Effective Salespeople Commit to Providing Value

A conversation with Brendan McAdams on how effective salespeople commit to providing value.

Effective Sales People
Commit to Providing Value

Brendan McAdams invited me to take part in his “Let’s Chat Health Tech” podcast and we talked about the importance of discovery to uncover customer needs, why salespeople who commit to providing value are the most effective, and the importance of playing a long game. Bredan’s summary of key points:

Shifting from closing transactions to creating enduring customer value
The role of discovery and fit in complex sales processes
How to build trust and credibility within customer organizations
Using project management frameworks for disruptive technologies
The importance of collaboration and co-creation during proposal development
Strategies for managing expectations and avoiding surprises
Recognizing and supporting the shift from exploration to operationalization
Early-stage sales tactics for managing technical requirements and customer objections
Navigating complex decision-making groups and internal gatekeepers
Maintaining a long-term perspective beyond initial deal closure

Edited Transcript

Brendan McAdams: Hello, it’s another episode of Let’s Chat Health Tech. this is a little less health tech and a little more just Let’s Chat sales. But we have the good pleasure of having one of my good friends, Sean Murphy. Sean is the CEO of SKMurphy Inc. He has been an entrepreneur and intrapreneur and serves as an advisor to a number of startups. He helps them explore risk-reducing business options and building scalable, repeatable sales process.

So our practices overlap quite a lot. He focuses on early customers and early revenue for startups, especially software companies and helps engineers. Don’t you have a degree from MIT or something like that?

Sean Murphy: Not MIT, no, the MIT of the west, Stanford. For your listeners on the East Coast: it’s a small college out west on the other coast.

Brendan: Stanford is legit. You take a wonkier approach to sales than I do, drawing from a diverse set of resources which is based relationship. My approach is more intuitive and based on trial and error.

For today we’ve decided to talk about complex sales, selling to enterprise buyers, and the importance of committing to delivering sustainable value.

Sean: I think that’s one of the hallmarks of your approach that I’ve always admired. Too much sales advice is focused on controlling the outcome, closing the transaction, and getting the purchase order. But the reality is, in the long run, if it’s not a good deal for the customer then it won’t be a good deal for you.

Brendan: I totally agree. There’s a natural flow to a good deal that takes a while to learn. But you experience it over a period of time, and you start to see the deals that are likely to close, are likely to be successful, and will deliver long-term value for both the vendor and the customer. We can spend time breaking down what the ingredients of a good deal are and how to manifest them more often.

Put Customers On a Path That Takes Them Higher

Sean: So my context: I work with early-stage teams, typically two to five engineers or scientists who have a complex technology, and they’re looking for early deals. So they’re trying to figure out exactly what they’ve got. Often, when you’re selling something that provides a significant boost in productivity, cost savings, or cycle time, the customer needs to change their process. It’s not always a form, fit, and function insertion.

I advise clients to treat this like a project management challenge: they are scoping and managing a project to install capabilities that deliver business value to the customer. I think a project management framework is not a bad framing, at least for more disruptive or discontinuous technologies.

Brendan: That is an interesting way to put it because I coach clients to view themselves more as consultants than sales people. They should guide customers to a successful outcome, in much the same way a project manager would.

Sean: I agree. The first step to delivering value is making sure that you understand the customer’s problem or need. Then you have to make sure there’s a fit between that need and the capabilities your product offers. Sometimes entrepreneurs skip that first step and all the discovery that goes with it, assume their product is a good fit, describe a few features, and get started on closing the deal.

Brendan If you start by trying to understand the customer’s situation they are going to feel less rushed. They will appreciate that you are trying to examine all the things that need to happen and might go wrong. I think that gives the customer a much more kind of comfortable feeling about moving forward.

Sean: I work primarily with bootstrappers who are often trying to close deals to meet payroll, so to speak, or keep the lights on. But even in that context, I think the reality is that the urgency comes only from the customer’s need. No matter how much you need the deal, if you can’t connect it to objectives, timelines, and results the customer needs, you can’t inject urgency.

Brendan Right. We all want to have things happen more quickly. A salesperson is often working against time–end of the month, end of the quarter, or end of the year. So delays work against you. The more you let things go, the more things could happen in the interim. The way you compress time is to be more responsive, to get things done sooner on behalf of the customer. Rushing the customer often slows things down.

Trust Makes Things Smooth, and Smooth is Fast

Sean: I think the kind of deals you’re involved in, and many of the deals I’m involved in, there may be an internal champion and one key decision maker, but there’s often a group or a committee or a set of people that have to sign off in different ways or at least contribute to and shape the decision. There’s a Navy SEAL mantra that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” If you lay the groundwork by building relationships, in the long run, that actually speeds things up.

Brendan As the customer recognizes that you’re genuinely interested in doing the right thing on their behalf, you establish shared trust, and the amount of due diligence that they feel the need to do goes down. It doesn’t go away, but goes down. The reverse is also true: if they start to believe you are only focused on the deal, then they feel they need to double-check everything.

Some of the ways you can look out for them with your project manager hat on are to identify what’s going to get in the way of a pilot or initial project delivering value. What might cause it to fail? Can you address them now? If you can’t, it may be a case where “no” is the right decision. If you can’t deliver value to the customer in a meaningful and measurable way, you’re probably better off not selling that deal.

Because if you’ve got a customer who doesn’t succeed, that’s a big black eye for you with other customers, support issues, collections, and more. So if you’re really taking the long view and playing the long game, you as a salesperson need to see that deal succeed. Otherwise, it’s an albatross hanging around your neck.

Sean: That’s a very good point that often gets overlooked in the heat of the moment. There is normally one community that you and the customer are members of, and often several. It may be organized around a particular technology, discipline, profession, or geography. You will develop a reputation within multiple communities that the customer evaluation team members are part of.

We have a simple sales model. The customer has to understand your product, believe it can do what you promise, and find a reason to act. That second step, the belief step, typically relies on the trust you have established in the way that you have engaged with them and the credibility you have established with people in communities the customer is a member of and can verify.

Brendan I think that’s absolutely true. And I believe that over time, if you’re in sales, and frankly, if you’re a founder of a company or high up in a company, this applies just as well. And there’s certainly a certain component of your expertise in sales, regardless of whether or not you’re the CFO or COO or the CEO or actually in charge of sales.

Over time, you become more and more recognized for your reputation and expertise, which supports your idea of acting as a project manager and making things happen. I hope you don’t think I’m overworking that metaphor.

You Must Talk to Enough People to Get a Holistic Perspective

Sean: I don’t. Another aspect of the project management paradigm is the need for joint scoping of needs by talking to multiple people in the customer organization to get a holistic perspective on the total set of requirements. Sometimes you can disqualify yourself when it becomes clear there is a misfit between their needs and your product’s capabilities. To your earlier point, it’s better to detect the misfit before you’ve taken their money than after you’ve taken their money and can’t deliver, and now everybody’s unhappy.

Brendan: You made a very valuable point: you must get around inside that organization. You want to talk to as many people as possible to get that holistic view. That’s going to allow you to communicate with more people more effectively in the language they understand and that resonates with them. You’ll be able to use their examples, their terminology, and their metrics. And by doing so, you’ll make it much easier on yourself and your champion inside the organization to get this deal across the finish line.

Sean: Many times, especially early in the life cycle of a new technology or a new problem space, different terminology is used in different companies or regions. Different terms may actually mean the same thing. Figuring out how they talk about the problem and adapting to their language is important.

Another aspect of soliciting input comes when they ask you for a proposal. It’s better that you work on it together at the whiteboard or in a shared document where you are both actively engaged and collaborating on a shared plan for moving forward. Don’t pour your notes into ChatGPT and ask it to write a 12-page proposal. These don’t get read, and often sending it to a prospect can end the conversation–you never hear from them again. The best proposals and project plans are co-created with key members of the customer organization.

Brendan: Going back to this project manager example, part of your job as a salesperson is to create shared recognition of the problem you are trying to solve. We agree that this is what we are trying to achieve together. And there may be a fair amount of difficulty and discomfort in the coordination and politicking to get that done. You, your champions, and the other people in the organization need to figure out and agree on the steps, moving parts, and obstacles to be overcome.

You also need to bring in others from your company to review and commit to the proposed solution. If you’ve done your job well, it’s not two sides but everyone on one team looking at the challenges and the plan together. Done right, you can hit their target and achieve all of the business objectives your firm needs to make this a good deal for both parties.

Negotiation is a Means to Arrive at a Solution Jointly Agreed To

Sean: That makes sense. Project managers negotiate; salespeople negotiate; negotiation is a means to arrive at a solution jointly agreed to. At the end of the day, if the customer doesn’t get value out of what your product can do for them, then nobody wins. Maybe you get a one-year deal, but as you pointed out, when it doesn’t provide value, it leaves a lasting bad taste in everybody’s mouth. So you have to get multiple perspectives, because no one person understands all of the complexity involved in a successful transition.

In particular, the champion may understand what’s needed for a successful proof of concept or pilot project, but may know less about what’s needed to scale up from there to operationalize the solution fully. What procedures do we have to change? What’s going to change about how the organization does business to take advantage of this product? I spend a lot of time helping my clients help their customers scale up from an initial success.

If you are selling to a freelance website developer, that person is the business decision maker, the manager, and the user. So you can get a decision very quickly, and they can figure out what it will take to use it. There is no scaling beyond making that one freelancer successful.

But it becomes complex when you’re trying to support a team, department, or larger group spanning organizational boundaries. It becomes much more complex when your product affects how the customer does business with their customers or suppliers. As the scope of the change increases, there is more negotiation and often more re-engineering of existing procedures and workflows. All of which has to be mapped out to make the first implementation a success.

Brendan: Another benefit that flows from this consultative project management approach that involves the customer in the design of the solution, mapping all of the moving parts, and identifying evangelists is that you are in a much better position to guarantee success. You can plug your team members into the right conversations and prepare for various eventualities you may need to manage.

For example, here is the person who will be your account manager. This minimizes surprise, and large organizations don’t like surprise. They want to know that this is going to happen, and at this point, this is going to happen, so that they can anticipate and plan ahead. It works well in setting expectations in both directions: we’re going to need this from this department, and we’re going to need these people to be involved in this training.

Of course, if people know about these things ahead of time, they can object, and you may have a potential adversary. But doing it early means it’s not a surprise, you have more time to make adjustments, and they are much more inclined to participate enthusiastically because they can plan for it.

Sean: I am OK with tough questions, they are normally an indication you are speaking to a serious prospect. I would much rather be talking to someone who ask, “How do we do this? How do we do that? How do we operationalize this for our group?” The people who a just focused on getting a quote have already slotted you into third or fourth place as a makeweight. Large companies often require three bids and they invite you to bid so they can say, “we’ve evaluated three options and it turns out that the guy we like when we started turned out to be best.”

Tough Questions All the Way Around Are a Good Thing

Brendan: I would argue that the converse is also true. When you are in a sales or consulting role, you are an expert knowledgeable about your side of the solution, and you’re certainly learning more and more about their side of the problem. Every customer has their own environment, with unique components and aspects to their workflow. They may not face the same obstacles, but you will find common patterns, which will enable you to ask tough questions as well. Like, what could go wrong? Who will oppose this solution? Whose ox is gored by this decision? Any of those sorts of things. I mean, you’re entitled to know those things as that outsider who’s evaluating and consulting on their behalf. And so I think tough questions all the way around are a good thing: they are something you should not only expect but also encourage.

Sean: Another thing I’ve seen happen, especially early in a product’s life, is that you have a clear view of what the complete feature set should be. Then a customer says, “We’re going to need an interface to this software tool or this piece of equipment.” But because you are blessed with insight, you say, “Actually, we plan to support this other software and this other brand of equipment.”

When they respond, “OK, but we still need it. If you’re not going to do it, we’ll do it.” What you don’t realize is that they are giving you a new requirement that other companies like them, perhaps firms above a certain size or in a particular vertical, will ask you for. By turning over the implementation to them, you’ve forfeited the chance to work with someone to debug a more general solution, because they are not going to make that interface available to their competitors.

In B2B, if you’ve sold to 30 or 40 customers, you should have a pretty good sense of the market and where this particular prospect fits within the distribution of what others are selling and what most customers need. You have a better sense of whether their request is a one-off that interfaces with legacy software or equipment, or it’s on the roadmap and should be accelerated. If it’s the former, then that’s their problem or perhaps a professional services opportunity.

But early on, feature content and interoperability requirements are less well settled. And I think that argues as well for figuring out what it’s going to take to get this thing into real production use to be part of the critical infrastructure.

Brendan: I think that’s one of the reasons early-stage companies benefit from a consultative sales approach. This approach also benefits companies in a growth stage that face significant competition in the marketplace, where new features and functionality are expected. Having a salesperson who can act as a consultant to customer organizations will be invaluable because they can surface the requirements for what is needed in the next release or on the product roadmap.

The other thing a good consultative salesperson can do is manage customer expectations: “Here is why you can’t have that feature yet. That’s going to take three months or six months, or we need six other customers to buy into it to make sure that it is actually functionally required in the marketplace.” They may also say, “That’s a one-off, we’re going to need $50,000 for development fees to bring that in and to support it.” That’s what I mean by managing expectations.

Sean: We don’t do a lot of work on the medical side, but one related area is medical equipment that is sold for “research use only(RUO),” which means selling to research labs and what are called central labs. These buyers have different requirements from what is needed to get deployed in a hospital or a clinic, and represent a much smaller market niche, but it’s a way to get started.

A second area is to attack the veterinary market, because it’s easier in many ways. Over time, you can migrate to clinical use for humans.

In both cases, you have to satisfy that initial community, but you’ve got to be alert to the fact that you don’t really have the full product spec for what it’s going to take to get to the major market or the major opportunity. On the other hand, if you don’t make the researchers or veterinarians happy, you won’t get beyond them to the major market.

Brendan: The corollary for me is that I’ve coached people in certain health tech companies that need FDA approval. In some cases, you can work around that in the short term to achieve some adoption that provides feedback and outcomes, generating data for analysis and case studies. One of the best ways to do this is to work with DoD: if your solution can assist in a military setting, they don’t have to wait for FDA approval if the results are compelling enough. They can drop it into a location, start testing it out, and prove it out.

Then you can start the approval process with a fair amount of traction. That out-of-the-box approach can sometimes move things forward quickly. Good salespeople know how to think outside the box, know how to consult, and know how to examine things from a lot of different angles

Sean Murphy: I think that’s a good example of looking for a win-win. You must have some proof of efficacy for a problem that the DOD is facing, right? You’re not going there just because they have a more relaxed standard. In some ways, they have much more stringent standards. They just don’t need to wait for the FDA.

The Sale is Never Really Over

Brendan: Right.

So let’s start to wrap this up. We’ve talked about the need for a good discovery process to uncover customer needs and make an offer that provides compelling long-term value. I think there are two implications: the sale is never really over, and there is a lot to learn from a customer saying no.

The idea of “closing” someone has always made me feel uncomfortable. The customer is never permanently closed. You can have a signed contract and full payment, but that doesn’t mean anything is really over. In many ways, the real work of supporting the customer has only begun. And before that, until they have seen results that demonstrate your value convincingly, there is always the possibility that the deal is not done.

You need to make sure that the customer has the opportunity to say no. It is very important to let the customer examine the situation and accept when they say, “This isn’t a fit for me.” If you make them feel comfortable doing that, the less likely they are to look for excuses to say no, the more likely they are to try to figure out why they should do something.

I’ll stop rambling on here in just a second, but the thing I’m thinking of is that many customers, especially in healthcare, don’t want to do something else. There are already too many things they must do. So you do have to address that. But at the same time, if they’re really going to say no, right, because they just don’t have the bandwidth, they don’t want to do it, they’re lazy, or they’re just a hidebound old school organization, then you want to know that. And you want to know that soon rather than later. You don’t want to go through six months of evaluation and a dozen 30-minute sales calls that ultimately go nowhere.

Sean Murphy: There’s a lot to unpack in what we covered: I agree with your conclusions. To rewind to an earlier point about handoffs: in a small startup, there is a lot of overlap between sales and operations. As the business grows, there’s a much greater need for a handoff between people focused on new opportunities and those handling day-to-day customer interactions.

I think over the course of a deal, the customer also shifts from an exploration mode to a delivery or operations mode. OK, now we’ve decided to move forward and need to operationalize the capabilities the product offers. Operations people are usually less involved in the early stages of an evaluation. I think when you are open with the customer up front, you’re going to get more of the real reasons for a no. And you’re going to get less “performative” testing and more verification focused on what they believe are their real needs.

If you do three demos and learn something from each, to me, that’s winning. Even if the sale doesn’t close, I place a high value on learning with a new product. The best case is that you learn a lot and close the sale, but if you don’t know why you closed the deal, that’s not good, because you were just lucky and aren’t building a repeatable, scalable process. And the real reasons for a no are very valuable because it’s definitely not good when you lose the deal and are mystified, because you are going to make the same mistake again on other deals, and you might chase opportunities you shouldn’t.

In the same way that the customer shifts from discovery to delivery, the sales team shifts from explore to exploit as they learn what works. They still do discovery, but they are executing a debugged process instead of debugging their process. The first purchase order or initial sale is just one milestone in the evolution of an ongoing business relationship.

I liked your points. I just wanted to add a few more items we covered.

An Enterprise or Complex Sale is a Long Game

Brendan McAdams I think that’s accurate, certainly for an enterprise or a complex sale, where the customer is not buying a commodity but a complex product. They are buying a result that won’t happen right away. It will require education, implementation support, and configuration to their specific needs. That’s a long game. You’re playing the long game.

So for our listeners, if you’ve got questions about this or have things you want to add, please leave a comment or reach out to us.

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Effective Salespeople Commit to Providing Value