MV #004: Why buyers don't buy and how to change that.
Lessons, stories, observations and analyses on software sales, building companies and creating customer value.
Read time: 8 min
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Curated highlights from thought leaders in B2B software
Lessons on how to become a better value seller
Analyses and observations from the B2B software industry
Unfiltered, personal stories from working in big tech and startups
🤔 Week Recap + My Thoughts?
📈 LinkedIn COO’s perspective on macro and creating customer value
Danie Shapero, COO of LinkedIn, wrote a great article on growth in the new economic environment. His hands-on tips are so valuable for every B2B software professional.
Find upside in customers who already love your product
Start by helping these successful customers get more value from what already works, and then show them how to bring that value to more parts of their organization
👉 My take: Agreed, focus on the upside in great customers and expand your footprint rather than chasing after every account equally. You’ll stretch yourself too thin. If you have champions in one account, leverage them to win other departments. A champion is priceless in winning more business.
Acquire customers who are "Likely to Succeed"
With that information, we’re able to focus our sales and marketing teams not just on companies exhibiting a likelihood to buy […], but more importantly on whether customers are likely to succeed.
👉 My take: Great perspective. Forget "likely to buy". Most GTM teams use propensity models that don't look beyond the deal win. Customer acquisition is costly, and you'll face even more expensive churn if you can't deliver the value. Build models based on attributes of successful customers and focus on value creation.Help customers go from getting good value to getting exceptional value
At LinkedIn, we learned that one of the most powerful things we can do to grow our business was helping customers getting good value to graduate to getting exceptional value, because customers getting exceptional value grew much faster.
👉 My take: Agreed. If you focus only on your weak spots in the customer portfolio, the best you’ll likely get is mediocre adoption and mediocre success. However, if you start focusing on customers who can be great, you will create more value easily and more of it.
Don’t make it hard for your customers
providing a great onboarding experience will pay dividends for years to come.
👉 My take: Easier said than done. The time to value has to be short and onboarding smooth for customers to embrace a product or service. Once adoption fails at the early stages of a partnership, it’s very hard to course-correct. In his post, he focuses on onboarding and time to value. I think this is true for every touchpoint, from marketing to sales all the way to customer success. Trust builds slowly, but it’s destroyed instantly.
💡 In short: When you focus on customer value, everyone wins. Focus on customers where you can deliver value from the start, deliver it fast, and double down where you have the most potential for value creation.
🥞 Sunday Pancake Recap
Most readers of More Value will know Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon. One of my favourite books on Sales. It taught go-to-market teams not to ask buyers, “What keeps you up at night?” but to show them what should keep them up at night.
Now his new book, the JOLT Effect (here), has been released. The book could not have come out at a better time. He and his co-author Ted McKenna focus on How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Sounds like the perfect book for everyone selling to customers now.
Who is not dealing with indecision in their sales cycles right now? Matt says about 40-60% of deals are lost to indecision.
He recently spoke on Gong’s Reveal podcast. If you have 37 min, you’ll learn a whole bunch that’ll help you sell more immediately.
Matt has so many great points to drive more value and overcome indecision. If you don’t have 37 min, here’s my 60-second summary.
If your customer is not showing up to meetings, or demos or fails to reply to emails, it’s most often not the case that you’ve lost against the status quo. You might have just lost to indecision.
75% of sellers go hammer the status quo when they think the customer is getting cold feet. Sellers use fear, uncertainty doubt (FUD) if their rosy ROI projections and fancy demos don’t convince. It turns out, that backfires most of the time. Hammering the status quo does not work when the buyer is indecisive.
Drivers for indecision.
(1) Valuation problem, not sure what to pick, how to value each feature, module, or product. It’s too complex to decipher the offering.
👉 My take: We’ve all been there in our personal lives. How often have I read reviews and watched unboxing videos trying to understand the differences between various products?
(2) Lack of information. They don’t know enough yet. Customers are waiting for the next piece of information. A new Gartner report, another review, and one more case study.
(3) Outcome uncertainty, they might agree with everything you say, but what if it does not work out? What guarantees a good outcome? We’ve all seen software investments being written off completely.Choosing the status quo is not the same as indecision. When customers choose the status quo, you have failed to prove enough value for a change. Customers might still see more value or insufficient value to make a change.
When indecision happens, the customer might agree with everything you’re saying but still doesn’t move forward. That’s indecision.Customers are more concerned with the fear of failure. Nobody gets fired for staying the course. Many do get fired for spending a ton of money on things that might not work out.
You need 2 playbooks. One to beat the status quo. And one to overcome the fear of failure. You have to do both.
Loss aversion. Humans seek to avoid loss than gain something. Even if doing something and doing nothing leads to the same bad outcome, people will always prefer the do-nothing option. It’s been shown countless times in human psychology. Check out error of omission vs. error of commission.
The customer won’t tell you that they’re bad at making decisions.
JOLT is actually an acronym. It stands for the 4 behaviours Matt found in high-performers.
J = Judge. Judge the level of indecision. Don’t just qualify on the ability to buy but also the ability to decide.
O = Offering recommendation. Do discovery. Diagnose the problem. But don’t keep it open-ended. Make a recommendation for your customer. Too much information is overwhelming. Offer a specific, tailored, clear recommendation.
L = Limit the exploration. Average performers will grant every request. Great AEs dare to stop providing information. The law of diminishing returns applies when it comes to information you need to make a decision. In fact, if you honour every request, it induces analysis-paralysis.
High performers will be very careful about who they bring into a sales cycle. They position themselves as trusted experts and are not just glorified admins. They do their own demos. Otherwise, buyers won’t trust you if you need many experts to make your case. If the customer doesn’t trust you, they’ll continue to do their own research.T = Take risk off the table. Salespeople need to de-risk things. They ensure that value can be delivered fast and customers feel good about every step in the process. If customers are getting nervous, great performers think of ways to create a safety net. This can be done with creative deal structuring like opt-out clauses, recommending extra professional services or offering an attractive discount on a multi-year contract. Choosing land and expand over the big bang rollout is another way.
🐦 Tweet of the Week
👉My take: 100% true. That’s why some people are paid millions.
🥹 Missed my posts week? - Fret not!
PLG Sales Tech? There’s a massive market opportunity for sales technology that is built to help accelerate PLG motions. Here’s my take on an article by Bessemer Venture Partners (here).
🗞️ In other news & top posts on the web
Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, shared his top learnings from growing companies from $0 to $300m. (read more)
Kyle Poyar, Operating Partner, OpenView, posted the incredible story of Supermetrics. A company that grew to $50m ARR with PLG in just a few years. (read more)
Scott Barker, Partner GTMfund, has a hot take. Services are hot. Software is not. Or should I say, not only software? Great perspective on why you should build a services business. (read more)
The FT reports: Middle managers are needed and critical for organisational performance. (read more)
CNBC reports trouble in paradise. Google is trying to do some cost-saving, and it’s not resonating well. Fewer fancy offsite, more scrutiny on expenses and hiring freezes. Life is so tough for Googlers where the median salary is $161,254. (read more).
🤓 Don’t know me? Here’s the about section.
My name is Semir Jahic. I’m a self-confessed news junkie, and I’m also a student of startups and obsessed with what it takes to build something of value.
In More Value, I’ll share what I’m reading, learning, and observing to help you create more value.
More value is for go-to-market professionals in Sales, Customer Success, Delivery or anywhere in the enterprise software industry.
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