I've sold to b2b companies for years. here's what actually matters in sales
i've spent a lot of time selling to b2b companies and honestly most of what i believed about sales in the beginning was wrong
so heres some random things i learned from selling, doing outbound, losing deals, closing deals, getting ghosted after "this looks amazing", sending way too many emails and building products for b2b companies.
no particular order just writing this because i was thinking about it today.
the person with the better product does not always win
this was probably one of the hardest things for me to accept because as a builder you naturally think better product = more sales. if your product has more features, works faster, costs less, whatever, people should obviously pick you right?
not really.
i've seen companies buy something objectively worse just because they trusted that company more. maybe the salesperson understood their problem better, maybe the website looked more credible, maybe their friend already used it, maybe the founder replied to them personally.
buyers are taking a risk when they buy from you especially in b2b. if they choose some random software and it breaks something internally they are the person who needs to explain why they picked it.
so sometimes they are not buying the best product. they are buying the decision that feels safest.
took me way too long to understand this.
people dont really care about your product, they care about what happens after they buy it
this sounds obvious but almost every sales call i did early on was basically me explaining features.
we have this, we can do that, we are faster than x, our database has x amount of contacts etc etc.
the customer is sitting there thinking ok... but what does this do for me.
if you're selling lead gen they dont want "verified leads". they want more conversations with companies that can buy from them.
if you're selling some automation they dont want automation. they probably want to save 20 hours a week or avoid hiring another person.
once i started thinking about sales this way it became a lot easier to explain products.
features are just the mechanism.
a lot of "price objections" are actually trust objections
this one cost me quite a few deals.
someone says its too expensive and your immediate reaction is usually ok maybe i should discount it. maybe i should give them 20% off, free month, extra credits whatever.
but if someone really believes spending $5k with you will make them $50k, the $5k usually isn't the problem.
the problem is that they are not sure the second part will actually happen.
of course sometimes people genuinely dont have budget, im not saying price never matters. but i think founders underestimate how often "too expensive" really means "im not convinced enough to risk this money yet"
discounting doesnt fix that.
sometimes it actually makes it worse.
the biggest difference between good and bad sales calls is probably how much you talk
i used to think being good at sales meant being good at explaining things.
now i think its almost the opposite.
some of my best calls were probably the ones where i barely talked for the first 20 minutes.
you ask someone how they currently do something, what sucks about it, why they haven't fixed it yet, what they already tried, what happens if they keep doing it this way...
and eventually they basically tell you how to sell to them.
then instead of giving the same pitch you gave to the last 50 people you can just connect what you do to what they literally told you 5 minutes ago.
sounds stupidly simple but most people dont do it because silence on sales calls feels uncomfortable.
so they start talking again.
outbound still works. bad outbound doesnt
ive sent hundreds of thousands of cold emails by now and i still find it funny every time someone says cold email is dead.
it definitely got harder. inboxes are crowded, everyone has AI generated personalization now, deliverability is more annoying and prospects have seen basically every template before.
but the idea that you can directly contact companies who probably need what you're selling is obviously not dead.
what stopped working well is taking 50,000 random contacts and sending the same "quick question {{firstName}}" email to everyone.
targeting became much more important.
the best outbound campaigns i've done usually weren't the campaigns with some genius copy. it was something like we found a very specific type of company, at a very specific moment, with a problem we knew they probably had.
then the email almost writes itself.
honestly this is also one of the reasons i eventually built Getlead. i got tired of having one thing for leads, another thing for verification, another for sending, mailboxes somewhere else and then trying to figure out which part actually worked.
the funny part is building better infrastructure doesnt magically make outbound work either. you can have perfect deliverability and still send an offer nobody wants.
follow ups are probably the most boring unfair advantage in sales
people ghost for so many reasons that have nothing to do with you.
they were travelling. had a meeting. opened your email on their phone and forgot about it. their boss asked them something. kid got sick. they just didnt feel like replying that day.
early on if someone didn't reply i immediately assumed they weren't interested.
not always true.
some deals i closed came from people who ignored multiple messages before replying.
the important thing IMO is not becoming that annoying guy who sends "just bumping this to the top of your inbox" every 2 days for a month.
sometimes wait. sometimes send something useful. sometimes just send a normal human message.
sales people overcomplicate follow ups way too much.
you can have an amazing pipeline and still have no pipeline
this happened to me more than once.
you open the CRM and you have $50k, $100k, whatever sitting there and it makes you feel good.
then you actually look at the deals.
one guy hasn't replied for 3 weeks.
one said "maybe next quarter".
another one liked the demo but never introduced you to the person who actually has the budget.
another asked for the proposal and disappeared.
technically they are opportunities. realistically most of them are dead.
i think one of the best things you can do is become slightly pessimistic with your pipeline.
if someone hasn't done anything that shows the deal is moving forward, dont mentally spend that money yet lol
getting a yes from the wrong person is basically a no
this one is painful.
you can spend 3 weeks talking to someone inside a company and they absolutely love the product.
"this is exactly what we need"
"the team will love this"
"lets do it"
then suddenly they need approval from their founder, VP, CFO, whoever and the whole thing dies.
because the person you convinced now has to convince someone else.
and they probably won't explain it as well as you did.
these days i try to understand quite early who actually decides if money gets spent.
not in the awkward "ARE YOU THE DECISION MAKER?" sales guru way.
just asking how they normally buy something like this usually tells you everything.
the easiest companies to sell to usually already understand the problem
trying to convince someone they have a problem AND convince them your solution is the answer is incredibly hard.
this applies to outbound too.
lets say you're selling something for companies sending lots of cold email.
company A has never done outbound before and doesn't really believe in it.
company B already has 20 mailboxes, an SDR and spends $2k/mo on tools but hates their current workflow.
company B is obviously easier.
you dont need to educate them on the entire category. they already spend money trying to solve the problem.
you just need to convince them you solve it better.
i started thinking about this a lot more when choosing who to target.
sales gets much easier when you stop trying to close everyone
this one sounds counterintuitive when you need money lol
but bad customers are expensive.
they need more support, complain more, churn more, request things your product wasn't designed for and usually take longer to close too.
i used to think every inbound lead was something i had to somehow turn into money.
now if someone clearly isn't a fit i'd rather know quickly.
same with outbound.
100 companies that actually have the problem is much more valuable than 10,000 "leads".
most sales advice makes sales sound more complicated than it is
there are frameworks for everything.
how to handle objections. what question to ask at minute 17 of the call. exact words to use when they say the price is too high. how to create urgency etc.
some of it is useful but i think people can feel when they're being "sold".
especially founders and experienced b2b buyers. they've been on 200 sales calls already.
the best sales conversations ive had didn't really feel like sales calls.
two people talking about a problem.
one person has the problem.
the other person might have a way to solve it.
thats basically it.
and if you dont solve it, sometimes the best sales move is literally saying "i dont think we're the right fit for this".
weirdly enough people trust you a lot more after you say that.
anyway thats the brain dump.
still lose deals, still get ghosted, still have campaigns that completely flop and sometimes i have absolutely no idea why someone bought from me instead of a competitor.
thats probably what makes b2b sales interesting though.
curious what people here disagree with, especially people who've been doing this much longer than me.