the whites of their eyes


I wrote yesterday about getting on a plane to meet people. Another benefit of standing in front of someone is body language.

In-person selling doesn't scale well, but it's the fastest feedback we'll ever get.

When we're talking to the right person -- someone who can and should buy our product -- it's easy to see when a pitch resonates.

When we say the right words, two exciting things happen. Eyes widen and shoulders lean in.

When a pitch is even a little bit off, we get polite nods and "That's cool."

When we see the whites of their eyes, we know what works and what doesn't

Yeah, you can get a sense of this on Zoom. But it's not the same.

So this is me suggesting again to get on a plane, shake hands, make your pitch in person. Adjust your pitch until you see their eyes widen, their shoulders lean in, their wallet open ;)

Take what works and put it on the website, your socials, in your email signature, and run with it until you find a pitch that gets even more people excited.

It's a process (but it's pretty damn fun)

Peter
(196 / 500)

Target Burn

Short, daily emails from a friend in the trenches. I’ll share what works and what doesn’t as we build Accoil Analytics, a B2B SaaS company.Each email 500 words or less. Each one based on the planning, execution, and reflection of growing a B2B SaaS company in a competitive market.

Read more from Target Burn

Who do you want to meet that would change the course of your business? If you're not willing to get on a plane to meet them in person, you're missing a huge opportunity. I'll save you all the terrible analogies (including the one about online dating vs meeting in real life). Meeting someone. Shaking his or her hand. Breaking bread across a table. It creates a connection you will never get from LinkedIn comments. It may feel like a lot of money to book a flight, pay for a hotel room, get the...

So much marketing advice and guidance is about how we take our message to our customers. What if you want customers to come to you instead? I'm not talking about 'inbound marketing.' That works, too, but this is something a bit different. Let's call it the Oopsy Daisy. If you want to have more customer conversations, but find it hard to get anyone to talk to you. Break something on purpose. We've done this in software. I've done it with service reports. And I bet you can find a way to "break"...

AI is eating the world. And whether you like it or not, it's a hungry beast. My co-founder Kate attended Intercom's big partner and customer event. Intercom is going all in on AI. They launched a new AI customer support agent named Fin. Fin is not an LLM. It's not trained on the web. It's trained on the documentation, knowledgebase, and other content we feed it. For Fin to work best, it needs us to write down as much as we can about our software. It needs the technical side. It needs to use...