Bob Moesta’s first role in sales and marketing happened relatively early in his career. He came from engineering, and so found the notion of tackling sales and marketing — soft, squishy, people-centred — to be extremely scary.
In the introduction to his 2020 book Demand Side Sales 101, Moesta writes:
I thought of sales as a series of techniques, tools, and processes—a trade—and I just had to learn it. So, it’s with this mindset that I boldly took a lead sales and marketing role at a home products company manufacturing and selling solid surface countertops for kitchens and bathrooms, my second startup. I was excited about our product—a new type of kitchen countertop—and believed that if I understood how my product worked and its position in the marketplace, I would strategically know how to sell it. Tell people about the product, and they’ll buy it, right? The idea was that we sold our countertops to small kitchen and bath shops, as well as big box retailers like Lowe’s and Home Depot, who in turn, sold direct to the customer. Easier said than done.
Immediately, I struggled! This felt more like art than science: people, emotions, exceptions—no equations, very scary. The hair on the back of my neck went up whenever I encountered someone because I thought of every person I met as a prospective customer, all the time. To me, the consumer world seemed irrational and random—like falling into a blackhole—very different from engineering. Previously, I’d been responsible for solving problems for people, but in sales, I was trying to get something from people—money in exchange for my product. For some reason, sales felt icky. It was an unnatural “push” to get people to buy my product. I knew I hated pushy salespeople, and I didn’t want people to hate me. I didn’t know if I wanted to do this and wondered if sales had to be this way. I considered myself more of an introvert at the time, and most salespeople seemed to be extroverts. I felt like I was a misfit in the true sense of the word. When I did procure a lead, the rules of engagement were murky, and I was directed to say and do whatever was necessary to close the deal.
I began to make trade-offs, compromising on both sides of the table—with the customer and internally with the company: if they wanted black, well then I’d figure out black. I caused havoc back at the office. The customers were managing me and our process, where I felt I had been reduced to an order taker. My confidence waned. I wrestled with how to sell directly to the resellers and meet their needs, versus providing what the end-user customers wanted. I felt my loyalties pushed and squeezed. I had loyalty to the company and the customer. But how could I satisfy both? I also felt a huge amount of pressure to grow the business. I’m a goal-oriented person, but it got to the point where I was not sure I could do it anymore.
I thought the problem was my sales technique. Since I had no real sales training, I began to consume everything I could: listening to books, going to seminars, and signing up for classes. Right away, I noticed that I could only find basic sales techniques, such as how to make cold calls or how to get past the gatekeeper, how to do a sales pitch and how to negotiate a contract. There were gaps in how to apply the knowledge in practice.
So, I sought out a sales coach. At the time, I was stunned to find that none of the top business schools in the country even had professors in the area of sales. Lawyers were teaching sales negotiating. Sales management was being taught as part of the human resources curriculum because it was seen as motivation and compensation. I’d studied at both Boston College and the Harvard Business School, and neither had professors in sales. Why didn’t I have a sales class? Why are there no sales professors? The short answer: “Sales is a trade, not a profession like accounting or law,” I was told. You learn on the job; there is no sales theory.
This oversight was true during Moesta’s time — and remained true for about 20 years afterwards. In a typical business school curriculum, marketing is placed above sales, with sales seen as a ‘trade’ — just a set of tools, techniques, and processes, with no real management theory behind it.
So Moesta was alone.
It was around this time that I met Bob Ericson, one of our sales representatives—formerly a lineman for the San Francisco 49’ers, a massive man standing at six feet ten inches tall and weighing over 300 pounds—and he kept telling me that I was going about this the wrong way.
“You’ve got to understand where they’re coming from,” he’d say.
“But I don’t! I don’t know what it’s like to be a buyer at Home Depot. I don’t know what it’s like to own a kitchen and bath store. I don’t know why the customer wants a black countertop.”
“Why don’t you go live in their stores for a few days?” he asked. “You will learn a ton.”
So, I did. I went to Home Depot and volunteered in kitchen designs, quoting kitchens on Saturdays and Sundays, for several months. And it was my ah-ha moment; I quickly realized I had no idea what I was talking about! Sitting in the back of the vast Home Depot weekend after weekend, I suddenly realized it wasn’t about my product at all—it was about the customer.
Our countertops filled a void in the marketplace. At the time, in the late 1990s, consumers had three basic options: low-end laminate, followed by Corian and granite at the high-end. Our product filled the gap between the low-end laminate and the high-end options. Traditionally, consumers had to trade off between high-end cabinets paired with cheap countertops or the opposite; most couldn’t afford both. Our product gave them the best of both worlds. It was engineered stone, with the look of Corian and between the two extremes in cost.
Customers struggled to choose from the one-by-one inch, countertop sample sizes. It was hard to pull out colors and match them to the large cabinet doors. Yet, our competitors used these same tiny samples. When I simply switched our sample sizes to two-by-two inches, our product stood out. I also realized that the wide spectrum of color options confused the customer—some brands had upwards of fifty. Four shades of beige just confused people. We had originally planned to expand our palette, but I realized fewer, great options would outperform. In this setting, more wasn’t better, just more overwhelming. These two simple steps—making bigger sample sizes and fewer colors options—resonated with the buyer. For the first time, I saw the direct impact of solving a struggling moment in the setting of sales. I had flipped the lens on how I saw sales. Sales started to feel more like engineering—solving a problem—and less icky.
On the business to business side, one of the biggest problems stores had with our countertops was quoting. There were several elaborate measurements, and every store did it differently. Immediately, I streamlined the process. It didn’t matter if we got the numbers exactly right. It mattered that regardless, we lived by the quote and that it was easy to create. Right away salespeople began selling our products—they were just easier to quote.
I realized it wasn’t just about the product and what it did—the buying process mattered too. There were a lot of details wrapped around the process that when managed correctly, could make us more valuable, like the samples and quoting. Yet, none of the books taught me to look at sales this way—through the buyer’s eyes. They were all about building a persona of an ideal, imagined customer. And, in my experience, the imagined customer had little in common with reality. The sales techniques taught in books didn’t work in practice for me.
The idea of having a cold lead, where I pitched a preplanned presentation of features and benefits to a persona and not a real buyer, frustrated me to no end. A sales funnel based on the probability someone will buy, without understanding what causes them to buy, made no sense to me. In my experience, customers bought on their terms. I didn’t convince them to do anything; they convinced themselves. It was their moment of struggle that became the seed that caused customers to switch to my product or service. We are all creatures of habit, and we will keep doing what we have been doing unless we have that struggling moment. So I flipped the lens, stopped trying to push my product, and started to understand what caused people to pull new things into their lives.
Once I started focusing on the customer—their problem, outcomes, and trade-offs—as well as gave the resellers tools to inform the customer better, sales soared. Flipping the lens from pushing product to creating pull for our solution changed my perspective. And, I no longer felt like a used car salesman, compromising left and right. There’s a different way to sell, and it starts with helping people make progress.
The surface countertops company Moesta joined was his second startup, after attending Harvard Business School for his Executive MBA. He helped it go from $500,000 in sales to $18 million in a short twenty months. And then he was off to his next thing.
Sources
Demand-Side Sales 101, by Bob Moesta and Greg Engle