This is what helped me learn to listen and close more sales
Early sales calls were our most useful research strategy. But talking to prospects, selling our solution and trying to get insights was too much for me to handle in one 30 min call.
After dozens of failed demos, I found what I was doing wrong. I wasn’t really listening to what they were saying. As a first time founder, I was eager to get new users, and nervous about selling them an MVP as a solution to their problems.
It took a while for me to understand how to prepare those conversations, understand their problems and find if they were the right fit for our solution.
After much trial and error, and a few helpful conversations, here’s what I did to focus on what users were saying:
- Prepare my list of three (from The Mom Test): I went from a 15 question script to 3 key things I wanted to get from each conversation. Got much more flexibility and focus on what was really important.
- Structure my script and divide topics into chunks. If I wanted to ask about their tooling but also their team processes, I prepared two sets of questions and then chose those that were more relevant to each user.
- Leave my background research aside and ask each person what their day-to-day looked like. I found that trying to get every answer beforehand was actually making me talk too much.
I wrote a detailed guide of my process and lessons learned, would love to know if any of this worked for you too.
