Why Sales Sucks: Who To Call
How to pick winners and get on base
Note: This is part II in my series on Why Sales Sucks (and what you can do so it doesn’t for you and your team). If you’d like to read the whole thing from the beginning, just click here.
How to Change a Game
Ever seen Moneyball?
It’s a baseball movie. But it’s also more than that. It’s a movie about careful, rigorous, analytical selection. It’s a movie about picking winners.
In the film’s opening minutes, the Oakland Athletics’ GM, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), and his scouting staff wrestle with a problem. Who is going to replace their all-star first baseman, Jason Giambi?
Giambi has defected to the New York Yankees. The Yankees are offering a bigger contract, more exposure, and a spot on the strongest roster in baseball. Adding insult to injury, the Yankees have also just ended the A’s playoff run. Billy Beane feels outmatched.
The options to replace Giambi don’t look so good. Beane listens to the scouts report on their prospects for the upcoming season. They disagree on what they want and who they like at first-base. Each has their own favorite prospect and unique rationale for their choice. Jaw size, attitude, the sound of their bats, and the link between a player’s confidence and his girlfriend’s looks are all discussed. It’s an unscientific discussion. Beane sits there, dejected and underwhelmed. There has to be a better way.
Soon after, Beane meets Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), a Yale Economics major working for the Cleveland Indians. Brand opens Beane’s eyes to a different way of building a baseball team. “You don’t want to buy players,” Brand tells him. “You want to buy runs.” Skeptical at first, Beane eventually buys in and hires Brand. Together, they build an analytical approach for finding undervalued ballplayers. These are the guys who might not look the part, but do what really counts in baseball: Get on base.
The new approach takes time. Players struggle to learn new positions and fit into the lineup. Beane’s manager openly opposes him in the clubhouse. But finally, the A’s break through. Players get on base. The team scores more runs. The A’s start winning. They make the playoffs. They punch far, far above the weight of their measly payroll. And Beane, by finding a better way to build a roster — a way to pick winners — changes the game of baseball forever.
Who to Call — Choose Wisely
Roster spots are precious and finite. For every player you add, you’re saying no to another. Picking well matters.
Being a salesperson is like managing a baseball team. You only have so many spots to work with. So many calls you can make, so many prospects you can target, and so many hours on your calendar. Your time and attention are both limited. Choosing how to use them is important. Every prospect you go after is another prospect you leave untouched. Every deal you invest in is another that goes unworked. You can’t have it all. You have to choose.
When you begin to conceptualize your job in this way — as a collection of choices and opportunity costs — you realize something. Finding success in sales (or anything) is about choosing where to focus. You can give a perfect sales pitch, but if the prospect doesn’t care about solving the problem or can’t afford your price tag, it doesn’t matter. You chose poorly. You lost before the game ever started. You wasted your time. And wasting your time sucks.
What’s the solution? Choose wisely. Be like Billy Beane. Pick winners. Go after the prospects and deals you actually have a chance with. The ones with a problem you can solve. The ones actually looking for help. The ones with whom it’s easy to get “on base.”
Sounds great, you say. But who are these people? Where do I find them?
That’s the tricky part. You can’t know who these people are. Not from the outside-in. Not for certain. But you can guess. And the best way to start is by looking at who’s already paying you: Your customers. More specifically, your best customers.
What Your Best Customers Have in Common
What’s true about your best customers?
They buy quickly — They know they need help, so they don’t stall. They move with pace through the sales process.
They buy happily — They tell you they appreciate what you do for them (with positive product and/or NPS feedback).
They buy lucratively — They recognize the value of your product, and are willing to pay higher prices for it.
They stick around… — They get value from your product quickly, and don’t churn, cancel, or switch to something else.
…And then they buy more — They add users and buy more of what you sell over time.
Do you know who these customers are? If not, don’t feel bad. Most businesses don’t. Separating your best customers from everyone else takes some work, but it doesn’t need to be a science project. First, look at your customer list. Then, do some simple analysis. Sort out the best from the rest, highlighting the customers that make the grade using the checklist above. Don’t be afraid to use a combination of data and discussion with your team — both are valuable sources of information.
Finally, look at the qualities your best customers share. What makes them similar? Do they come from the same industry? Do they have similar headcount? Do they tend to say the same things in a first meeting? Don’t be afraid to get creative as you build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Good ICPs blend visible traits (like industry, region, brand, headcount, or function size) with more hidden qualities (like pain-points, products they use, reporting structure, or buying process) to paint a complete picture. A well-constructed ICP should feel balanced and simple. It should capture the essence of the customers you would love to clone and the prospects you know you can help.
Once you build your ICP, your work is only half-done. Now it’s time to start using your time better. Here’s a rule of thumb. You should strive to spend the vast majority of your time pursuing or working deals that have a strong fit with your ICP. Try to abide by the 80/20 rule. Strive for 80% — of your prospect list, of your time, of your call/email volume — focused on ICP-like prospects or customers. Spend 20% running experiments elsewhere, trying new stuff, and taking stock of what you learn.
Then watch — and feel — what happens. I bet you’ll like the results.
How to Spend Your Time
Sales can suck when you don’t know who to call.
When I was selling research, trying to “break through” with a new type of customer rarely got me anywhere. I can remember a specific time when I tried to target traders at investment banks, a potential new market for our firm. I built a campaign, trained my team on messaging, made hundreds of calls… and booked zero meetings. It was awful. I failed. But not at selling. At choosing.
I chose to play a game I couldn’t win. I ignored the odds in favor of my ego. I thought I could make a new market work for us, but the data (had I looked at it) would have told me otherwise. We had worked with but a handful of these fringe prospects over the last 5 years. With a simple look at our customer list and asking our longer-tenured salespeople “why”, I would have saved myself and my team a lot of wasted time. Of course they weren’t calling us back. They didn’t need what we were selling.
I should have known better. Technology-focused hedge funds with specialized teams were always far more receptive to our pitch. No wonder. We counted more than a hundred of them as clients. They liked our product. They stuck around and bought more. When we focused on those people — the ones that looked like our best customers — our conversion rates went way up. We booked more meetings, closed more deals, and made more money. And not only that, our work felt easier — because it was. This job is more fun (and, I promise, you are much, much better at it) when you’re talking to people you know you can help.
So, who should you call? Remember Billy Beane. Pick winners and get on base. Focus on the prospects who actually want your help. The ones that look like your best customers. The ones who buy quickly, lucratively, happily, and then stick around and expand. The ones that make it easy.
And please. Stop wasting so much precious time with everyone else. As Pete Kazanjy writes in Founding Sales:
“All you have in B2B sales is your time. And when you spend your time on prospects who don’t need your product, they won’t close. So you’re spending your scarce time (and salary expense, and runway) on prospects who are unlikely to buy. Think about that. Your goal in sales is to scalaby acquire customers and revenue. So spending time on people who won’t close is the equivalent of setting revenue on fire.”