Sales

When we started Intelligems, I was pretty scared of Sales, because I thought it was about forcing stuff on people.

Good selling, I’ve learned, is about listening to your customer, understanding why they are talking to you, and—if your product is a fit for them—figuring out how to frame the value you can provide in a way that they can understand. It’s a process that lends itself really well to iteration, and the closer you are to that sale (i.e., on the phone with the customer), the easier it is to listen, iterate, and understand. If something doesn’t work, or you lose the deal, you can just change it up on the next one. Like with testing, you can learn from each loss.

Getting better at sales—learning what resonates with potential customers, adapting our message, etc.—also paved the way to start doing marketing. One of our investors has a great line which is “marketing is inflexible sales.” You want to take your pitch, solidify it (literally put it into writing or imagery or video), and blast it out into the world. You hope that it resonates with people who may buy your product. The translation and iteration here can be difficult. Your customers are farther away, so your feedback loop is going to be slower and less precise vs. when you had someone sitting in a Zoom with you. 

So building Intelligems, we approached this sequentially: first let’s get pretty good at sales and understand our customers; then, after we have a good sense of what will resonate, let’s start to invest in marketing. 

That experience is obviously in B2B software. But I believe this “marketing as inflexible sales” concept is also true for selling consumer products over the internet. It’s just that with e-commerce, the scale is even bigger, which makes the challenge even tougher. You can have so many potential customers, all of that monolithic “traffic” visiting the site, that it’s tricky to think about the sale on a human scale.

Some of the most successful brands I see today understand that. It doesn’t matter how much “traffic” they have, they’re still getting customers on the phone, running post-purchase surveys, and grabbing a ton of qualitative data to understand the “micro” components of who is buying from them and why.

But I don’t quite know how to foot this with the prevailing talk in the DTC community about ad creative, and how much creative volume is needed today.

Basically, and this is a little bit of hyperbole here, the thought process is that you need to toss as many ads into Meta as possible and let the algorithm find the winner: “Get as many shots on goal as possible.”

You can make beautiful ads, you can make ugly ads, you can make ads that have nothing to do with what your customer is likely to buy… it really doesn’t matter; you just need to pump volume and let Meta do its magic to go discover individuals who those ads resonate with. Find the hook first, find the customers second.

Maybe that’s the way advertising should or needs to work now—I’m really agnostic here—but it’s certainly backwards from how it used to work, where Marketing required brands to understand their customer first and then build experiences (from products to retail partnerships to DTC sites to ads) that earn and hold attention based on said understanding. 

But here’s the thing about this approach: even if you built the hook first, you still will benefit from doing that work to understand the customer at a human scale, because it’s the work that will make you better at sales, which is what you’re still ultimately doing.

That hook-to-customer translation likely still needs to happen in the same way the customer-to-hook translation historically has. It doesn’t matter where you end up starting; you have to get close to the customer at some point.