How to book more sales meetings (part 1)
Quick and easy framework to dial in your sales content
This is part one of two, part one is focused on foundational frameworks while part two will be focused on actionable steps.
If you Google “how to book more sales meetings” you’re going to get confusing, overwhelming and generic advice. Below is a framework any founder can take to book more meetings, quickly.
First things first, you need to have a clear product vision. Founders can sometimes fail to separate a pitch to an investor from a pitch to a potential customer. Investors like to hear about big visions, multiple-year roadmaps and how big a company could potentially be. Potential customers want a clear product vision. Focus on what your product currently does or at most next quarter’s product roadmap. Potential customers are buying what your product currently does. So make that clear and concise.
Once you have established your product vision now you must align all your content, story, marketing and assets to the vision, this is product marketing/product positioning. Whether it is the founder or early salesperson doing sales, your team needs to be aligned on how to discuss your product, whether it is a 30-second elevator pitch or a 10-minute sales pitch.
A common mistake for startups and founders is “feature dumping”. You may have seen, received or done outreach like the examples below.
“...Our product reduces X by 25% and is 50% faster than Y. It does A, B, C, D, E, F…”
“...Our product helps identify and find multiple issues within technical databases that feature AI and machine learning aspects to drive revenue in a dramatic fashion with web3…”
Outreach like this fails to help your potential customer visualize using your product.
Instead, focus your positioning on personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, generalized representation of your customers that account for the demographics, goals, motivators, and challenges they are facing. You may have 2-5 personas. Instead of having job title-specific personas, such as “Marketing Manager” or “VP Sales”, you want to consider different challenges the individuals are facing or their day-to-day and create personas.
With these personas, you take the focus away from their title and can focus on the day-to-day challenges they encounter and solutions that your product/service can offer to remedy those challenges. Personas could include information on potential buyers like income, location, needs, motivations, pain points and if they listen to podcasts or read articles.
Creating personas can dramatically improve the quality of your outreach content. Instead of feature dumping, writing for personas helps humanize your content and make it more impactful. Another major benefit to personas is something I call personalization at scale.
Outreach is a constant battle between one-to-one time-consuming personalization and blitzing impersonal emails to thousands of potential buyers. The main mindset shift that has to happen is switching from individual personalization to pain personalization.
Individual personalization is what most people use. They will use first name fields in emails or “I saw/noticed we both breathe air” type lines. This is the status quo and is so overused that it no longer is effective.
Instead, focus on your newly created personas, identify those pain points and personalize them to each persona. This instantly gives you personalization at scale by focusing on the pain points. You now have content that can be used for a large group of people and will elicit a deeper emotional reaction versus individual personalization.
In part two of this series, I will take these frameworks and apply them to actionable steps and tools to land your first customer.