“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
- Thomas Edison
Launching anything brand new in many ways resembles the stories you hear about launching startups. There are more unknowns than certainties, easy answers do not exist, and the playbooks never quite match reality. It often feels like we are fumbling our way to success.
Steve Blank, the tech startup entrepreneur and godfather of the lean startup movement, coined this definition of startups over a decade ago:
“A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”
I often think about this when setting up a sales team from the ground up. You are experimenting, testing, learning, and implementing on a continuous basis so you can reach a repeatable and scalable sales process. In other words, building the sales flywheel.
A key part of that flywheel is the ability to experiment and adapt. Many sales leaders suffer from a disease called same-itis. This is where every sales playbook is the same template repeated over and over again without variation from company to company. While there is some value in a repeatable and dependable model, in time your sales results start to falter, the tactics just don’t pan out. The thing about flywheels is that they are contextual to the market, the product, the culture, and the company.
This is what I mean by experiment and adapt. Sales leaders should always be on the lookout for different ways to engage with prospects and customers and bring novel tactics and strategies that energize the sales teams and bring value to customers. In the same way, salespeople need to look through their toolkit and honestly assess what is working and not working, and be willing to pivot to new methods.
A common startup concept you probably familiar with is “Failing Fast.” This is the engine that allows startups to iterate so quickly, enabling smaller, less resource-rich teams to outpace better equipped incumbents.
In sales, you are competing for the time and attention of a fickle audience that has many choices of how they wish to spend their money and time. The way salespeople, leaders, and teams stay nimble and innovate then is to come up with new ideas, try them out, and drop the failed ideas quickly while doubling down on the more promising bets.
How do you choose what new ideas to pursue? At Amazon, we have this mantra of “working backwards from the customer”. All this means is that for any problem we try to solve, we first think about how it impacts customers and then see what changes need to be made to deliver an excellent customer experience.
In the same way, your first and best source for innovation should come from customers. They already trust you and are invested in the relationship with your company. Therefore create a survey, call a select (but diverse) group of customers, and ask them nicely to help answer some questions about the sales experience. These should be open ended questions and it is best if these surveys can be done in person or over a video call so that you can fully capture their thought processes.
What questions should you be asking? Start with their thoughts on various stages of your sales process from initial outreach all the way to closing and the post-sales hand-off. Ask what worked and did not work for them as well as what they would have changed in the process. Also ask if there were other sales experiences that they thought were pleasantly memorable or terrible. Note that this can make some uncomfortable, so preface by stating the details of the vendor and product are not necessary.
The next best source for innovation is in the heads of you and your sales team. Salespeople on the front lines experience all the glory and all the pain in the ways the team sells. Great salespeople are always hacking and trying out new things as well in order to improve. On my teams, we would set aside a half-hour every week called the “Happy Hour” to openly share new ideas and things we had tried, which always helped the rest of the team to elevate their results.
New ideas can and should also come from outside your company. When I was just starting out, I read numerous books, and later on added blogs and podcasts to my business learning repertoire. I also sought out peers and mentors for 1:1 time to discuss a specific question I was grappling with. When I launched the Enterprise Sales Forum, it was as much an opportunity for me to learn as it was a community for all salespeople and startup founders to learn.
There is no formula for innovation. You just need to be willing to experiment, be transparent with your team and colleagues, and have the discipline to measure and assess outcomes honestly. That is how to fail fast in the sales context.
I have had plenty of failures to draw upon in my “fail fast” mindset. One of the experiments was early on at Stack Overflow trying to setup a high-velocity sales prospecting process. The sales team had zero support from marketing, so I took it upon myself to build “awareness”. The campaign was a complete flop with zero revenue generated.
That experiment however made me realize the method and the messaging were off. This launched me into the next experiment, to build a high quality content repository that could resonate with engineering managers up to Chief Technology Officers. This worked and to this day, I still continue the DEVBIZOPS newsletter (you can check it out here) which has over 4,000 subscribers. Failure in this case was learning that resulted in a successful experiment and program.
In the same way, Enterprise Sales Forum is a community and also a testbed for learning how to build and manage a large community. For example, I noticed attendance for some events early on were over 90% men. To entice more women to attend. I had to think big. So I declared October to be the designated Women in Sales Month and asked all the chapters to just feature women speakers.
The premise was simple. All events were promoted under the banner of Women in Sales Month. The topic was not “women in sales”, but ranged a number of sales related topics like hiring or leading teams or prospecting, much like we would do any other month.
The results were phenomenal! Events for that month registered over 50% women attendees per event and the number of women signing up to the community tripled from previous months. Now, October is a month reserved by the Enterprise Sales Forum for Women in Sales and has also been recognized by other sales communities as well.
The lesson is that being nimble and flexible pays dividends. Not every experiment will yield positive results, and that is to be expected. The benefit of sales is we have the numbers on open rates and engagement and cadence and revenue. This gives us great insights into what experiment are and are not working so we can put “fail fast” into practice.
Bring innovation to your team. Run experiments, be adaptable, change the script. Because if you’re not innovating, you’re…well you know the answer 😉
ON another note, I am starting to do more 1:1’s with members of the Enterprise Sales Forum. You can look me up here - https://remotehour.com/mb/casual-meeting - and if I am online, grab a 10 minute slot and ask any question(s) you want about sales. I encourage you to reach out and connect 👍
Have a great weekend and chat next week!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum
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