Hooray! We have a sale!

Of course, sales is not this easy or ridiculous. In reality, you may very well have what the client needs, but while you may both speak the same conversational language, you may not be speaking the same business language.

The first lesson I learned almost 15 years ago when I started my consulting work was to align on terms. Are we sure we’re talking about the same thing? When a potential client wants user segmentation done, are we talking about the same user segmentation? We both know the words and even our own understanding of what “user segmentation” means, but is it the same understanding?

Prediction? Are they looking for prediction? or is it correlation? Did they mean association? Did they mean pattern? Did they want causality. Seven decimals of precision or just “up or down”?

The process of requirements gathering isn’t just for projects. It’s part of good sales motions. We might call it by other words: user persona, understanding use case, matching the client to the product, etc. but at the end of the day, it’s about making sure you and the prospect / client are speaking the same language.

Those new to sales tend to use a ton of internal lingo to sell their company’s product. And they stick to a single pitch. This leads to prospect disinterest or confusion and a dangerous cycle of confirmation bias. There will be some prospects for whom the pitch resonates. They become clients. This provides positive reinforcement on what works and then we misclassify the uninterested prospects as “not a good fit for our product”, which in turn leads to addressing issues with the product because the pitch didn’t work.

In a business, everything needs to evolve and iterate. And that includes the pitch. It’s easier to adjust the pitch than it is to adjust the product. It’s also easier to have multiple pitches than to have multiple products.

You can also sell the same product to different customer profiles just by emphasizing different aspects of the product. Take any tourist attraction. It’s the “same product”, but you’re highlighting different aspects to different target audiences. It’s Sales and Marketing 101, but sometimes it’s easy to get lost in our environment and forget that maybe we just have to say “trugoy”.