In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews Donald Kelly, founder of The Sales Evangelist. Kelly shares a personal case study of a failed startup (referred to as PD) that tried to sell managed IT services and an electronic health‑record solution without a clear product‑market fit. He contrasts the Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated) with the Platinum Rule (treat others as they would like to be treated), arguing that sales teams must understand customers’ specific needs before pushing a product. Kelly then outlines five practical steps to achieve better go‑to‑market fit: (1) Define a precise target customer and buyer persona; (2) Gather relevant data through surveys and existing sources; (3) (the remaining three steps are hinted at later in the episode). Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of segmentation, competitor analysis, and aligning the solution with the true pain points of the chosen market. The episode also includes sponsor messages from Rev Genius and Demandbase.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
We are joined now by the founder of The Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly. We are so lucky to have him here with us today. Donald is absolutely incredible. I know he has an incredible talk for you guys. Donald's mission is to evangelize the method of effective selling and motivate sellers at all levels to do big things. He was a former top-performing technology sales professional and has successfully sold in both the public and private sectors. Donald was able to crack the code of helping teams thrive in B2B sales. He's also the author of Sell It Like a Mango: A New Seller's Guide to Closing More Deals. So if you want more, I would definitely check that out. He has helped many sellers from different companies build confidence in their selling abilities to increase revenue and as a result. And Donald has spoken to audiences all across the country and has shared the stage with speakers such as Aisha Tyler, Sarah Koenig, Guy Ross, Chris Brogan and Marc Mehron. Oh, I love Marc Mehron. So please, please, please welcome Donald Kelly to the stage. Donald, please take it away.
Thank you so much. I appreciate that awesome insight, invite there. I'm excited for this today. And I want to see if you all are excited as much as I am too. So if you are, just go in the comments and give me like a yes or throw some fireballs or something in the comments. I'd love to see some excitement here for this session. This topic is something that I'm really, really passionate about. Obviously, I, my name gives it away, The Evangelist. I love to evangelize about sales, and especially with this one about product-market fit. So I'm gonna take you back about, you know, 15 years to a story. So I want you guys to sit back and enjoy this experience here. I worked for a company, and we're gonna call their name, their acronym, just PD. So P as in Paul, D as in David. And PD was a company that was an amazing startup in theory. This startup was a startup that never ever really got up. And I will explain all of this. The company was in the, in the, in the, the managed IT services. So essentially, we would come to your organization, and we would oversee your IT and take care of all of your break fixes. And when it comes towards your tech department. Now, the other challenge that this company faced was that they had an identity crisis, because the founder was just like any amazing founder, had a big vision of things that he wanted to accomplish and to save the world. So we started to sell different products as well. If our clients could benefit from this, why not? Now the issue was they did not necessarily have a lot of clients. They had some sporadic people in different industries that they were serving, and they figured this was a good thing. This was, this was showing that they were growing, and this was showing that they were advancing. And one area that came out, some— this, this neat thing in 2008 was quite interesting. was this notion of this, uh, this meaningful use. And when it came towards healthcare, and specifically it was around this notion that if, uh, you know, electronic health records. So with the fact that this company was servicing a few clients that were in the medical field, actually were one dentist, they figured, what if we started to sell this electronic health record solution as well? Makes total sense, right? We take care of the IT and we'll sell the software. So they started to scramble and they found a software that they could use and they started to sell. Now they needed to find salespeople that could come in and do this job. They lured me with a lot, with a wonderful, uh, advance in money and more, you know, all the, the big vision ideas, and brought me into this company and several other people with a medical background to come and to sell. And the reason was they figured with our medical sales expertise, we could help this company get to the next level. Now you can figure out what's going to happen over time as I go through this story. Naturally, we did not become that successful company, and no, we did not hit New York Stock Exchange. And obviously that company is no longer in existence because this was a big issue, and it's an issue that's prevailing with so many startups. We started to go for so many different types of clients, and with my expertise, my medical expertise was really around assisted living, senior care facilities, being in South Florida, selling into that world. That knowledge was not necessarily effective to go and work with dentists and also for hospitals and doctor office and larger doctors groups. In no time, the company started to dwindle, and naturally the effect or the problem was pointed towards the salespeople. Only if the salespeople could do a better job of landing in these accounts, we would thrive. The point of the matter here is, is not that the salespeople were bad. I mean, I'm Donald freaking Kelly. We had a good time. We had a great team. The issue was we did not have a product that the— for the right type of market. It wasn't something that dentists needed or cared that much about, and it wasn't necessarily the right time to be able to do that. In no time, as I shared, the company folded. And I remember that day like it was yesterday, where the CEO and the leaders brought us all into the conference room. Hmm. And they told us, you know what, keep the iPads. You all could keep those, and you will need to look for other employment because we are closing down the company. I was devastated. I was frustrated. I was angry and all of these things. But it learned— it taught me something important. If you don't have a right product for the industry, you better make sure you figure that out before you start to go deep. Fortunately, I was able to land into another software company who did have great product-market fit, and they thrive, and I was able to really grow and become successful there. Now here's what we we're going to talk about. So how can we determine when it comes towards sales and it comes towards product-market fit, how can we ensure that we're on the right path? How can we ensure that our teams are focused? And how can we ensure that we're doing the, the, the right piece, right, put the right pieces together? I'm going to share with you 5 things today, 5 ideas, and hopefully these can stick and you can take and apply them. But I want to also kind of share this notion before I jump into all of that. There's something— if you heard about this before, I want to see in the comments if you're there. Just go ahead. If you've heard about the Platinum Rule before, just go ahead and put that in the, um, in the chat. The— sorry, the, the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule. Just give me a thumbs up. The Golden Rule states simply, treat others the way that you would like to be treated. The Platinum Rule, however, is something totally different. The Platinum Rule states that you treat others the way that they would like to be treated. So when you think about this with your customers, That company that I worked for, PD, our goal, we are, we were focusing on being the, the golden rule. We wanted to treat others the way we wanted to be treated. We wanted to make money. So we figured if we like this product, people are going to like this product. However, we didn't apply the platinum rule. We didn't figure out what our company, our clients wanted, what issues they had, what challenges they needed to solve, and then to solve their problem and their issues. So 5 things that you need to take advantage of to make sure you avoid this fate and don't fall into this area. The first thing, is to determine your target customer. We had no clue who our target customers were. As I mentioned, we were going for dentists, we were going for senior care facilities, we were going for hospitals, we were going for anyone with a medical degree and that we feel could benefit from the solution that we offer. The solution, however, could not service all of those areas well. So you have to make sure you focus on the target right away, get the right people and start working with them. And I wanna give an example. Think about, uh, Like that, you know, obviously you all know about buyer persona or your ideal customer profile. Identify who those individuals are and then start to figure out what are some of those pains or some of the problems or difficulties that they might be facing. Analyze the product or service or familiarize yourself with your competitors and then choose a segment and then make sure you do some performance research. Like if you're doing these things, you'll be able to help to determine who's gonna be the right fit for you. Unfortunately, the dentists weren't gonna be a great fit for us. We found out later that the doctor groups would've been much better group for us to focus on, but that was way too late in the process. We had no idea of the segmentation. We had no idea of the competition. And we didn't necessarily analyze what type of service and what type of issues those organizations needed to solve. So, that's a super simple first thing. So, if you're a founder or if you're an executive at a startup, or if you're someone that's looking to, you know, entrepreneur trying to expand your business, trying to grow, or even if you're an established organization trying to establish new division, the first thing you want to do is make sure you really get that part down. Do we have an understanding of who those ideal customers are? Super basic. Number 2 is an interesting one, and it's super simple as well. It's just gathering data. And you could gather data in several different ways. You can do surveys, or you can go ahead and just use information that's out there.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
