The Follow Up
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How to Sell Something That No One's Heard of

How to Sell Something That No One's Heard of

When no one's heard of the company you sell for.

October 01, 2024

In partnership with

Good Morning! Yesterday Verizon had a major outage that left 100’s of thousands of customers without cell service. At the same time, it also stopped hundreds of sales reps from making cold calls, which some reporters are calling ‘devastating’ to the sales profession. Verizon has since reported that service has been restored, and sales reps are free to resume cold calling activities. Sources: trust me bro. 😁

In today’s Follow Up:

Selling something no one’s heard of 🤔
The best way to send proposals ✍️
How much six-figure sales reps work 🤑
Sales jobs, LinkedIn & a meme 😂

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Selling Something No One's Heard of

Wouldn't it be great if all of your prospects already knew about the product you sell or the company you sell for?

Any time you call them up, they already know where you’re calling from and have an understanding of what you sell. That would make things a lot simpler.

But unfortunately, that's not the reality for most sales reps.

If you've ever sold for a startup, or even a big company with a new product launch, you've probably been faced with selling a product that your target market has never heard of before.

At one point or another, every company and sales team has faced this problem, and the good news is that there are proven ways to overcome this challenge.

So today, we're taking a look at how to sell something, when no one’s heard of it.

Identify Your Product's Purpose

First, you need to identify where your product fits into someone’s current situation, so you can ask the right questions. It likely falls into one of these three categories:

1. Replacement Product

Your product replaces an existing solution. For example, a new CRM to replace Salesforce.

Questions to ask:

How long have you been using Salesforce?
What do you like most about Salesforce?
What would you change about Salesforce if you could?

2. Add-on Product

Your product works alongside an existing tool or service. For example, an add-on that logs sales call notes in Salesforce.

Questions to ask:

How do your sales reps currently log their call notes?
How much time do you think reps spend on logging notes?
Do you think any important information gets missed during manual entry?

3. New Solution

Your product or service solves a problem they don’t currently have a solution for. For example, a tool that runs the entire sales call for reps.

Questions to ask:

What's your current process for scheduling and running sales calls?
What are the biggest challenges your reps have with their sales calls?
If you could wave a magic wand, how would you improve the way your reps run sales calls?

The Big Three Focus Points

Once you’ve identified the type of product you’re selling, and know what questions to ask, focus on the big 3 points:

1. Sell the Meeting

As you’ve probably found when selling a product that no one’s heard of, the biggest hurdle is getting facetime. Meetings are hard to get and you need to earn them.

Rather than pitching your product or features in your initial outreach, pitch the meeting. Why they should meet with you. What you can teach them. And why it would be a good use of their time.

It's not about your product, it's about what you can do for them.

2. Pitch the Problem, Not Your Product

When you’re crafting your pitch, avoid making it about your company or your product’s fancy features.

Make it about them and their challenges. Remove the features from your pitch and focus on benefits. Remember, they don't care about you (yet), they care about solving their problems.

From our example above, if you were pitching a product that automates the entire sales call process for a rep, you wouldn’t pitch all of the cool AI features of your product. You’d focus on how much time is spent setting up calls, preparing for them, running them, and then recording the notes afterward.

Once you’ve proved the pain, you can show how your product solves it.

3. Paint the Picture

Since they don't know your product or brand, you need to illustrate a brighter future with your solution.

Use case studies and stories to get them thinking about how great their life could be if they bought your product. For example: "Earlier this year we started a conversation with ACME corp’s sales team, and found they were wasting up to 20 hours per month on admin work associated with their sales calls. 20 hours! So, after 2 months of conversations, ACME Corp’s sales team took a risk and decided to try out our new solution, and within 6 months they’ve closed an extra $2M in ARR, fully attributed to the extra time they’ve saved.”

Tell a story and paint a picture.

Have you ever sold for a startup that no one's heard of?

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