The key to your next deal (or career move)

As I have spent more time in sales and more time running my own company I’ve learned that sales comes down to two things: credibility and relationships. 

Credibility: How good are you?

Credibility is how credible you are when it comes to solving the problem you claim to solve. Imagine you’re selecting between two baseball clinics to send your kid to; one is taught by a local college student and the other is taught by Derek Jeter. Without any other information, which clinic do you think will make your child better at baseball? Probably the one taught by the 5x World Series Champion.

Of course, gaining credibility takes time and in the early days your credibility co-efficient is going to be VERY low because, well, you have no customers!

Relationships: Who are you?

That’s where the second piece comes into play: relationships.

This is where I have learned the most over the last two years. Of course I’ve always known that relationships were powerful tools in business, but I don’t think I ever appreciated just how important they are.

My main learning when it comes to relationships and sales is this: It is unbelievable how willing people are to help other people who they have even the slightest warm connection with.

We’ve all been there, right?

You’re out to dinner with a group of friends and someone comes over to the table and starts talking to to one of the other people in your group. Suddenly, both of them turn to you and your friend goes “Hey, I want you to meet X, I think you guys should chat at some point.” So you exchange a few pleasantries, add each other on LinkedIn and then go on with your nights. Come Monday morning, you check your LinkedIn DMs and you see that not only has the person you met Saturday night DM’d you, they’ve actually been messaging you for weeks and you’ve just ignored them. This time however, you immediately reply excited about setting a time to chat!

And THIS is what’s crazy and incredibly powerful in my mind. For all intents and purposes your personal relationship with that person is effectively the same as it was when you were ignoring their DMs. The only thing that has changed is that you’ve shaken their hand and you now know that they know one of your close friends. But when it comes to human relationships this makes all the difference.

It doesn’t take MUCH!

This little homemade (chatGPT assisted) chart sums up how I think about it:

On the X axis you have “warm connections” which in my mind describes in-person interactions, warm intro’s etc. On the Y-Axis you have resistance to taking a meeting (i.e how hard it is to get an initial convo scheduled with them). Obviously this graph isn’t a perfect science, but I think the point is clear. The difference between meeting someone once, or even just having some warm connection to them versus coming in totally cold is tremendous. In fact, in my experience, the gap between having never met someone and having had one in-person convo/warm intro with them is larger than the gap between a close friend and someone you’ve met once.

What does this mean for you?

So what does this mean for sales?

I think the takeaway is that particularly when you’re early on and have a low credibility co-efficient you want to:

1. Try to meet people in person

2. Ask for warm intro’s vs just trying to go in cold

Of course, this is good practice regardless of how much credibility you have because at the end of the day people buy from people. To go back to our initial example, Derek Jeter may have a high credibility co-efficient making his clinic more attractive out of the gates. However, imagine you learn the rival clinic is taught by a close friend of your next door neighbor who happens to play D1 baseball. Your neighbor tells you he’s the best and that he actually invests time into every one of his students. Suddenly, even though the friend has a lower credibility co-efficient, he’s added a strong relationship-co-efficient, which is making his offering pretty appealing.

And this is the crux of everything here: in order to source and close deals you need to have BOTH a strong relationship co-efficient and a strong credibility-co-efficient.

My biggest deal ever

As a final means of illustrating this point, let me briefly take you through how I sourced and closed my biggest deal ever.

My biggest deal to date is an enterprise deal that I signed with a 1000+ person managed security business here in NYC to work with a number of our FewerTasks reps. This deal first came onto my radar back in May of 2024. At that time, I was invited to a dinner by a founder friend here in NYC. At that dinner I happened to meet another founder who works in the crypto space (something I know very little about). We talked for 20 minutes or so about sales, our businesses, goals etc. and exchanged numbers so we could stay in touch. Two weeks later out of the blue she texted me asking if she could make an intro to someone she knew who was looking to hire Philippines-based talent. I said sure thing and she introduced me to the person who would eventually become our champion there. Frankly, the first call wasn’t even a sales call. It was really just a consulting call where I taught him the ins and outs of the offshoring space. Over the next four months though I would hop on calls to talk about specific use cases, meet their team for lunch in-person in NYC, and even introduce them to existing customers of ours. Slowly but surely, I was increasing both our relationship and credibility coefficients. Finally, after months of back and forth and despite some more established competitors we were able to get the deal done. In my opinion, we probably didn’t have the highest credibility co-efficient or the highest relationship co-efficient, but we worked to create the highest combined co-efficient.

So to close, my advice to any founder/salesperson is to find excuses to meet people in person and/or ask mutual connections for introductions. People love helping other people. All you need to do is ask.

*Caveat: none of this works if you are actively trying to game the system. People can smell disingenuousness from a mile away. You have to genuinely be a good person looking to build rapport with someone. If you put on some persona to try and manufacture relationships you should and will fail at this.

New Opportunity:

We have a great new opportunity in the network with a startup backed by OpenAI and Thrive Capital.

NYC-based

Base salary appx. $90k

Will have more details soon!