Sales
Running a Sales Process
Always focus on delivering what the customer needs. Sometimes that will mean sending them to a competitor or turning them down.
Initial Call
The purpose of this call is to work out what the potential customer needs.
Don’t be presumptive - ask why they reached out. It’s often a very quick way to understand what they need, but there will likely be adjacent challenges you can also uncover.
You are trying to work out:
- Does the client prefer ease over saving money or vice versa?
- How should the client deploy (i.e. hosted or self-hosted with support). This will depend on their volume and price sensitivity.
- Does our functionality meet their use case? Would it be worth going ahead with what we have now?
- Is the client going to need us to do most of the work? If this is the case, support is really important e.g. because they’re growing very fast.
- How much analytics experience does the client have? More experience means you should focus more on how we are different, less experience means you should try to keep things simple.
As a rule, always understand the context behind the question - it may help you make further useful recommendations.
Demo
Show the client the product. Use localhost with example data. Pause frequently and make sure there are no questions. Ask if the functionality would help them.
Use this to confirm the benefits to the customer that PostHog needs to provide. If you are talking only about feature X does Y, then you’re doing it wrong!
Follow Up
Keep this as quick as possible - if you can follow up immediately / on the same day, do it.
Feature Requests
Sometimes client calls will highlight features that they would need which we don’t have. Your first step is to work out if what we do will be valuable enough to move forward with. Avoid committing to new functionality unless you’re already about to work on it. It’s better to underpromise and overdeliver.
Pricing
Our pricing is new and may need some modifications. We trust you to make a sensible judgement. Generally, you should be covered by the pricing we have on our website - if they need something more (e.g. they have a huge volume), get as much info on their requirements as you can, then debrief internally to work out what is reasonable. Finally, confirm with the potential client - that can all happen the same day.
We provide a 10% discount for annual upfront invoicing.
Style
- Be passionate: "This is one of my favorite parts of the system", "the neat thing about X is Y"
- Social Proof: If your current users are using something, or if you built something for a really specific reason, let the client know (obviously without naming names). This helps people know they're not the first to use PostHog!