Ep 79: Feelings vs Features and the Sales Experience That Wins or Loses the Deal

Well, today we want to talk about some interesting... approaches to the sales process, which is amazing to me just how many like nuances there are and how it's like an iceberg.

I view the sales process like an iceberg.

There's only so much you see.

But when you're like in the business, there's so much happening underneath the water.

It's unbelievable.

And I think organizations who do this really well, it shows and those that don't, It shows, but maybe not as much.

So today we want to talk a little bit about how there's this thing called feelings versus features that happens during the sales process.

And I know that, Jay, you have someone who had this experience, but I am no stranger to this.

So why don't you give us a little bit about like, what does that even mean?

So the conversation, and again, what me and Sarah always do right before we jump on this to record the week's podcast is we kind of brainstorm items.

And typically, the best ideas we get out of topics is conversations we have with current or prospective clients.

And it was interesting.

One of our clients is considering making pretty significant investments in their marketing tech stack.

looking at various different monitoring and measuring tools and then really comparing two of the leaders who have a lot of similarities but also a lot of differences.

And we got into a really interesting conversation from her point of view where She's leaning towards one of the platforms that, from my opinion, had a couple missing critical features that they need not only short-term but also long-term.

As I was unpacking that, I'm always a curious little monkey over here.

It came down to heavily around the sales experience.

And she really had a much better sales experience with one company or the other.

And that I thought was really intriguing where, from my point of view, if anyone's ever implemented any kind of tech stack, unfortunately, you might get a different experience from the sales side versus onboarding and then ongoing support.

And luckily for our client, our team is very knowledgeable in both of these platforms.

And so we're less worried about, you know, the ongoing support side.

And then, you know, again, typically we find that from the sales part, After you don't sign the contract, you unfortunately hardly ever speak to those people ever again.

And so from my point of view, I often look past those initial relationships because I know they're not going to be forever relationships.

And that's where I think it comes down to an interesting conversation of do you make a decision – off of working with new partners or vendors, however you want to look at that, based upon your experience working with their sales team from the feelings point of view? Or do you make sure that it's checking off the boxes regarding the features and have a bit more patience if the sales experience is not to your expectations?