To gain an understanding of your ideal customer, you'll want to do customer development. You'll want to run a structured, focused process to validate their pain points in a neutral, non-sales environment. That means you need to get answers to a consistent set of questions, but it can be challenging to know where to start. Here are our recommendations for sample questions to run through during your customer development process.
Defining successful trials and pilots
Not every B2B software sales process requires a trial or a pilot. But you may find that this is often the fastest way to get your foot in the door of accounts. The goal of a pilot should be to get your product in a customer’s hands, gain experience with the customer, and ideally, sign a one-year agreement from there. Here’s the framework to follow to ensure a winning trial.
When should you make your first sales hire?
How to handle objections in sales
After running qualifying and demo calls, many salespeople are faced with a dreaded interaction: objections. But we don’t think objections are something to dread—in fact, we think objections are great because they show the customer is engaged and demonstrate what the customer thinks is truly important. Here's a five-step framework to tackle objection handling as well as a few common objections and how to handle them.