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Buyers Don't Want Your Product
Published 13 days ago • 3 min read
Issue #101
It's Not Just Marketing, It's What You Care About
Buyers Don’t Want Your Product
How I helped a clueless (about sales) founder land a £60k enterprise win.
When Jake first emailed me, he was a brilliant tech founder who thought he could never learn to sell.
Ready to learn how to sell YOUR way, Jake?
All those cold calls and demos and not a single order to show for it.
He was in no doubt about the problem, “I'm just not a natural at sales.” Being aware of your short comings is the first step in solving them.
Also, people don't trust "natural sellers", they prefer to do some of the work themselves.
You don’t have to be a "natural" to sell, you just need to know what to do and do it your own way.
That makes you competent and trustworthy, which are the two foundations of any customer relationship.
Competent and trustworthy
Let’s go through Jake’s journey - and yes I have changed his name because he is a different person now (and richer).
The background is that Jake has a procurement compliance SaaS - it finds ropey spending and keeps an organisation honest with the CFO’s budget.
Stage One: Outreach
Jake’s emails opened with “I hope you’re well…” and closed with a half hearted invitation to see how clever he was.
No one replied. If he'd sent it to me, I would have emailed him back and suggested he got therapy, not booked a call.
I told him, “If your first sentence doesn’t spark curiosity, it’s spam.”
We hunted for a trigger and found a punchy stat, “Our client cut PO leakage by 42%.”
Lesson: Relevance beats persistence. If you’re not earning attention in the first line, you’re not getting in.
Stage Two: First Meeting
On his first call, Jake tried to demo before understanding the prospect’s particular issues.
We’ve all done this out of enthusiasm and ambition, but it is a killer.
I stopped him and asked: “What are they actually buying?” He mumbled something about compliance to budget, I’m not sure because even I lost interest before he’d finished.
That’s when I laid out this structure: Agenda, Permission, Curiosity.
Understand specific needs before a demo, so you can talk about them
He changed his answer to, “I’m not sure, I need to know what’s working and what isn’t.”
Lesson: They don’t give a damn about your product. They care about the problem it fixes - talk about that.
Stage Three: Discovery
The real pain came out; chaos in the tail of their spend profile, rogue suppliers, invoices arriving with no authorisation or reference.
But Finance just shrugged, “That’s an ops problem, we’re focused on EBITDA.”
I told Jake, “Translate ops chaos into margin bleed. Make it their problem.”
He adjusted his message, “Would it help to map this to cash flow and margin impact?”
Finance leaned in, the door cracked open.
Make sure you can handle the truth...
Lesson: If the pain doesn’t threaten real power, the deal dies.
Stage Four: Proposal
Jake built a tight ROI story, 5x return, and sent the proposal.
Silence, ten days of nothing. We drafted a reactivation email to the Head of Ops - no chase, just context and curiosity.
If in doubt, give them a bell
“Claire, we’ve been reviewing our project resourcing for the quarter, quick question - have your priorities changed or are you still keen to fix the issues with your profit leakage?”
She replied next day, “Still interested, CFO’s slammed. Let’s reconnect next week.”
Two weeks later, Jake closed a £60k contract starting with a £10k pilot.
Not because he miraculously “became good at sales.”
He just learned to lead buyers through decisions in his own way.
That’s the journey I coach.
We find your best way of selling, then nail it
If you're stuck in no-man’s-land with a great product and zero sales traction, and if you can learn, reply like Jake did and we’ll take it apart, together.
Then build it up into a sustainable revenue stream.
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Join 1,850+ professionals and transform your B2B sales results. Learn to sell the way big companies buy. Get insights delivered every Sunday - read in minutes, use forever.
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