Someone sent me a Seth Godin post, so I will blog about it now.

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The post:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/first-ten-.html

The B2B sale is a relationship sale. What Seth describes is selling into referrals. This is the way most businesses actually grow. Better than 70% of sales come from or through existing customers in many companies and industries.

To scale up in that sales environment, the key is applying a process mentality to figure out what activities further those relationships. What activities can we control that speed the buying decision? What are we doing that unintentionally lengthens the sales cycle? Identify problems. Try to discover root causes. Test ways to improve.

Relationships are relationships - can't standardize them. But human nature is human nature, too. This allows some activities (and not-doing certain activities) to be adopted as standard practices. See also: behavioral finance.


Dumping a lot of volume into a leaky process just creates a bunch of work and chasing after the wind. So, like Seth says, start with small investments. Look for things to try that you can afford to repeat if they work and won't kill you if they don't. Pull back fast from activities that don't give sustainable results - either tweak them and try again, or move on. Find a few small things that seem to help. Do more of those. As repeatable results become evident, begin to add volume to the process inputs.

Buying is irrational...like investing

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Tip: for marketing inspiration, read up on common traps in investment management psychology and behavioral finance. The same emotional wiring kicks in just about any time people buy stuff.

A quick example from both the Miller Heiman world of sales training and the Warren Buffett world of investment management:

Emotional capital.

Just like monetary capital, emotional capital is a finite resource. The more I expend, the more committed I am to my course of action. This can make an obviously bad deal difficult to unwind. It means that the further two (or more) parties go into a dealmaking process, the more either (or all) will be tempted to act against their own interests in order to reach a given outcome.

This is reportedly why Warren Buffett has played a lot of card games in the course of his career. He saves up emotional (and financial) capital for good deals by ignoring most deals as much as possible.

Savvy buyers and savvy sellers walk away as quickly as possible from deals, because they know that this conserves emotional capital. It helps hold down the error rate. We're only human, after all.

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