Sales For Nerds - A Guide By Lukas Biewald

Sales techniques don’t seem to work for Lukas - who is the CEO of W&B ($4BN valuation) and sold CrowdFlower for $800M+. He started his career in data science and ML and then focused on building companies shortly after.

For him - it all leads up to being genuine and honest. Below, we summarize his main take-aways from his blog.

• 100% honest

  • Aiming to be 100% honest with people who sells to them

  • When he runs late for a meeting for any reason, he will tell the person why he was late

  • When a customer is trying something new with some risk, he tells them what they are in for

• High Urgency

  • For every day that goes by, a deal is 10% less likely to close

  • He is obsessive about following up a customer after meeting with them

  • He tries to get to the next meeting as quickly as possible and keeps relearning the importance of this

• Cadence

  • People walking out of a meeting remember your cadence much more than what you actually said

  • It’s more important to look excited about your product than to make any particular point

  • Never contradict or interrupt each other if you sell with another person

• Persistence

  • In fact, sometimes it was hard for Lukas to email people the first time. But it’s important. “Ensure you keep following up if you don’t hear back right away.”

• Qualification

  • Learn to identify customers and hand them off to your competitors

• Negotiation
  Lukas writes a great section below -

  Like most nerds, conflict makes me uncomfortable.  I am not a natural negotiator.  I love my customers and I want them to get a great deal, sometimes such a great deal that it’s actually bad for my company.  So I make someone else the bad guy.  Sometimes it’s my board.  Sometimes it’s my cofounder.  As in, I want to give you a lower price but my cofounder would freak out – luckily in my case I can do this honestly, because my cofounder freaks out all the time.  Even when someone recognizes the tactic, it sets up a nice dynamic where you are working together to find a mutually beneficial solution rather than an adversarial negotiation.

  As another nice non-confrontational negotiation hack, remind a potential customer that, when customers have negotiated too aggressively in the past, they ended up getting bad service.  Fortunately, it also turns out to be true.  The more a customer pays the more they get taken care of.

  Lukas Biewald