THE STARTUP CHAT

Steli Efti:

Hey everyone, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

And in today’s episode of The Start-up Chat, we’re gonna talk about sales. The question  that we want to explore today is is sales natural or learned? This is a  question I get quite often and this is also one of the things I like  the least about all the compliments and nice things people say about me. Which is  that I think that often times when people hear me, especially on stage, they falsely  get the impression that they would have to be as outgoing and as loud and  as colorful as I am to be good in sales. And nothing could be further  from the truth. I just want to talk about this selling, is it natural? Is  it learned? What is it? Can I learn how to be good at sales? Or  do I have to be born with it? Is it kind of a gift, or  something like that? I know that you have a bunch of thoughts on this topic  as well.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’ll throw it out there and start and I’m curious what you  have to say. Based on my experience of working with founders and even their teams  as well as in my own companies, if somebody, I feel like sales is just  like anything else, where if somebody is really focused on learning the core principles of  it, they can learn it. I say that because to me sales is very much  just communication. It’s just like anything else. If you’ve never been on a date, you  go on a date and you communicate and you figure out what dating’s like. It’s  just like sales. If you’ve never sold anything before, you just go do it and  then you learn what it’s like and then eventually, especially with things that are business  oriented like sales, unlike relationships, I know there’s courses and learnings you can have on  dating and stuff, I’m sure. I’ve heard about some of those, I have been literally  been married since I was in my early 20s and dating since I was 15  the same person. But anyways, to me, yeah, you can learn it. You don’t have  to be born with it. I don’t think there’s a natural sales person sort of  persona that somebody has to be in order to be in sales or do sales.

Steli Efti:

I couldn’t agree more with you. I do believe that selling can be learned. I  also do believe that there are certain talents or certain personality traits that some people  have, that will make it easier for them, to sell or to be good at  it. I do think that there’s a little bit of both, like nature and nurture  in it. I do think even if you are the most anti-social, even if you’re  somebody that is very, very introverted and does not like to interact with people, has difficulty communicating effectively with others, especially in person. Even if you have real challenges with  that, I think that you can learn all the basics to communicate well and I  think you can learn to be really effective in selling. If you compete with somebody  directly who has a lot of natural talents and gifts, that loves people, that somebody  tha is very charismatic, somebody that is very caring, that connects easily with people, that  people are drawn to and that person learns the basics as well, that person works  as hard as you are, yeah, it’s gonna be difficult to perform better. But you  don’t have to perform better than the best sales person on this planet. That should  not be the benchmark. You just need to be performing well for your purposes, whatever  it is that you’re trying to sell. You just need to be getting better in  it. Especially if you’re a founder, even with an engineering background, learning the basics of  effective communication and learning how to sell, will help you in so many ways. Not  just about closing customers, but attracting talent, attracting investment, getting your story out there. Just  it’s gonna benefit you in all walks of life because really, any time you communicate  you’re selling in one way or another. So, I want to talk about some of  the, so, so I think we both agree, sales is not totally natural. I think  I added to it that I do believe there’s certain personalities that might thrive, but  I want to highlight one thing. Because I think usually when people think about the  ideal personality composition for somebody that’s good at sales, we always think about loud people.  People that like to talk, people that like to be social. People that like tension,  people that are very competitive. That kind of a very loud character. If you’re the  opposite of that, being very loud has some benefits, being very communicative has some benefits,  but it really has also a ton of risks in terns of selling. These people,  they need to learn to listen. They need to learn how to shut up. They  need to learn how to use that intensity of their personality at the right moment  but how to not overwhelm people. So they also have challenges and if you’re a  quieter person, maybe you have to learn how to be a little louder, maybe a little bit more social, but you have a lot of benefits. You might be just  an amazing listener. You might be more thoughtful. You might be more caring. When you  say things, they might carry more weight because people know that you’re not just talking  all day long making tons of promises. So, there’s real benefits and strengths to being that type of personality that I think those people don’t think of themselves that they  have certain strengths if they wanted to learn. They see all these things just as  weaknesses and I think that’s absolutely wrong. And yeah, sales can be learned. Now, let’s  talk about this a little bit. I’m curious, because you’re always learning. Right? And you  are not a sales person but I can speak from experience, you get sales. You  get it. You’re a good sales person. If you need to, you can be a  very good sales person. You might never think of yourself that way, but you get  it. You’re also the type of person, just in general, from my observation, that would  never say to himself, “I’m not the type of person that can do x, y,  z.” That’s a limiting belief that you would never adopt. So you’re like, “Well sales,  sure. It’s simple. I can learn the basics. I can do this. It’s not a  problem, anybody can.” Was there ever a time, has there ever been a moment or  a period where you learned a ton about sales that kind of changed your mind  about it? Were there any kinds of sprints or moments of learning about sales? Or  did it just always happen just marketing and sales is always been a blur, you’ve  always been learning and you don’t even know how you picked up all that know  how? How is your experience been with learning some of the abcs of sales? I’m  curious about that.

Hiten Shah:

That’s a great question, thanks for the compliment. I wouldn’t want to say I’m not  good at things cuz it’s not good in itself. I probably learned more about sales  when I had to raise money for the first time and I failed at Crazy Ed. And that was because we just failed at it. We, there’s a whole bunch  of reasons. Some of them were just our business and the market timing, others were  our own pitch and all that. And now I’ve learned that I could have pitched  that business in a much different way and actually raised money at that time, no  problem. So I think for me, I actually learned it first by having to sell  investors or fail at selling investors on the opportunity to invest in my company. The  reason I say that is, that company was specifically, all sales were happening online. We  didn’t have to talk to people to sell. Cuz we’re talking about more like inside  sales and talking to people, in order to sell. Because I think the online sales  stuff is much more copy marketing product and other things versus when you’re actually having  to pick up the phone and get ideally five figure or greater a year deals.  Maybe four figure depending on your economics. To me, I learned it then and the  reason is, I really didn’t understand sales in the same way because we used to  have a consulting business from 2003 onwards. I was actually not doing most of the  sales, I would get involved in helping out and thinking through it, but that was  more selling services, which to me is a lot different than selling software, in a  lot of ways. In a lot of ways, it’s similar. I never thought of us having to do sales. One of the reasons is my co-founder Neal would just do  the sales. He, I think you would put on the spectrum of more natural, maybe  like you, if you want to look at it like that than myself. That I  was a natural in sales, like I was born selling, kind of thing, I think  both of you are much more born selling than I was. That was probably my  first shot, when I realized I failed at it and I realized that it’s just  communication. It’s story, it’s compelling someone to really believe in you. And then after that,  at Kiss Metrics, for the longest time we actually didn’t hire a sales person, and  then eventually we did. I learned more about sales at that point and it just brought me back to, we had to raise money for that business too and we  were successful. So I think I got good at that sales process, if you want  to call getting money from investors as a sales process, you can. I don’t really look at it like that, but that is where I think a lot of sales  principles do apply.

Steli Efti:

I do think so, yeah.

Hiten Shah:

Then when having to hire a sales person, a sales leader in the company, in  a lot of ways we screwed it up. Not because of the person, actually the  first sales person at Kiss Metrics is this gentleman named Ben Sardella and I think  the world of him in so many ways, and I think the feeling is mutual.  I just bumped into one of his team members at a coffee shop today, ironically.  He was like, “Hey, are you Hiten?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m Hiten.” And he’s like,  “Do you know Ben?” And I’m like, “Yeah, of course I know Ben.” And he’s  like, “Oh yeah, I work at Data Dives.” I was like, “Oh cool.” Apparently Ben’s  saying something about me somewhere cuz I didn’t know this person.

Steli Efti:

I can tell you for firsthand experience, Ben loves you. Anytime I’ve talked to Ben  in person, and I’ve met him multiple times at different events, he always talks incredibly  highly of you. And how could he not? But yeah, the feeling is definitely mutual.  It’s definitely mutual.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah, I learned a ton about sales from him and a lady named Jodi Maxhen  that actually introduced me to him. Then we hired him, he was the first VP  of Sales at Kiss Metrics. I think he was the best. We were just really young and there was all kinds of things just going on in the business. He  stuck through all of it. To me, I learned it then, but honestly as I  think about what I learned from Ben and executing sales and understanding all the things,  I just realized that we’re selling all the time. Especially if you’re a founder, even  if you’re inside of a company as an engineer, you’re selling something. You’re selling your  skills, you’re selling your code. Once I really unlocked that sales is not a bad  thing, sales is really just something we’re doing all the time. Every time you communicate,  there is a process going on, an exchange, I almost think sales has this thing  where it’s called sales and you’re selling people on stuff, and all this stuff. And  even sales implies discounts, just because when things are on sale. So this word is  weird, in my mind. At the end of day, we’re communicating and trying to provide  value to each other. That’s what we’re doing in pretty much every interaction we have  or we’re trying, in some cases, we’re just trying to extract value and all that  kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, the best sales is when  you’ve built a relationship with the person on the other end. Right? We’re doing that  constantly with everybody we talk to. I think that was a really big deal for  me because that’s why, right now, I can’t tell you that raising money is a  sales process. I can’t even tell you that selling software should be considered a sales process, the way that we’ve been taught. I’ll punch line this so that you can  give your perspective cuz I’m sure you’ve got a lot to say about this, obviously.  But the punch line for me is this, in the early days of sales, people just weren’t inundated with sales people calling them or emailing them or whatever. It was  just easy to use these very basic, simplistic psychological relationship building oriented tactics and get  away with doing sales. I mean like back in the day, like when sales was  first invented, I don’t even know the history, maybe you do. But this is just  what I remember. And now, it’s like everybody’s selling. You’re selling all the time. Founders  have to sell. One of my biggest lessons was like every time I was talking  to a customer or a perspective customer or an investor or anybody, I’m literally doing  what most people would call sales. I’m communicating, I’m sharing. I think that the tactics  and the tricks, they don’t work. That’s why I actually love, loved your perspective on  it Steli. Because when I hear a tactic or trick from you, it isn’t a  trick or tactic. It isn’t something that I feel like is scamming the other person.  It is more so, language and words. The thing I was super impressed by is  what we talked about in a previous episode recently, when you were talking about how  you literally were essentially running a sales process on a vendor that screwed up. While  in a conversation, you set him up, and then you got him to admit something  and then essentially he played himself as would say. Because in that, that was sales  to me. That was you convincing him of something, getting information from him, and then  basically, in a very respectful way, I think you did it greatly, based on how  you described it, you threw it back at him. To me, that was a sales  process. You had a goal in mind. “I’m gonna figure out whether this guy is  being genuine and honest with me.” And then you went for it. And so to  me, that’s communication. You communicated really effectively, and all sales is communication. So I’m gonna  stop with that.

Steli Efti:

Yeah, no, that’s beautiful. I thank you and my definition is really very close to  yours. It’s funny. To me, sales is result driven communication. It’s when, whenever-

Hiten Shah:

I like that.

Steli Efti:

Whenever I communicate and I have an end goal in mind, and this doesn’t have  to be, “Give me your money.” It could be just, “Agree with my idea.” Or,  “Be honest with your feedback around what I’m doing.” Whatever I’m trying to convince another  human being to move forward in some kind of a way, whatever that is, whatever  the conversion is, I’m selling. So sales, to me, I think it’s a cliché, but  really a significant amount of things that are happening in life are sales. If you  have children, they’re constantly selling you on things. And you, as a parent, are constantly  selling them. You do it with tonality and you do it with your body language.  I always love how grandmothers are pitching certain types of foods to little children, right?  And they get all sweet in their voice and all overly salesy cuz they want  the little children to like the broccoli or whatever it is. There’s a constant exchange of communication because the little kids, they want the parents to do things for them,  or they want to get certain things, and vice versa. So it doesn’t matter if  you communicate with the opposite or the same sex, if you communicate with another person  because you’re attracted to them, if you communicate with your children, in the family, in  business, whenever you communicate and there is a purpose, there’s a result you’re trying to generate or you’re trying to move towards to with the other human or humans, you’re  selling. Because we do so much of it, we might as well get good at  it. Because you’re doing it either way. You might think you’re not selling, but you  are selling, you might just be really bad at it. I think if a major  part of what you do in life is selling, communicating and trying to convince people  of your ideas, of the things you want the world to move towards, then getting  better at it is a good thing for the world and it’s a good thing  for you. I’ll give you, I’ll give you … To touch on something else you  said before, a big part of the advice I give around sales, and around business  as well, and we had discovered this multiple times and laughed, on this very podcast  about this, is that a lot of our advice is very fundamental. It’s stuff that’s  been true for a really long time and will still be true many, many years from now. We’re not really the heckity, heckity type of people that are like, “Here’s  a new little trick that works now but will stop working in two days. But  you need to take advantage of it until everybody else is.” That shit is just  like, that hunt for short cuts in life, and for what’s fashionable and for what  everybody else is doing, that is one of the biggest waste of human potential, time,  and energy, right? So most of our advice is very fundamental and that’s the same  thing for my sales advice. My sales advice is always very basic shit that will  always work. But it’s not difficult to do, it might be emotionally challenging but it’s  not very difficult to do. But I don’t have really easy answers for people. One  of my favorite examples, I use a common friend of our, Patrick McKenzie, Petty 11,  for those of you out there that are hekause folks, I use him often in  my presentations. I actually have like just a massive picture of him, the most unflattering  picture I could find, sorry Patrick. But the, my whole point is, I bring up  this example often times because when I’m on stage and I’m screaming at people and  I’m high energy and people are loving it and they are inspired, maybe, and the  moment. That’s great. That feels great to me, that feels great to some people in  the audience, that’s awesome. But I’m really aware and worried about the distance I have  from the audience because of my personality and the potential for people to misinterpret me  as like that’s how, that’s the only way to be successful in trying to sell.  If I don’t put on a leather jacket and scream at people, I will never  succeed. Or I can never do this like Steli, I’m not that type of person,  so sales is not for me. I think that that would be, if that’s even  just one person gets that impression when I speak about sales, then I made the world a worse place, not a better place. This is something that really worries me  and I’m really aware that I can come across that way. So I always bring  up, or often bring up, Petty 11 as a counter example to myself. And I go, “All right, I know some people here, they look at me and they go,  I need to buy a leather jacket or I need to be more Greek or  this isn’t for me, I’m not that type of person.” Sales is not, like I  have a certain personality, but you can be dangerous in selling and you can be  a completely different person than I am.” I bring up Petty 11 cuz he is,  in person, very different from me. The way he dresses, the way he communicates is  much more of an engineer, much more of a geek, much more introverted, although he’s  an amazing storyteller. And he’s great, he’s learned to be a great communicator, but if  we stood next to each other, you would not think, “Oh, these people are exactly  the same.” You would think these people seem very opposite of each other. I always  bring the example how Petty 11 has learned the basics, the abcs of sales, he  understands that if he wants to communicate his ideas, if he wants to grow his  businesses, he wants to succeed in certain areas, he needs to just understand selling and  selling is important to get money, and money is important for business. And he has  a very engineer way of thinking about it. I always bring up this one example  that I want to share towards the end of this episode, where he had a  meeting, I don’t know if I can say which company, but a multi-billion dollar really great, kind of recent, not recent, five year old start-up that is now a really  big business, and it’s one of the newer companies that I really admire and I  think that’s gonna be the next kind of Google or Amazon or whatever. So this  is a very popular service and he was visiting the founder of that company, and  back in that day, he was still working on a sort of start-up himself and  he wanted to convince that founder to become an early customer. And so they were  chatting, they were chatting, they knew each other, they’ve known each other for a long  time, and eventually at the end of the conversation, after Patrick had told this CEO  about his new idea and what he’s trying to do and all that, he looked  at him and he went, “Do you know Steli Efte?” And the founder said, “Yeah,  I know Steli.” And then Patrick said, “Well, if Steli Efte was here, he would  not allow me to end this conversation without asking you if you’re gonna become a  customer.” And then the founder CEO started laughing and going, “Wow, this is so weird  of you to say, this is nothing like you.” To which Patrick said, “Yes, that’s  why I said, if Steli Efte was here, he would not allow me to leave  this meeting without asking you.” It’s just like, in the most stoic way, in the  most Patrick, Petty 11 way possible, in terms of his delivery, so dry and then  the founder CEO of the billion dollar company looked at him, laughed again and said,  “Yeah, sure, all right. We’re gonna be a customer. I’m happy to be an early  customer of yours.” And to me this is, obviously I’m honored that he used me  in that meeting that I was able to help, but I love that story because  it’s somebody being incredibly effective in sales, and asking for the close at the end  of the meeting, although it’s not in his typical personality. And he even went just  one step ahead and just pretended I’m in the room and said, “Steli would say  this to you.” This is, to me, just one of those examples that I like  to share with people and say you don’t need to be flashy, loud, or anything else. If you just learn the basics of selling and you apply them, it’s gonna  benefit your business. Anybody can learn to become better at sales. It’s not a gift.  You might not become the best sales person in the world, but you can be  a really, really, dangerous, you could be dangerous in selling. You can be effective in  it, no matter how introverted or whatever you think is kind of anti-sales you are.  As we discovered earlier, and as we both said, you know since a lot of  things are really result driven communication, and selling is really nothing else, you might as well get better at it. Communication is really, really important if you want to move  the world forward.

Hiten Shah:

There’s only one thing I disagree on. I think we’re gonna end it on this.  The thing that I disagree on Steli is that I don’t believe that everyone cannot  be the best sales person in the world.

Steli Efti:

That’s an interesting one.

Hiten Shah:

And the reason I say that is, is sales is like you said, result driven,  results driven communication. If sales is results driven communication, as long as I am getting  results, I am the best. I think it’s that simple. So, I wouldn’t want people  on this, especially on this podcast, to think that they can’t be the best sales  person in the world. Cuz the best sales person in the world sells effectively based  on results and getting results. And we can all get results if we’re doing sales,  regardless of where we come from or what we consider ourselves to be. Look at Patrick. He does it his way, he uses you, in the conversation, and he gets  the job done. Is he the best sales person in the world? I would say  yes, for him, if he’s effective at his strategy, he is the best sales person  in the world for what he is doing.

Steli Efti:

And that is the final word of this episode. Let’s just wrap it up on  this, I have nothing to add to this. Very good.

Hiten Shah:

See you next time.

Steli Efti:

That’s it from us. See you next time, guys.