Guest Speaker: Harry Hollander (@harryhollander)
Main Takeaways
- He gets to do a little of everything at Moraware – marketing, sales, support. His company makes scheduling and estimating software for countertop fabricators
- 100% of customers talk to them on the phone before they buy
- Started at trade shows, giving demos (~1 hour), but something was missing. Some would never talk to them again, but other were buying but had not idea why
- The demo customers needed wasn’t what they asked for. Instead, they needed a conversation about their business, then we can talk about how we can help.
- Implemented a process and asked the following questions:
- What are you doing now? How do you schedule countertop installs now?
- What works?
- What doesn’t?
- What are the consequences of not changing?
- They are describing the value so they are already sold to the software before you even say a word
- Then, show the software highlighting the features they care about
- Most of the time this ends up in the sale. They understand that’s more expensive not to buy the software than buying it.
- To get better: role playing (better start practicing with coworkers), listen to calls (painful to listen to yourself screw up on the phone, but the good parts keep getting better), write down the entire process (anticipate answers to customer’s questions).
- Create a repeatable sale process (anybody can be trained to do it)
Read notes of all the other talks on the Microconf 2014 Hub page.