Summarize below paragraph on sales process and scaling startups?

In this chapter on sales, you're going to hear about how important the selling process and being really good at explaining and conveying your message is in terms of success.

Now sales is not just you're a salesperson who goes out and sells your product. Sales is what every person in your company should be doing, from the sales person to somebody even developing the product to somebody packaging it up and shipping. Because selling is about conveying your value proposition, the so what factor, what it means to customers. And if you can't do that well, and you can't do that the succinctly, then you're not going to be successful, even if you have an amazing product.

We target the sales end of the business. We're going after the executive vice president, the vice president, the owner if it's a smaller company, the partner of the owner. And we hit them where it hurts. We start with, we show companies like yours how to increase their sales pipelines by up to 74%, as little as a quarter starting with the economic decision-maker.

Very few people can resist a number that they think is absolutely blue sky but sounds measured. I just want you getting stuck on that 74%. And I need you just to say to me, how do you do that?

Let's say that you had software that worked within a company that could cut travel expenses. You wouldn't talk about the software. You would talk about cutting travel expenses and how much overall, or in a region or in a state or in a country, travel had increased or decreased. Or maybe you would talk about the fact that pre-purchasing train tickets seven day in advance in Japan actually saves you 50% on the price, and people don't know this even in Japan.

So you'd start talking about that, and ah, well how do I get this? Well, it turns out I've got this software. So it's that same kind of idea that you start talking about the end goal.

Coming in through a different door is usually the most effective. So if you sound like everybody else, if your message is just like everybody else, walls go up out of almost a Pavlovian response. I'm getting a selling stimulus. I'm going to give you a predictable, shut-down response. Human nature.

And what we teach and what we do is, you've got to go in through a door that everybody else isn't going through. And if your message doesn't resonate within 15 seconds, you're done.

So we just respect the physics of what we teach, which is if you're interrupting a decision maker, if you can't get out the business value, and hard-hitting business value, in 15 seconds, the conversation ends pretty abruptly.

We do very little cold calling on the day-to-day basis. About four to five years ago, I found that conversion rates with cold calling were lower than I wanted them to be. And it was using a lot of time unproductively when I knew that my sales staff were very, very capable of selling. They knew their product so well. But I'm selling to a niche market. And it's something to consider, depending on what your product is, there's different types of calls and different requirements with your leads.

So what I did is I developed through search engine optimization a really intense and busy inbound inquiries system whereby I have up to 70 web emails, web-based or through the website, coming in. These are people with a real, genuine need. They have a need. They have an interest. So they're already qualified.

So at that moment, we then divide those up along with the inbound calls that come in. And that's how we address finding new business now. We're basically data mining and gathering the information from the website. What better place to get qualified people?

We don't do micromarketing. I mean we do not completely change stuff from country to country. What we do is change how the conversation happens or who we might be introduced or who we might try to seek an introduction. And that will be different depending on where you're at.

So the way you might apply this in other product areas is you might say, say you're selling something to farmers. Not all farmers are the same. It turns out there are family farms. There are big agribusiness. And then there's a few people kind of in between there.

So how you approach big agribusiness is very different than how you approach the family farm. And it's not just messaging. It's literally the method of communication.

And is it telephone, or is it a conference, or is it a direct contact through a referral? It'll change depending on how you want to reach those people and what specific market you're in.

Another place, of course, that I met a lot of viable leads for my industry was at special events, because you have all sorts of production people and designers, producers, directors. And it was a great opportunity to meet them, exchange business cards, and then close out that moment by saying, I'd love to follow up with you. Is that OK?

And if they've give you that blessing, it's really a great way then to circle back around and follow through with that by calling on them.

People are willing to meat. If you call someone and tel them we're going to have an interesting technology, it will do this and that, I would like to come and show you, in most cases, they'll say, OK, come on.

If you want to meet the CEO of a company, that's difficult. But meeting the mid-level people-- and the mid-level people are the most important ones, because they prepare the decisions for the decision makers. Without them, nobody can make decisions.

So you need to reach the mid-level. Going too high sometimes could even backfire, because it could alienate the middle people, and you're done. So you need to reach the middle people. And the middle people, this is their business. They want to meet and see where are the new technologies.

I look that every initial meeting as a cold call. And there's a difference between somebody selling insurance off of a marketing list during dinner time and what we do. But every initial meeting is, in essence, a cold call.

So how much time is spent on doing that? A lot. I don't know maybe a third. A third is on new introductions. And then a third is on maturing introductions, and a third is on actually closing deals. That's just a rough guess.

But the trick is to first of all be very discriminate with who you're calling on for those that customer list. So you might have a very large market list, a lead list, if you will. But out of that, you've got to have done enough homework to know who is really likely to buy, and then do they have the resources to buy? And somewhere down here is motivation. That's kind of underpinning everything.

So I hate to sound trite, but this is a very, very-- I guess the basic point about cold calling is doing sufficient research. If you walk into a meeting and you don't know everything in the world about the person you're meeting with, then you shouldn't go into that meeting. Somebody should have done it.

We famously hire undergraduate students to do a bunch of research. They troll the internet.