Name: Mastering the complex sale
ISBN: 9780470533116

What Hacker News says

mindcrimeMay 2024

Offhand I can think of a few that I've read at least 2-3 times. And in a couple of cases, maybe as many as 4 or 5 times. There are probably some others that just aren't jumping to mind, but suffice it to say that these are all books I've found very valuable.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

Mastering the Complex Sale - Jeff Thull

How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

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mindcrimeMar 2023

One could write a book on this. In point of fact, there are a lot of books on this topic. I'd suggest you consult The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, the series by Jeff Thull that begins with Mastering The Complex Sale, and The New Solution Selling by Keith Eades.

As for some specific, tactical gambits you can use, here's one I've gotten some mileage out of: browse LinkedIn for people who used to work for companies you want to find out more about. Cold contact them, explain that you're researching $COMPANY and that you were hoping they could share some insights. I find that this is often better than contacting current employees, because the ex-employees don't get that defensive "guards up" thing from this kind of engagement, since you're not - by definition - trying to sell them anything.

Then, armed with whatever information you glean from these calls (which ideally will include some suggested names of people to contact!) you can make contact with the target $COMPANY.

Even better, if the call with the ex-employee goes really well, they may offer to (or be willing to, if prompted) actually make an introduction to somebody they are still in touch with at the target. This can go a long way towards greasing the wheels and getting an "in" there. It won't always happen, but it does sometimes IME. Or if they aren't willing to actually make an introduction, they may at least agree to let you name-drop their name, as in "Hey, Bob, I was talking to Susy who you used to work with, and she mentioned your name as somebody I should talk to about X..."

Just don't do the "name drop" thing without explicitly getting permission from the person in question first. Doing otherwise is unethical and if the person you ping happens to call their good friend Susy and she says "I did talk to that guy, but I certainly didn't give him permission to use my name" then you're going to find yourself persona non grata real quick.

Anyway, if you read some of the books I mentioned above, one common theme you'll see revolves around doing a lot of research on your target companies before making contact. Doing that takes more effort, but it's also more likely to pay off, since people are more likely to respond to people they perceive as offering legitimate value as opposed to people sending blast spam.

Note: but don't do the generic thing of trying to make it sound like you did your research without actually having done any! Think about how you feel when you get messages that start with something like "Hey, Centigonal, I've been researching Centigonal Inc and I love what you guys are doing in your space, and I think I could help you generate an extra 10,000 high quality leads every month..." Blah, blah, blah. To me, those things are 100% "auto delete on sight" since the person not only obviously didn't do any research, but on top of that they lied about it. Dishonesty is not the best way to initiate a relationship.

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mindcrimeMar 2023

The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy

It's Not the Big that Eat the Small...It's the Fast that Eat the Slow - Jason Jennings

Mastering The Complex Sale - Jeff Thull

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

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mindcrimeMay 2022

I'd suggest you read The Four Steps to the Epiphany[1] by @sgblank, Mastering The Complex Sale[2], The Prime Solution[3], and Exceptional Selling[4] by Jeff Thull, and Customer Centric Selling[5] by Bosworth, Holland, and Visgatis. Across this sequence, especially the first two, I think you'll find a lot of very good suggestions on how to approach the situation you're talking about.

I don't know if I can put enough into a TL/DR; to even be useful, but the general gist of things starts with something like:

Have some kind of idea of approximately what you're interested in building, or what kind of problem you are interested in solving. If you're really starting from a complete blank slate, this might be tough. It doesn't need to be super detailed, but you should have something to start from. Otherwise you're asking people really airy questions like "What problems do you have?" that don't always work well as a starting point.

Talk to people in industry who you already know (Blank calls these "Friendly First Contacts") and ask questions around their experience in the area related to your vague notion of what you want to build / what kinds of problems you want to solve. Next, and perhaps most importantly of all... ask your "friendly first contacts" to refer you to other people that they think could give you useful insights, but who you don't already know. Repeat this process (and "the process" as laid out by Blank is fairly detailed, structured, and actionable. This is not hand-wavy mumbo jumbo. But you'll have to read the book(s) for the deep details).

As part of all this, you employ an iterative process of developing a detailed "problem hypothesis" which is simply a statement along the lines of "companies (or people) like you often have this problem, and would spend money to solve it." You then go back to your contacts (while also continually working to expand that pool of contacts, as you see fit) and try to validate / invalidate your hypothesis. If you can't validate your hypothesis, you start over and develop a new hypothesis. Once you have a problem hypothesis that you feel is validated (to some extent. This isn't really a totally binary thing) you develop a "solution hypothesis" which says "given that you have this problem, a product like the following would solve the problem and you would pay for it." And you keep iterating, talking to people, presenting your hypothesis, trying to validate/invalidate it, etc.

If it all works, at some point you have good reason to believe that you know something substantial about a real problem that real people have and a real (potential) solution for that problem that they would (theoretically) pay real $$$ for.

I'm eliding a lot of details, but somewhere in all this is where you build an MVP, show it to people you've talked to, and ask questions like "If I built this product would you pay a million dollars for it?" and "If I offered this product to you for free, would you install and use it immediately?" and others to help you hone in on just how real the interest and potential are.

Somewhere after this is where you start asking for either a check and signed purchase order (up until now you haven't been trying to sell anything), or at least something like a non-binding letter of intent that you can use to demonstrate the reality of interest in your solution if you're going to go out and try to raise outside capital, etc.

There's more to it than this of course. But at a super, super high level, that's sorta kinda how you can approach things. HTH.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strate...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Prime-Solution-Increase-Margins-Compl...

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes...

[5]: https://www.amazon.com/CustomerCentric-Selling-Second-Michae...

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mindcrimeFeb 2022

I like the approach Steve Blank laid out in The Four Steps to the Epiphany[1]. If you haven't read that yet, I highly recommend it.

To summarize part of the approach: you want to have high-bandwidth conversations with specific individuals who you think are part of your target market. Make sure you and they agree on the problem. Then try asking a question like "If I built a solution to X and offered it to you for free, would you deploy it?"

If the answer is "no" then it's obvious that the problem isn't a particularly high-value one, OR you don't actually have a proper shared understanding of the problem.

If the answer is "yes" then you can start trying to bound the actual value of the problem. "Well, what if I charged you one million dollars for the solution? Would you deploy it then?" The answer may well be "no", but that's OK. Now you can start a sort of a binary search process to try and find some common ground.

Beyond that, there's a series of books by a guy named Jeff Thull that I really like, which you might find valuable, at least if you're trying to sell something in a B2B setting. The first book in the series is titled Mastering the Complex Sale[2] and a big focus of Thull's approach is about how to develop a "shared understanding" of a problem, and the value of a solution. It's a "sales" book, but it's not the kind of "sales book" that's about trickery and manipulation, etc. It's really about how to work together with a prospect to gain that "shared understanding." I'm a big fan, FWIW.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strate...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes...

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mindcrimeJun 2020

There are a handful of books I have read more than once, and which I may still read more times. Offhand, I can think of:

1. The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne - read 6 or 7 times if not more, dating back to when I was in about 6th grade

2. False Memory - Dean Koontz - read probably 4 or 5 times

3. Neuromancer - William Gibson - read 3 or 4 times, at least

4. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - read at least twice

5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank - read 2 or 3 times, skimmed parts many other times

6. Mastering The Complex Sale - Jeff Thull - read 2 or 3 times

7. Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore - read 2 or 3 times