Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. His recent article published by Medium rang so true to everything I have written in Sales is a Team Sport.
I was chatting with a friend who also happens to be one of the most thoughtful sales leaders I know. During our conversation, he shared a counterintuitive strategy that helped his team increase close rates by over 20%. He told me that, when hiring SDRs — Sales Development Representatives, the people who qualify customers early in a SaaS sales process — he never trained them on the product.
That’s right. The SDRs on his team — the first people potential customers would speak with — had no idea what the company’s product actually did.
At first, this sounds insane. After all, how can you sell something if you don’t even know what it is? But my friend had a good reason: Whenever SDRs were trained on the product, they couldn’t help but talk about it. They’d dive into features, capabilities, and specifications, trying to “sell” the product itself. And the moment they started talking about the product, things went south.
Potential customers would hear the pitch, make assumptions — often wrong ones — about what the product could or couldn’t do, and mentally un-sell themselves.
If you want to read more: https://ehandbook.com/why-so-many-entrepreneurs-suck-at-sales-and-how-to-fix-it-04463512d3d2
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