Average Seller vs. Great Seller
Skills that differentiate the best sellers and sales orgs
There has been a Cambrian explosion of b2b SaaS companies. Both founders and investors are starting to realize how lucrative it is to be right in this broad category, so as a result, number of SaaS startups is exploding, dollars invested into SaaS startups is exploding, and downstream of that, the number of sellers being hired is exploding.
This may change if we enter into a recession, but for the past few years, this trend has been undeniable.
One key side effect of this trend: the average experience level and skill level is dropping as sales leaders have to get more creative to hit recruiting and team growth goals. Gone are the days of solving your talent issues exclusively with a high hiring bar. Market conditions have dictated hiring more sellers based on potential than sitting around waiting for the perfect unicorn seller who has never missed President’s club in their career, and is still motivated to grind after 10+ years in the trenches.
So now, sales leaders and company leaders have a critical task: skill development amongst sellers is more important than ever. The perfect unicorn sellers aren’t coming to save you- as a leadership team, it’s your job to find [oftentimes] inexperienced sellers with high ceilings, and develop these sellers into champions with proactive, persistent training.
First point: some sort of training program is absolutely key. If you’re a CEO, you must ask your sales leaders to devote some part of their brain and bandwidth to creating a skill development program to: (a) communicate to sellers which skills are actually important (most companies don’t do this, and govern more by survival) and (b) figure out a way to teach these skills proactively, and on a frequent cadence.
The second point: you have to know what you’re coaching towards, which can be difficult as a company leader who isn’t well versed in selling.
Below are the skills and categories to keep in mind when turning untrained sellers into great sellers. If your sales leadership team is not proactively communicating these types of skills and teaching them, they are guaranteed to be a mixed bag across your team, and it will lead to suboptimal sales results.
Great sellers vs. average sellers
territory planning & goal setting
Great sellers have a plan to hit their goal, average sellers go with the flow and assume it will all work out. Great sellers always build pipeline so that next quarter isn’t terrifying, average aren’t thinking ahead of this month or quarter.
Inbound leads
Great sellers respond immediately and prioritize inbound leads, average sellers just show up unprepared and expect the buyer to drive the deal momentum. Great sellers conduct inbound discovery with paranoia that they’re missing something, average sellers assume an inbound lead is a sure thing.
Prospecting
Great sellers customize their outbound message to a specific prospect and what they specifically would care about, average sellers recycle templates. Great sellers ask themselves “based on what I’ve written, would I respond if I were in their shoes?” and rewrites when the answer is no. Average sellers are not good writers, don’t think good writing is important, and tend not to proofread.
Great sellers have an activity plan that they try to stick to each week, and know there’s no way to game the system. Bad activities lead to bad outcomes. Good activities lead to good outcomes. Average sellers prioritize activities that will satiate their managers instead of actually generating results.Discovery
Great sellers have a “quantum brain”- they can juggle multiple scenarios at once and ask questions that either get you closer to a fit, or catalyze not a fit. Great sellers aren’t afraid to discover it’s not a fit and actually crave that because it saves you time. Average sellers go on a single talk track each discovery call that never changes, and have happy ears. They think the call went great and aren’t aware of the reasons the deal might be at risk.
Great sellers also deeply understand the product they sell. Average sellers want their solutions engineer to handle all the hard stuff.
Great sellers understand the importance of asking questions first, and saving pitching for the end. Average sellers pitch the second they hear a pain their product can solve.Deal follow up
Great sellers worry “is this person politically capable of buying? Who else do I need to talk to? Why might this deal fall through and how can I future proof it?”
Average sellers stick with the person right in front of them. Great sellers multithread as an insurance mechanism, average sellers are content to work with one prospect, and blame that person when the deal falls through even when they should have realized they were below the power line of an actual decisionNegotiation
Great sellers have a negotiation plan. They learn, learn, learn before sharing pricing. They get feedback on whatever pricing they share, and don’t share a price until they’re confident around the impact their product will provide. Great sellers float terms as a discovery mechanism that are not “officially approved yet” so that buyer must commit first, before their VP of Sales signs off on a big discount. Average sellers float pre-approved discounts and ask “is that good enough to get this done?”
Closing
Great sellers know that closing is a function of continuously working towards a timeline, and getting mutual buy in for that timeline. You bake in extra time in case timeline slips. You’re constantly talking about timeline. Average sellers hope for the timeline they want but don’t proactively discuss it for fear of being rude.
Setting up prospect to grow and renew
Great sellers understand that their deals must renew and grow to be good deals- they think like owners. They care about a smooth CSM handoff, and care about negotiating good terms that will grow a deal year after year. Average sellers just think about themselves and their own quota, and may sign deals that churn or were never set up for success.
Forecasting and hitting goals
Great sellers are paranoid and look at their top deal list every day. They weight deals in their pipeline with realistic probabilities. Average sellers project confidence, call a high number, and continuously remove deals from the forecast as the quarter goes on.
Great managers vs. average managers
Average managers use fear and dashboards to crack the whip. Great managers invest in the inputs to proactively improve the outputs, through weekly training and creating an environment where sellers share best practices.
Conclusions:
If you take away one thing from this article, great sellers are strategic and paranoid. They’re constantly thinking about how to hit their numbers and adjusting/readjusting to obstacles. They’re always calculating and maximizing odds of hitting their goals with every micro-interaction.
They’re aware of why deals will miss and thus, proactively problem solve against those things. They don’t trust anything they hear from prospects- they know this champion is not going to get a deal done on their own. They suspect that a given value prop is not going to withstand scrutiny without some extra prep. They suspect their champion is not capable of getting internal buy-in, and thus, they need to be the ones to go above and beyond to bridge that internal gap.
The best sellers, deep down, don’t trust anything the buyer says and as a result, assumes the responsibility of everything going right. They are accountable when deals slip or don’t close- there is no such thing as “customer did this, customer didn’t do that.”
No, when things go bad in a deal, that’s on you, the seller. No seller can control nature, and not every deal will close- that’s a given. But the best sellers are constantly stacking odds in their favor and with enough at bats, that tendency reveals itself in constant overperformance.
Great sellers care, and great management teams put them in position to keep caring.
Sales & Product - a caveat
As a caveat to founders: please do not view sales as a solution to product shortcomings. It’s your responsibility (on the product side) to equip sellers with industry leading products.
If your product isn’t the best vs. competitors, and you aren’t listening to customers, and aren’t shipping features that you can actually sell to a decisionmaker, your sellers will leave your company and sell something else. A seller can only be as good as their product, so when you identify your great sellers, and they tell you why customers aren’t buying, you should definitely listen to them.
Thanks for reading EarlyGTM post #12!
Mike Marg, Principal, Craft Ventures
(for more thoughts on go to market, @mikemarg_ on Twitter)