What if all you knew about sales was wrong?

Happy Thursday 👋

That is exactly what I learned after about 6 months of working with an Australian startup.

You see we were ticking all the boxes that would indicate something huge and special was about to occur.

• We had product market fit
• We generated a huge amount of interest in our client sales meetings
• The product solved a massive gap in the market
• We were completely differentiated from our competitors
• We seemed to have found an elusive BLUE OCEAN

But things didn't quite transpire as we thought...Although we followed all the proven methodologies like Miller Heiman, BANT, and MEDDIC, something was missing.

Deals were fizzling out, indecision was our biggest enemy.

It was almost too hard for me as a Business Development Manager at the time.

I would have quit except for 2 things; 1. I had 2 mortgages that I needed to service. 2. I made a promise to the CEO that I would never stop and would figure out how to sell the platform.

What I learned and uncovered ultimately changed my life and set me on this path to help other founders.

What I discovered...

Just like most businesses that are motivated, that want to help clients and grow revenue to ensure survival, we were trying hard to sell our platform to our ideal target clients.

But this was the exact problem...we were trying to sell.

Instead, we should have been creating a strong need for our platform in our target businesses so they would want to buy from us.

This is so so different to thinking we had a sales problem. We actually had a demand problem.

This applies to every single business by the way...If you aren't hitting revenue targets, you have a demand problem.

Once I discovered this, I completely changed my approach to learning how to create demand and once I achieved this, the sale would naturally occur.

This led me to contribute more than $20 million in revenue to this business and almost 40% of its clients until I left in 2020.

Since then I have been refining the Sales Market Fit strategy to help other B2B businesses apply the lessons I learned and achieve excellent outcomes.

I've actually just released the SMF coaching program with over 100 lessons and more than 10 hours of content to help businesses on their growth journey.

So if any of this story resonates with you and would like to know more, feel free to reply to this email and we can set up a time for a conversation.

Cheers

Gavin