Last week, I got fired from my job at a seed stage SAAS startup.

The short answer why this happened was that I was not skilled enough to meet their expectations.

The long answer is their expectations were kinda extreme.

The really long answer is that I really didn’t know just how difficult it’d be to shift from selling to the Defence in India, to selling software in UK- and be expected to perform in a leadership capacity from Day 1.

It was a skill gap- and I found it out, pretty quickly.

Something my manager and I agreed on was that I’d be great in 3 months’ time- we just didn’t have 3 months.

But….hey that’s startup life for you. The margin for error is razor thin, especially in these key hire positions like “Founding Account Executive” which I found myself in.

But this post isn’t about what went wrong.

It’s about what I learned.

Because learn, I did. Tremendously.

The tl;dr version:

Sales is mostly divided into 3 major skillsets:

1. Objection handling

2. Storytelling

3. Project management

To succeed in any role, you need to be great at least on 2/3 skills. Most of your time shifting to a new company is going to be spent in mastering all the various sub-skills to get to success on the 3 points above.

Objection Handling

My last role in India- I wasn’t trained on any formal sales frameworks. Everything I know, I’ve picked up by reading sales books.

However, one area that was a major focus of improvement for me in the last 45 days was objection handling.

It basically relates to writing down common objections that you might hear from prospects across the buying cycle and having an appropriate response ready.

Eg: You cold call someone and they say we’re already building a solution in-house, so not interested.

Instead of saying “ok”- dig into it. Why prompted them to build a solution? How’s the process going? Any challenges?

Having a POV on what usually goes wrong if someone builds an in-house solution and how your solution can typically help- is the pre-work you need to do to be able to successfully handle the objection.

That’s pretty much the strategy for objection handling- but I’ll write a more detailed framework on objection handling in a follow up newsletter as well.

Story-telling

2 key frameworks I noticed in the way the founder sold to prospects:

1. Starting with why he started the company- what pains and frustrations led to building this solution? Works great as a 30-45 sec intro

2. Tying the prospects’ pain points to our solution during the demo

Whenever demonstrating your solution - regardless of whether you sell SAAS or a physical product or consulting- talk about how it ties in to the prospect’s pain points.

Prioritise those talk track basis their biggest pain points to the smallest.

To take it to the next level, be able to throw in anecdotes around customers that had similar pain points and their outcomes after using *our solution*.

To take it to the ninja level- you need to be an Industry expert.

That allows you to talk like a consultant and tie in the pain points to your solutions, outcomes it will help generate, other customers you’ve helped and also wider Industry trends around that particular problem.

Project Management

This bit is useful to manage the sales process. This is one of my strongest skills because selling to the Govt in India was a very process driven role- and required a lot of project management.

Essentially- you need to know who cares about this deal passing/failing in your buyers’ organisation?

You need to know the process for signing the contract- who will have a say before the ink hits the dotted line?

Last- you need to know everybody’s incentives. Who’s the champion, who’s a potential blocker and who’s neutral?

This is where most sellers lose visibility of the buying process- so effective project management is so so important.

Again- I’ll write more detailed posts on this soon.

Bonus: Handling Energies

This is something I’ve only just begun to understand. My manager was a master at this.

He would look at a sales call as the ebb and flow of energy- and his focus would be on bringing the prospect to a high energy state as the call went on and he demo’d the solution.

This to me is akin to Neo looking at the matrix as a stream of binary numbers.

It’s that meta level of analysis of how to conduct a sales call that I’m frankly still learning.

Conclusion

I’m frankly stoked for the rest of 2024. I’ve learned so much in the last 3 months, and while it didn’t work out- I know I’ll be a good salesperson, given the right opportunity.

Finding it is my responsibility- and while that’s stressful, I find it extremely intoxicating that I get to call sales my profession.

I get to apply psychology and communication tactics at scale to drive real world results.

I get to improve myself every single day and learn new skills.

Guess this means I’m building a thick skin.