10. My best tips from 5 years of sales
This is reposted from a newsletter I wrote earlier this year to a small audience of private equity professionals.
I would never claim to be an expert in sales, but I’ve had a few experiences growing businesses in my short career:
Built a newsletter from 0 -> 18,000 subscribers in ~9 months, all through organic growth (no paid marketing). Several of my posts reached #1 on HackerNews and were read by CEOs of public companies and partners at tech funds.
I’ve been a key part of a sales team that grew revenue 20%+ month over month for several months in a row.
I launched a consulting business and had 13 requests for my service within a month.
I’m hoping to share a few things that worked for me in different contexts. Maybe some will apply to you.
Respond quickly. Many people in finance know the “confirming receipt” mentality that’s drilled into the minds of IB analysts. The idea is that you should respond to any email within 1 hour no matter what time or day. I think this is valuable to a degree, but I also think it has limits.
Instead, the goal I choose is to try to respond to emails within 5 minutes but only during the work day. (At my last job we would compete to respond within the same minute that the email was received…). There’s been some research in customer support that getting an answer within a few minutes is vastly different than even an hour, which can make the difference between getting a company on the phone or not.
Headlines: make a big promise, but back it up. This applies to marketing (articles, etc.) but it also applies to things like writing email subject lines. After writing dozens of articles, we learned that the headline really did make a huge difference. At places like CNBC, they actually start the writing process by writing the headline, then finding data and a story to back it up. We didn’t go that far, but we knew we had to promise something big and interesting in order to grab attention.
Our solution was to make a big promise, but back it up. People get mad at click-bait because they feel cheated: they thought they would get a reward by opening an article, but it was just filler on the other side. We had to write compelling headlines, but we backed up our headlines with deep research and narrative (or we tried to anyway). I often think about this with new email campaigns or personalized messages: it’s not bad to make a big claim, you just have to back it up.
Up the intensity. In my last job, the business development leads would frequently have 55-60 calls per week (my job was to keep the leads coming). This amounts to 10-12 calls per day.
These days, a good outbound day for me might mean 4 or 5 conversations with companies, and most days it’s fewer than that. I know several firms have benchmarks between 30-50 calls per month for their full-time BD people. Obviously, the motion to get company CEOs on the phone to talk about selling their business is a different motion than enterprise sales, but it’s a good reminder that I can always increase my intensity.
Initiatives: 50% of your time for 4 months. If you have flexibility in your job, you’ll have some say on the tactics you use to get in front of more qualified businesses. Maybe you make an effort to build a network with IBs, decide to focus on a certain subsector, or attend 3 conferences this quarter. Whatever it might be, the best way I’ve heard to evaluate if it’s working is if you spend at least 50% of your time on it for 4 months.[0]
The reason this is important: if you try something and don’t give it long enough, you don’t know if it worked or not. A goal (even if it’s a secondary goal) of every sales or marketing tactic is to see if it works and if it’s repeatable. Without giving a channel or tactic a full try, you might not know if you’ve validated your hypothesis. At some point you need to cut your losses, but not until after 4 months of spending 50% of your time on it.
[0] I found this exact time frame from someone online months ago but can’t find the original post… it matches up with my experience so thought I would share regardless.