Minimum Viable Sale

This is Chapter 6 in my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.

In this world of tech tools and quick fixes, it’s easy to think that employing some form of automation would be a huge boon in the world of sales. Artificial Intelligence is the first obvious candidate for the job.

Yet, when I think about artificial intelligence (AI), my immediate thought is that it is long on artificial and comparably short on intelligence.

AI certainly has its place, and undeniable breakthroughs have occurred, but it has been, and will always be, lacking when used to replace human interactions that depend on warmth, empathy, and personable improvisation. In my experience, using software that claims to be AI-powered with predictive and prescriptive capabilities hasn’t worked for me in my role as a salesperson or in my role as a customer.

Example: There’s an application on the Internet, okay several, where an artificial virtual assistant will respond to your emails and even attempt to schedule meetings for you. Interesting, right? Whose inbox isn’t overwhelmed with an unconquerable deluge? Who wouldn’t want to double themselves and outsource scheduling?

The problem is that I can tell when I’m communicating with a bot, and I bet you can, too. And rightly or wrongly it indicates to me that the other person is not actually interested in talking with me. Conversation is over or perhaps it never even gets started.

In this void of meaningful interaction, I can interpret anything I want: they’re not interested; they’re offended; they don’t want to learn more; they can’t be bothered. Who knows? Nobody sticks around long enough to find out.

Another problem with automated interactions is a bot’s inability to interpret nuance.

When the machine cannot respond, my question goes into the void, unanswered. Perhaps it was forwarded to the human owner, perhaps it was simply lost. Adding a third party creates another crack for details to slip through and disappear.

These bot-controlled interactions inhibit even the possibility of connection, and prospects who may actually be interested become impossible to engage. The additional machine layer that was added to triage the chaos unfortunately more often creates it.

Is this technology exciting and potentially transformative? Yes, but the risks can easily outweigh the potential rewards. Human intuition cannot easily be recreated. Salespeople miss out on opportunities and prospects feel outsourced and disregarded. The interactions all fall short.

People buy from other people. Why? Because we crave connection, even in a sales context. If AI has a place, it cannot be to replace the irreplaceable person. You need to pitch a person as a human salesperson. Everyone can easily say no to a bot.

So, where does AI fit into the sales puzzle?

AI has its time and place – in the background.

Machines can crunch numbers faster and more efficiently than any human. And these numbers bring insight. They can offer percentages, trends, and likelihoods of potential closed deals. But while these algorithmically-generated insights can be beneficial, they are not foolproof.

Even hard numbers must be massaged and interpreted with the human perspective. While the numbers may be accurate, they can lead to dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy where you invest time only in the “most likely to close” deals and neglect other, more subtle, but equally closeable deals.

Like a constant reliance on GPS can cripple geographic knowledge and intuition for directions, full buy-in to the predictions of AI algorithms can produce an unnecessary dependence that eclipses intuition.

The danger in machine learning is reinforcing patterns that then shackle you to the pattern. In contrast, a more robust, intuitive human process that includes a larger number of pursued deals and slower approach to sales will produce greater results with increased freedom and flexibility. It liberates a salesperson to close a variety of deals on different timelines that can adapt to the unique needs of customers.

The Efficiency Before Effectiveness Myth

A recent Gartner report touted the benefits of a massive volume of a repeated activity in order to establish proficiency and effectiveness. Summed up, the author advocated optimizing first for efficiency and then for effectiveness.

Upon first read, this made sense: you must have a large enough threshold volume in order to derive a statistically significant finding. But as I considered the proposition more, it chafed. Why would you waste time honing supreme efficiency at something that was not first effective?

This brings us back to the fallacy of acceleration.

If you keep going faster and faster in the wrong direction, you are only getting farther and farther away from your goal.

Optimizing efficiency without establishing effectiveness just leaves me wondering, what was the point?

In practice, this efficiency over effectiveness methodology can produce regrettable waste. It can look like burning through an enviable pile of highly qualified leads before knowing the best way to reach them.

Was it efficient? Sure. Was it effective? Absolutely not.

The first conversation went…badly. And what could have been a closed deal down the way is just a closed door from a botched initial interaction.

Too often we rush toward efficiency when we should focus on effectiveness first.

Screwdriver before power drill.

Bike before motorcycle.

It’s hard to learn a skill when we outsource the power from the very start. We’re missing the manual step when things are moving slowly enough for us to understand the mechanics.

In sales, this manual step is similarly critical. If your goal is to make a hundred calls a day, start by doing it step-by-arduous-step. Really work the process and dial the numbers. Think about what you are going to say and say those things before switching to a predictive dialer that increases volume but reduces preparation time.

Effectiveness also hinges on internalizing (not merely memorizing) your pitch. If you can’t launch repeated conversations in a way that keeps them fresh, organic, and original, you haven’t made the words your own.

Scripted calls do not go well. Your buyers have a finely honed radar for inauthenticity.

Make a string of effective calls and figure out what works. Then add speed to a point that makes sense – the equilibrium between effectiveness and efficiency.

Walk-Around Sales Management

Managing the art of the Slow Sale looks different than typical sales oversight. In my experience, the best way is to walk around – walking being an inherently slow activity itself.

Sure, you can gather faster, more prompt updates through messaging on Slack, Google Hangouts, or Salesforce Chatter. You could employ any number of collaboration mediums online or even resort to the most basic email itself. The problem is that the degree of response will most likely mirror the same minimal effort that you expend.

If you just ask everybody on Slack, “Hey, what’s an update for everybody’s

deals?” You’re likely to get a bunch of answers back that say, “Deals are good. Deals are progressing. I feel good about this one and not so good this other one. Had a good call; however, they’re not responding to my emails.”

Sure, this is efficient and (minimally) informative, but what are they really saying?

In contrast, a walk around the office will produce actual conversations where salespeople will tell you a story of the deal, not a bullet point list of the highlights. In this narrative, the deal personality and trajectory start to take shape. By understanding the nuance, you can impart value to the salesperson and help navigate the journey with them, sharing from your personal experience and helping them plan next steps toward a hopefully closed deal.

Let’s state the obvious: walk-around management takes more time. Not every story you hear will be valuable, not every conversation productive. The art of the story is a finely-honed craft where over time one learns the important details to share and what is overly-granular and superfluous.

Effective coaching is guiding people in how to tell a story that matters.

There’s a full circle at play. You are coaching to help people to tell you how you can help coach them. This type of relationship only comes from an interpersonal rapport developed over time. You can only provide a valuable level of insight when you pause long enough to hear the full story. Walking around, walking slowly, is the perfect corollary to the concept of a Slow Sale.

Lean Startup

The Minimum Viable Sale concept in The Slow Sale mirrors the Minimum Viable Product concept in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

As I read The Lean Startup, I was repeatedly struck by the concept of the “MVP” – Minimum Viable Product. Throughout product development, you are striving to reach the minimum state where someone could reasonably use the product and decide if it provides a threshold level of value and utility.

From a sales standpoint, we should always be asking ourselves, “What is the minimum viable sales process?”

Eliminating tangents, excising the fluff and extras of selling, we need to ask what are the key places where we need to exert effort in order to advance the sale in a way that makes sense to the customer and makes it work for them.

To do this, we must leave the periphery and enter their world. We must speak their language, work on their timeline, and strive for hyper relevancy and a mutually agreeable solution.

A minimum viable sale and Slow Sale go hand in hand. Pursuing root problems takes time and can prolong the sale, but it also encourages focus. It is directly opposed to distraction and over-complication of the process.

By focusing, you prove value and free the customer to focus on what you want them to see. It alleviates the pressure of getting distracted – presenting different business cases and triangulating between every player on the account.

The best approach, the best starting approach at least, is to determine the “least common denominator” of things that will appeal across the decision-making team. What will resonate with the most people? This is a perhaps somewhat complicated question that simplifies the deal overall.

If we as salespeople introduce complexity into the deal, the customer will follow. We have lampooned the idea of “acceleration” and instead decelerated the deal by adding unnecessary complexity. This energy and effort could have been used better elsewhere, to focus on second-order benefits to the customer.

A focus on the minimum viable sale advances a deal faster, more productively, and with greater benefit to both your prospects and you.

This is Chapter 6 in my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.