Jason M. Lemkin on sales fundamentals: always leave meetings with a clear next step, move deals forward through demos and pilots, and only ask for money when the deal is ready. He recommends the free Saster University course and the book From Impossible to Inevitable over most paid sales courses.
Best salespeople never leave a meeting without a next step. The next step does not have to be a check. Okay, if that's. Don't break the relationship. But what's the next meeting? The next meeting might be. Lenny, is there someone else at your company that I could do a demo for? People are lazy. They don't want to do multiple Demos. But in 2024, we all have to demo multiple stakeholders. In 2021, it was one stakeholder. Now it's a four stakeholder sale. So if you don't know what to ask at the end of the call, ask, who else can I have? Who else, Lenny, Is there someone else? I know you're excited to buy our product, but who else? Is there someone else in the organization? I can. Can I help you? Can I just do a demo? A demo is not threatening, right? Whatever the next step is, right. Can we do. Can we get. What's the next step? We can get on our books, right? And listen. And the best salespeople march deals step by step by step by step. And then they put in the time. They've done the demos, they've done the pilot if they need to. They've helped them get going, they've helped them see the value. And then that. If it takes six steps to say, okay, Lenny, now we've got five folks at the organization using it, it seems, here's the deal, they love it, right? What can we do, Lenny, to get going? Can we get. Can we get a contract signed so we can get going on February 1st? It's just very natural. And founders just end the zoom. They just end the zoom and they wait. They wait in their inbox for the next step to come. But it does. It rarely comes on its own. That's the number one tip, is make sure yourself and you log it in your CRM that you always have a next step after. You don't have to be great at sales as long as you're moving the ball down the field and get it into the red zone and then figure out how to ask for the money. But you don't have to ask for the money until it's in the red zone.
Amazing. While. While we're on this topic, is there like a book or a course or anything that you just recommend folks go to get better at sales? Just like, is there some tactical. Go read this thing, it'll help you. Or is it just. It's hard. You're not going to figure it out reading a book.
I am a voracious reader. If I only Wanted to plug myself. Right. And I usually wouldn't. Two things that we have, we have something called Saster University. Saster University. It's free. There's a pretty good course on getting learning about sales. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It just organizes a lot of the stuff we're talking about and it's free, so I think it's pretty helpful. We actually wrote a book called From Impossible to Inevitable that sold about a hundred thousand copies.
Oh, wow.
I did almost none of the work, although it's a lot of. It's my content. Aaron Ross did it. It's actually really good and it interviews a lot of top sales leaders and goes through a lot of stuff we did. So I, I don't usually hype it, but for 15 bucks, I think this, I, and actually I've never made $1. I've never even gotten a check for these hundred thousand copies. But I do think it's actually the second edition's pretty good. So I think if you like what we're talking about, the SAS University and the others, I would say the I would be very caught. I, I, I just hyped my own course, which is free. Like, I don't think I'm shelling something if it's free. The book I don't make a dollar on. I'd be very cautious. And this is tough. Maybe there's something we can work on together because there's so many courses and so many people selling stuff the last two years. Just be cautious. Just be cautious. The last thing I will say is there is another community called Pavilion. I do think it's great. Pavilion. It does have a lot of networking and stuff for sales and connecting sales with founders. And I am a super fan of what they're doing that, that one's worth investing in. But be careful about Bob and John's sales courses on the Internet. There's just too, there's too many.
Awesome. All right, we'll link to all those things in the show notes. Next question. What is the ideal trial length for a free trial for a sales team? Is it like 14 days a month? Years. What do you recommend?
Tomas Tungas did a whole Saster presentation just on free trials and free trial legs. It was really good. But.
