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I stumbled upon a year-old podcast episode of Jason Lemkin on Lenny’s podcast. The whole thing is worth listening to, but one idea stuck out to me and I wanted to highlight it today, before jumping into the Friday round-up.
The idea is something I believe deeply: the best sales reps are problem solvers.
Jason said this in the podcast episode:
Here’s the mistake that 99% of founders and sales reps make.
We’re not really selling in B2B. We’re solving problems.
Our job as sales reps in SaaS is to not sell a used car. We’re selling a Tesla Model 3 performance. It has competition. They might not need it this week, but it’s pretty darn good. “Let me help you get you into that Model 3 performance today. I’ve even got a special discount for the end of this month. Let me just help you. I’ve spent four calls answering all your questions and I’ve explained to you all the things and why the supercharging network is better than the regular one that doesn’t really work at the charger near your house. I’ve gone on Google and I’ve seen there’s no charging network near your house. There’s only superchargers.”
That’s the job of a SaaS seller because we’re not selling commodities.
I used to say the best reps are “sherpas” or “guides.” They help a buyer solve a problem, either with their software (or recommending another/better path if there is not a fit). They build trust, and have valuable expertise.
I was catching up with a founder recently, who is building in the sales space. And at one point he said something like “I mean, you know, salespeople are manipulative.” It wasn’t offensive, as much as it was shocking, how little he knew about the profession. But, that’s the general consensus still, even in B2B—that salespeople are mere manipulators that get paid a lot of money for playing golf in a vest during the day and put on a suit for their steak dinner that night. This is so obviously a misconception about the best sellers. They are curious, smart, problem solvers. And AI cannot automate them away.
To be a great problem solver, you have to be a great researcher/investigator (this is why “discovery” in sales is so important).
It's kind of ridiculous, but I actually like that some call recording tools show talk time percentage live on a call for a rep to see. Mine even has a BIG YELLOW BUTTON that appears when I talk for too long, saying “Monologue!”.
Ideally, a seller is speaking well under 50% of the time on a sales call.
My goal as a seller was always to pull, not push. “Pull” (information), not “push” (or, pitch, my product). In other words, maniacal focus on discovery. Which is downstream of curiosity, which is downstream of problem-solving.
It is only once you have this information that you can even assess if (or how) you might be able to solve their pain/problems (either with your solution, or recommending another path for them).
I’m bullish on sellers in the AI era. As more of knowledge work gets slurped into the labs’ models, and surrounding ecosystem, the value of human-led problem-solving is going to become more valuable, not less. It’s a great time to be a creative, thoughtful problem-solver. It’s a great time to be in sales.
Weekly GTM Round-up:
My friend Eric Linssen runs Demand Collective, a newsletter and vetted slack community for Demand Gen practitioners. He’s hosting Demand Day: “a virtual summit with 9, 20-min sessions from real demand marketers sharing what’s working for them right now.”
Save your spot! (Sep 24th at 10am PST)
(ICYMI) Tuesday’s post was with a legendary revenue leader (who I used to compete with at the company I co-founded, Groundswell); I think Tim is the prototypical future CRO.
Here’s my summary if you don’t want to read the whole thing (but you should read the whole thing :)).
GTM Engineer role at Sequen (they announced a $90M Series B this week).
I worked with Tim, their CRO, on a data/signal-based selling project last year. He’s smart and cool :) and I’m very bullish on what they’re building (they have crazy customers already, like Priceline, Wayfair, etc). There’s a ton of upside/opportunity. My favorite line from the job description: “Help shape how Sequen builds its GTM engine — the tooling, plays, and process are still being written, and you’ll hold the pen.”
Miro was acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.35B this week (they also own: Airtable, Eventbrite, Vimeo, AOL, and more). Miro’s peak valuation was $17.5B, so it was bought at a 92% discount. I liked Jason Lemkin’s (one of the godfathers of saas/sales) take on it:
Great, tactical read by Noah Adelestein of thegtmengineer.ai:
Elon tweeting about sales (tech) was not on my bingo card for this year (see! “GTM Twitter” is totally going to become a thing! heh)…
Clay announced their Series D at a $7.1B valuation. I commented on Varun’s announcement post saying “ser i thought claude code replaced yall?” (obviously, as a joke). But in reality, this raise is another datapoint showing Clay is still a critical piece of the AI-native GTM tech stack, and clearly their metrics internally show that if investors are still willing to pile money into the business.
[Disclaimer: I own zero equity in Clay, but they do sponsor The Signal. Fwiw, I don’t have any equity in any gtm tech companies, or referral agreements; when it’s a sponsored post I say that explicitly.]
With that said, here are two charts I put together (wild to see):
For anyone who missed the tweet that broke the internet this week, here it is; 166M impressions is bonkers (I haven’t fully formed a strong opinion, but I’ll say this: we should be kind, gracious, open-minded and work together to build a wonderful future for humanity)
Alright, that’s it. Enjoy the weekend!
As always, thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.
See you next time,
Brendan 🫡
PS: If you liked today’s post, send it to one person who would enjoy it.