You’re Always Selling to a Situation, Not an ICP

Note: This is Part 6 in a short series of essays on Understanding Customer Demand. Read Part 5 here.

What differentiates a great salesperson from a bad one? There are many differences, but one of the more important ones is ‘deal sense’. That is: can a salesperson, in a specific buyer context, develop a good sense for whether a specific deal will close?

Some people never seem to develop good deal sense. Such folks will never become great.

Of course, deal sense is an output. It is downstream of many other skills or traits that good salespeople have. At this point there is a rich literature for the traits that work for different companies in different sales contexts. For instance, in The Sales Acceleration Formula, former HubSpot head of sales Mark Roberge writes:

Every buyer context should have a unique sales hiring formula. For HubSpot’s buyer context, there were five criteria that correlated most strongly with sales success. These criteria are probably components of your ideal hiring formula, especially if you are operating in a rapidly evolving market. The five criteria are:

1. Coachability: The ability to absorb and apply coaching.
2. Curiosity: The ability to understand a potential customer’s context through effective questioning and listening.
3. Prior success: A history of top performance or remarkable achievement.
4. Intelligence: The ability to learn complex concepts quickly and communicate those concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.
5. Work ethic: Proactively pursuing the company mission with a high degree of energy and daily activity.

In a recent interview, Chris Degnan, the former Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake describes what traits best predicted success for them:

In the early days we did assessments of our sales teams. So basically, I took myself and all of the early Snowflake sales people and we all took these assessments. And in these assessments we were looking for things that were consistent across people that were successful. Because we had people that failed as well. And for us [the successful traits were] … highly intelligent salespeople that basically did not trust anybody. They were very mistrusting of people … and high energy, and sometimes even low social [skills]. [These highly successful salespeople] were out there and when someone says “Yeah, no problem, dude I'll get you a deal.” they would all be suspect of that. They’d be like “Okay tell me why.” And part of having a sales methodology is that you’re going to qualify: why now, why us, why anything. And so what really good sales people start to do is even when someone says that they’re going to do something for them … they don't trust them. And I think that … you’re looking for that [quality] in their background.

So for me, when we were early stage , I was not looking for people who managed one account. [Instead], I was looking for people who … show me in the last two years where you’ve worked, and you’ve successfully opened up new logos. Tell me about those new logos. How many new logos did you open? Tell me about the deals that you lost. Tell me why you lost them. Tell me who was your champion when you won. Tell me who was the champion of your competitor when you lost. Like these are things that you can ask in the interview to start figuring out if they’re BSing because they could say “Yeah I won this logo.” “Okay tell me more about that.” Like you could just ask like three levels deep and all of a sudden their story starts to fall apart or it doesn't make sense. Then you’re like “Okay this person's full of it.”

It doesn’t take a genius to look at these qualities and spot the leading indicators for good deal sense. In Roberge’s case, it was sales folks who were curious about their customers. For Degnan, it was folks who were ‘suspicious’ when promised something.