwy than the fact that even though the like the the engineers or the sysadmin may decide oh well we really like this product when it gets to purchasing and procurement they may decide to buy something else based on price and the you know the people who were actually end up end up with the

38:08product may not have any you know say over that yeah but and the main issue for me was I find it hard to automate it through a process on the website or something it it always returns to a manual follow up with the emails yeah it depends on the dollar amount I I can't give a specific thing for that I mean if it's small if it's small amounts I mean I've worked with some enterprises where like yeah we don't do $100 on a credit card every month you just have to give us an annual invoice and then you have to follow up with them every year to try

38:41and get that thing done because it is kind of a pain I don't have any good advice for automating that because every as you said every company is different and you have to work with them to try and figure out what the processes are document them internally and say this is how we need to have people follow up on those people all right we have time for one more question in the background

39:09so if you're selling into enterprises I mean my experience with that is they tend to do a lot of price discrimination they sort of try to size you up when you're trying to sort by stuff from companies would you still put up like a pricing page we're like you know pricing on there or do you tend to just sort of have a you know a Call Me type thing if you're primarily selling into enterprises if you're primarily selling into enterprises then you know almost by definition you're avoiding the small medium businesses who would just buy things off your website and in that case you have a sales force you have a lead

39:43generation process you have people who are doing cold calls and emails and you know using Hoover's subscriptions to try and get into those accounts you may be leveraging partnerships with other you know software companies or vendors who already have their relationships in the u.s. there are I think four main software distributors that you can deal with and they basically sell for all of the I'll say the more enterprise-e type companies like Microsoft and Symantec so like for example you - you don't typically buy software from Symantec you don't buy it from McAfee or you know Microsoft directly and if you do you pay MSRP for it and nobody wants

40:19to do that so that's why they go through you know a reseller and the reseller buys it from the distributor who then buys it from them so there's like two or three different levels there but it makes it difficult when you're trying to target just the enterprise I mean if you are truly going after the enterprise market I would say I wouldn't publish pricing because then it could be used against you um I've seen a lot of accounts like one of the one of the things that I see in enterprise sales is every customer tends to pay something different for the exact same product so even though there are internal pricing

40:47and there's an MSRP for it every customer pays something different and that's as I said that's the magic pricing piece of enterprise sales and nobody knows what each person pays so you know when you're working with small businesses it's it's a lot easier to just post a price since like oh well everyone pays that it's fair but when you get into the enterprise space because everyone pays a different price that's part of why the sales process is longer because they're like well is this a fair deal is it you know is in the budget you know how much is it gonna cost what sort of ROI are we getting

41:17those sorts of factors come in and they extend the sales process but the fact is like you know then you get into situations where there's like you know if your product grows enough you get user groups and they tell each other how much they pay and then you have one I've seen it happen where customers like oh yeah I only paid five dollars per machine and the other ones like I paid 40 and it's like then you've got a problem because then you then you're immediately as I said that first impression is very very quickly overcome they may used to think the world of you and now they find out that you're

41:45ripping them off by part charge than 40 you only charge somebody else five so you have to be a little bit careful about that kinda stuff