Day 575: learning to push

had a call with someone last week who was super excited about automating a bunch of the processes at his company

in his words, it would free up an entirely employee to focus on more important things

during the call, he kept saying “okay i’ll purchase a plan to start with and […]” and while i was happy to hear that on the inside, i didn’t discuss specifics around his plan and continued focusing on his use case and the details around automating it

i still feel uncomfortable telling someone that they’ll need to pay to get help / receive a service even though it makes absolutely no sense

i mean in this case, he was basically saying that he’d purchase a plan and was excited to do so

the reason why this is coming to mind is because i followed up with him today and didn’t get a response. it’s entirely possible that he’s just busy and will get back to me later this week, but this made me reflect back on the call and made me think that i have a ton of room to improve when it comes to doing sales calls

when he mentioned that he’s going to purchase a plan, i could’ve asked him what plan he was thinking of getting, explain what that’d give him in terms of features and usage, and then guide him to purchase a plan either during or immediately after our call. i tend to hold attitude of “if they want to buy it, they’ll buy it; if they don’t, it’s fine” which is true, but i think it’s also fine to ride the momentum of a customer’s excitement and lead it to a sale because you’re providing them something that they want and making it easier for them to solve their problems

1. my conditioning around money / discomfort around asking for it is being a disservice when talking to potential customers
2. i’m going into these calls with the mentality of “i’m just going to provide as much value as i can and be as helpful as possible” which is wholesome, but it’s also fine for me to charge for things (my time / things i’ve built)
3. so much to learn!!!! i’m bad at this but this is fun