Have you ever sat in the buyers seat before?
If you’re only looking at things from the sales side you’re limiting how helpful you can be to your buyer (which impacts your close rate). From my experience on the buy side, there’s two distinctly different sellers I come across:
They follow a standardized process and it’s clear they’re just going through the motions and doing what they’re told. Sometimes it’s helpful but usually it’s very transactional and feels like they’re really just in it for the commission.
I’d rather go through that whole process with an AI than with a human. The AI Agent would be faster, more convenient and probably more reliable with the information it provides too. PLG + AI will replace the majority of these reps.
They seem invested in me and my problems (or at the very least in my profession). They already know a few things about me and my company, they have valuable insight to share not just about their own product, but also about the processes that surround that product. The value I get from meeting with them is worth a human interaction and it creates a relationship. I want to learn more about these people and their opinions as much as their product offering.
These reps naturally seem to be better at their follow up as well. Treat it less like steps in a sales funnel and more like a tailored project management process to help me buy (even if the steps are 90% the same for their other clients, which they probably are).
We just added a new feature to SendKits to support this type of "project management" sales process:
We’re on the same team problem solving together, and sometimes the correct answer is "you don’t need this product." Other times, it’s "wow you needed this even more than we thought!" But as a buyer, when I feel like we’re on the same team I’m more willing to work through those questions and try to see the value.
Obviously want to be more like sales rep 2. No, you don’t need to go buy a bunch of software to learn empathy for you customers. But here’s a few things you can do to improve your understanding:
If you want to learn more about how to prospect with empathy, checkout these old interviews I did with Sam Nelson, Nikki Ivey, and James Bawden. This is a few years old and more focused on cold outbound to get the first meeting. But I think a lot of the mindset framing here still appllies today:
