Selling premium products, "Hunter Mentality" in Interviews, and Prospecting Motivation

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the very first edition of Sales Soup with Salman, where you are one of 2,500 sellers that have joined this community, that have joined this newsletter where I'm going to be answering the hottest questions.

Question 1: "how do I sell a premium product when my competitors are providing their solution at a lower price?”

So this seller asks, if I'm selling a premium product, which is obviously more expensive, how do I get over the fact that, hey, my competitors are offering a lower price, how do I tackle that challenge?

Well, here's what I would do. You've got to call it out. You need to fully understand what your key competitive differentiators are versus your competitors.

Because here's the thing. In most cases, 80% is table stakes. Your competitors can do it. It's the 20% that you might be able to accomplish that your prospects can't, sorry, that your competitors can't.

So here's what I would do on a demo, for example. I would call it out. You could say something like this:

“Hey Linda, I understand that you're considering a few platforms. As you're aware, 80% of the capabilities are usually the same across these tools.The 20% is where we stand out from the pack. So what I'd like to do today is walk you through that first on how it will solve your biggest challenges. Is that fair”

And then what you do is you kick off the demo to show them exactly the 20% where you're different. The competitive differentiators that will solve their biggest problems because they come back to you saying you're too expensive. You can outline, hey, this is what we do differently.And this is how it's going to solve your problems, which your competitors can't do today.

Question 2: "In jobs and interviews they always talk about having a hunter mentality. How can I show this on a resume or how can I articulate this in an interview? What are some catch words and phrases if the majority of my career was spent you know, not hunting or a small portion of it, how do I articulate that?”

Well here's what you do, in an interview show them a territory plan.

What is a territory plan? It's a one page or one slide that shows exactly how you're gonna attack the territory in the first 30 days, 60 days, or first 30 days, 90 days, and 6 months and outline a plan.

So if they ask you, hey, what's your plan to tackle the territory? Or you just jump in and say, “hey, Linda, I've actually built out a territory plan on how I will attack the territory and, and make an immediate impact. Do you mind if I walk you through that?”

For example, you can say in your first 30 days, I'm going to take the time to understand our personas. Their role & responsibilities, the problems that we solve for, understand our key competitive differentiator, sit down with the top SDRs and AEs, in the first 30 days

90 days, I'm going to bump up the activity and outline the number of calls, the number of emails, the number of emails that you're going to send that's going to result in this many meetings and this many connects resulting in this much pipeline and outline a plan to have some bigger accounts.

The prospects that you're going to target and your plan of attack outline exactly how you're going to do them. Actually show your screen and show them how you're going to do it.

Question 3: "what is the best approach when you're just not feeling motivated to start a long day of cold calls?”

We're in sales, whether you're in SDR, BDR, AE, you make a lot of cold calls, you know, you gotta hit those metrics, you gotta hit those connects, and you're just not feeling motivated.

One of the reasons people don't feel motivated is they don't have conviction in what they sell. You gotta believe in the product that you're selling. That's number one.

But number two is you gotta clearly understand the problems that your product solves for, not the capabilities, your language, the capabilities.

The company's language is the capabilities and the features. But your prospect's language is, ‘what are all the problems I'm facing. How am I gonna get through the day and achieve my goals’

For example, if you're selling a customer data platform, what is your language?

Your language is, ‘hey, we provide teams a way to centralize all their data in one place so they have what they need to provide personalized, real-time offers for their customers, improving conversion rates.’

Your prospect's language is this. ‘My development teams and marketing teams are spending hours a day trying to cobble up data that’s scattered across a dozen different systems. It takes them a lot of time, they have to make sense of that data and then we can’t provide real time offers to our customers when they’re on our digital channels in real-time which results in lower conversion rates and loss of revenue opportunities.’

That is the prospect’s language. When you lead your cold calls you’ve got to start with the problem. And when you do that you’ll be motivated to make colds and it’ll start resonating with your prospects.

Thank you for listening to the first edition of “Sales Soup with Salman”.

We’ll see you next week. Next Thursday 10am. Look out for the email. Thank you!