Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Predictable update: this week I could feel it’s product-market fit strengthening. Current customers had a few “wow” moments around the LinkedIn listening feature and I got 5 verbals from folks that either inbounded or were referrals. My calendar is slammed and I’m not sure how I’m going to get all my work done. It feels like the early days Carb.io again.

Wednesday morning, two founders I advise jumped on our call with a deadline hanging over them. In a few hours, they had a leadership demo.

The setup: a company had signed a three-month pilot and needed exec sign off before making any longer commitments. The VP of Engineering loves the product. But now the founder and the CFO were joining the call, and the VP wanted help making the case.

He'd even sent homework. Four questions he wanted answered. Who's using AI well? What metrics signal poor output? What's being worked on? What value does this actually bring?

These two had done the work. They'd mapped a product flow that hit every question. Start on this page, click into that chart, compare these two engineers side by side. Solid.

What they hadn't planned was how to run the room. That's what we spent our time on.

A sales call with a new group is a first impression. Whoever takes the leadership role in the first few minutes usually keeps it for the rest of the call.

If you want to drive, you have to step up and own the agenda from the start. Quick intros, then: "You sent us four questions. Here they are. Before we dive in, is there anything I missed, or anything new that came up?"

That's it. Thirty seconds. And now you're the informal facilitator. You're the one who gets to say "great, let's move on." Nobody derails you asking about something that's already point three.

Where founders get tripped up is seniority. You might be selling to a CEO with twenty years on you. Running their meeting feels presumptuous.

But in this particular problem, in this niche they're new to, you've seen it far more times than they have. You're the expert in the process of solving this pain. So it's on you to help them uncover where the pain actually is, and walk them through the options for fixing it. That's not presumptuous. That's the job.

This is the real meat of a sales conversation.

Every deal has multiple buying influences, and they rarely want the same thing. On any given call you might have:

Your job is to figure out who's who, and what each of them needs. Not the room. Each person. Ask the CFO "what are you hoping to get out of this?" and you'll get a very different answer than the VP gives you.

Those answers become your yardstick. Every check-in after this gets measured against them.

If you want to know whether a deal will move forward, this is where you spend your time. Or put another way, if your pipeline is full of deals and you don't understand why they are or aren't moving, you didn't do this well enough.

Deals rarely die in the demo. They die because someone on the call never got what they needed, and you never found out. Or what you showed them doesn’t match what their needs are. BUT, deals shouldn’t die in the demo this way because you should have a strong understanding that they are likely a fit before you show them anything. 

Once the agenda is set, I think of the rest of the call like a board game. There's a turn structure. Everyone knows what happens next.

For each of the four questions, the loop is the same. "Here's how I understand this one. Did I miss anything?" Then show it. Then, "Any questions? Great. On to number two."

It's a structured process inside a free-flowing conversation. And weirdly, the structure makes it easier to listen, because you're not busy figuring out what to do next.

The fastest way to lose a room is to flip on screen share and narrate for twenty minutes. It's so easy to ramble when your screen is up and nobody's faces are.

Instead, I like to work in 90 second bursts. Frame it first: "Here's what we're talking about, and here's what I'm going to show you." Show it for about 90 seconds. Then kill the screen share and talk about it. What did they see? Does it answer the question? What's missing?

Show something briefly, then ask for their reaction, looking at people instead of your screen.

Somewhere in the call, someone's going to light up. They'll ask a detailed follow-up, lean in, or keep circling back to one topic. For our founders, I suggested keeping an eye on the CFO because they’re a new potential user type they could sell to.

When you see a buying influence with a lot of energy on a particular subject, pay attention. Passion on a topic usually means that person has real influence on the deal, and you probably haven't fully mapped what they need yet.

So answer the question fully, right there. Then seed the side quest: "That's a really interesting point. If I reach out after this, could we grab 15 minutes to go deeper on it?"

Now you've multi-threaded the deal. You've shown that you care about their specific problem, addressed it, and prevented one passionate buying influence from derailing the conversation for everyone. 

Leave a few minutes at the end. Don't let the call run out the clock.

And don't say "let's check in sometime." Be specific. Calibrate the time based on where you’re at in the deal, pick a day, and say "I've got time on the 22nd. How does that work for everyone?" Frame up the next step with a reason first. If they asked me to send a proposal, I’ll typically end the call by confirming when I’ll send it and saying “I find people typically have questions about these, how about we set some time for N?” It shows that you know your process and are taking ownership over what happens next.

They might say yes. They might say talk to my EA. They might say no. Either way you learn something. 

This is where it all connects. The goals you collected from each buying influence are what the next meeting measures against. Without them, your check-in is just a check-in. With them, it's a progress report on things they already told you they care about.

By the end of our call, the plan was simple. Own the intro. Ask everyone what they need. Take turns. Show and talk. Watch for side quests. Book the next one.

They walked into that demo holding the rulebook instead of waiting to be told the rules.

So here's my question. Look at the deals sitting in your pipeline right now. For each one, could you name every buying influence and what they need from you?

If not, you know where to start.

Collin

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

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