On Shutting Up

2025.02.16

LXXXVII

As I hinted at in my post about product mode vs sales mode from September, I had a bad problem of verbalizing issues with BirdDog as I was showing the software to people.

Something’s changed, though:

• In November, I spoke to 100 new prospects in 10 days and closed one person.

• Last week alone, I spoke with 10 new prospects and closed 3 of them, and have solid follow up meetings with another 3, one of which is Director lvl and another of which is c suite.**

On top of bringing close rate from a meager 1% to a respectable 30%, we 3x’d our average contract value and are charging up to 8.5x more per company tracked by the user.

What happened? A lot of things–it’s been a build up, not a binary switch. What I really want to write about today, though, is that I’ve been learning to shut up & listen.

You don’t need so many words when the words you are saying are obviously true.

Poets know there is nothing more beautiful than compressing meaning into the smallest possible form. That’s a good lesson for selling software, too.

*The Director & C Suite people both came from internal intros at their respective orgs that Jack & I had each been working on for the last couple of months. I don’t know if you want to count them as “new prospects.” If not, my close rate on new prospects is actually higher.

[“The Truth ‘bout To Get Loud”]

You don’t need so many words when the words you are saying are obviously true.

Reworded as a two part sentence:

1. If what you are saying is true, 

2. You don’t need to say much.

We’re focusing more on the part about not saying much today.

[Don’t Telegraph]

When I was giving my early demo calls for BirdDog, I would catch a bug or a piece of low quality data and immediately explain how we were fixing it.

I didn’t stop to think whether or not what I considered a problem was a problem for the prospect.

If you’ve ever acted or spoken on stage, you know that if you make a mistake, you are not supposed to telegraph it.

The audience doesn’t know or care about the script. They’re there because they want to enjoy a show, not because they want to hear you recite memorized lines and stage directions, and certainly not because they want to know which lines you didn’t memorize.

The actor’s job is to facilitate this. The actor breaks their part of the bargain if every time they make a slight mistake, they say, “Oh, sorry, let me go back.”

The audience is paying to see the actor STAY in character even if something goes wrong.

[New Sales Calls]

Now, I do a lot less nervous ramblings on our sales calls than I did in November.

Upon advice from a sales guy who closed ~$1M in ARR for his employer last year, I spend the first 10-15 minutes of any sales call really digging into the prospect’s problems. Surface level “I want to try BirdDog” is not enough. 

Then, I will share a demo where I try not to bring up any features unless I can connect it to something the user told me they cared about. 

In other words, the words I am saying are meant to emphasize how our product solves the user’s problem.

Not how it solves a generic user’s problem, but how it solves this user’s problem.

This involves much less talking and much more listening. If you do it right, the user sees the value and gets excited about it.

Ie, if they said that they hate ai generated emails from other products, I show them how they can use BirdDog to write crazy high quality emails in <2 minutes.

Sometimes, I still catch myself rambling after, but I’m getting better at asking them simple questions, like “Does this feature look like it is a solution to quickly writing high quality emails?” 

It’s about them & the value that they WANT to get from the tool, not about me or even BirdDog really.

If I see what to me is an issue, I don’t bring it up any more.

99% of the time the user doesn’t even notice, because they care way more about the value they are getting than small issues.

[Truth] 

None of this works if what you’re saying is not true. 

1. If what you are saying is true,

2. You don’t need to say much.

If what you are saying is untrue, you probably need to say a lot to convince them otherwise. 

How do Jack & I actually know that we now have a product that solves users’ problems? 

Logic & evidence. You can fool yourself with flawed logic, but its hard to fool yourself with the kind of evidence we now have. We have users telling us how much time it saves them or how it is booking them meetings and allowing them to do what was otherwise impossible.

It’s a bit of a chicken before the egg thing, because you need people to use it to get evidence that it works but you need to make it good enough for somebody to use it enough to get the evidence.

The interesting part is that even back in November, I think the product was worth more than we were charging for it, even if it was not yet worth as much as we are charging for it now. 

I don’t have a time machine, so I can’t know, but I do think that if I would’ve focused on shutting up and showing the user the value it was providing, rather than literally telling them what I thought was wrong it, the close rate would be much higher than 1% in early November.

[The Imperfect Email]

One very tangible example for you from after Jack closed a user:

Our tool sends email alerts to our customers every morning. I skim them all.

On a user’s first day, I thought 2/4 alerts we sent her were subpar quality. I considered sending an apologetic email saying we could improve it.

I did not.

Jack texted her later that day and simply asked what she thought of the alerts.

She said 3 of the 4 alerts were “home runs.”

The next day, she booked a meeting off of one of the alerts.

Maybe she wouldn’t have if I told her what I thought was wrong with the alerts.

If the thing is actually good, the less you can say, the better.

It speaks for itself, better than you can speak for it.

[The Full Story]

There are many other reasons our close rate went up since November:

• The product is more valuable

• We now have lots of social proof

• We don’t book meetings by offering to give away free trials anymore

• Pricing is on the website (self selects for people who are okay with our price)

Our sales process still has a long way to go.

So far, though, me learning to shut up has been the best thing that happened to it.

Live Deeply,