For sales you do yourself, I highly recommend just listening in on the free stuff by Jeremy Miner and other "new sales gurus" that talk about "building the gap" as the main thing to focus on, rather than selling your product. I just like Jeremy Miner for his additional emphasis on the "tonality" over the phone.
Having said that, consider just getting salespeople who would work on commission. The good ones would do it, if you have a high-ticket item.
Now, when it comes to sales at scale, through webinars and courses etc, there's a whole other science to group psychology. As someone who built the "Groups" app for the app stores, and working on CRMs and
building community platforms with my open-source platform, I can write a whole book about it. I'm going to make a course, actually. But the basics are:
1) Whenever you are at events, focus on effortless and fun communication, showing off the unique things your stuff can do, but never overtly selling it. The best is if you could make a group activity facilitated by your app, by involving everyone scanning the QR code and getting into your demo thing on your webpage. Just make the onboarding easy (e.g. scan QR code)
Anything that involves friction, do 1 on 1 (e.g. private chat) and put all the structural stress on a third party (e.g. some onboarding process, or your app, or someone who gave you the questions to ask, or whatever)
2) Once people have made a commitment or purchase, invite them in a group chat (social proof)
... make it exclusive and valuable access, for both networking opportunities and content, and access to celebrities you bring, access to recordings, and ability to show off the access by bringing a +2 to events
3) Use social proof (e.g. when asking them to do an action, show actions others like them have taken, with their faces / results)
4) Control the messaging (e.g. if they leave a positive testimonial, make it easy for them to spread it, but if they leave a bad review, route it to a support team internally and don't make it easy to share it publicly)
5) Economics: reward them with credits every time someone follows their link / comes through their video etc. The credits can even be something like 10% of whatever the people they bring in spend
Don't think in terms of money only. For example, if someone brings a Twitter celebrity, you can have the celebrity auth with twitter and get their follower count. And then that is a valuable thing in and of itself, so you should scale the rewards both the celebrity and the person who brought them. Make this clear to your community. But it's only valuable if your app has integration with at least Twitter intents, allowing this celebrity to keep posting stuff on their channel, which links back to the app. Make every invite link unique so you can track and reward the one who posted it when people who come through the link make a purchase.
Group psychology opens up a whole set of interesting possibilities, up to an including starting an entire movement or viral brand. Look up the video "leadership lessons from the dancing guy" to get an idea of what's possible.
I could go on and on, but "group psychology" is a huge subject and a lot more fun, in my opinion, than trying to hack the sales with 1 on 1 prospects. But having said that, current state of the art in sales is the 1 on 1 thing. So just have salespeople who do that on commission, and their goal is to get prospects to buy something or book something (setters) and then you verify it and put them into a larger group... and do the group psychology.
You can have recurring memberships and much more.
You can train AI agents to essentially do the "sales calls" but they won't be very good at the "tonality" part.
In terms of what you offer:
1) you should have what's called a value ladder, which is that you keep delivering things to them of increasing value, while they keep increasing the amount of money. ideally have a way to deliver free and customized value first ... but them using that thing gets them invested (entering data, spending time, inviting friends, are all forms of non-monetary investment)
During the initial call you can also have them authorize $1 for some small demo, make sure to explain to them that's all you're going to charge, until they actively indicate that they want to start. Then the goal is to get them to invest so much "non-monetary" stuff above, that they don't want to "lose all that investment" and they'll actively agree to a recurring subscription to "maintain it". Just like you'd pay to continue your hosting or email service.
2) do "consultative sales", in that you walk through what your customers need, and then produce a "statement of work" for them. Whenever you set up the next call, always ask "same time next week?" and "until then, I will have the team prepare the proposal" and ask for their email.
Encourage them to bring other decision makers on the call (this is a form of investment and preventing objections from people behind the scenes).
The "same time next week?" is a good default question if you don't have their calendly, and also allows your prospects to fill a certain "weekly time slot" until they are closed and become customers, and are handed off to a case manager etc. It also allows your sales team to manage their calendars better. If people correct you and change the time to another that's fine too.
The key in sales is to keep the conversation going and either anticipate or address all objections. Including the ones of "hidden decision makers". You can sort of get a sense of how important someone is by how much time they take to talk. If they don't talk very much they have a lot going on.
3) As long as you deliver something customized that "took a lot of effort", they will appreciate your text 24 hours before the next call, and they will make sure to get on the call (it's the "least they could do" after you did 90% of the work for free).
4) When discussing the cost, designing your statement of work, give people a choice of A, B or A+B in same time frame, so this way they can choose to pay the large A+B amount if they want it "fast" for the same price it would take doing it piecemeal.
Meaning, never put them to a "yes" or a "no", but always a continuous trade-off, so they are likely to choose something on that curve. That is somewhere in your value ladder and once you get a foothold, the relationship grows, the trust and dependency grows, their stakeholders will be telling them to keep going with you.
5) my favorite hack: open a company specifically for the new product, and if your product still has bugs, offer your customers shares in your company in addition to the product (legally allowed under Rule 506b if there is a substantial pre-existing relationship, or through Test the Waters leading up to an upcoming crowdfund through Reg CF, e.g. https://wefunder.com/Qbix).
Having said that, consider just getting salespeople who would work on commission. The good ones would do it, if you have a high-ticket item.
Now, when it comes to sales at scale, through webinars and courses etc, there's a whole other science to group psychology. As someone who built the "Groups" app for the app stores, and working on CRMs and building community platforms with my open-source platform, I can write a whole book about it. I'm going to make a course, actually. But the basics are:
1) Whenever you are at events, focus on effortless and fun communication, showing off the unique things your stuff can do, but never overtly selling it. The best is if you could make a group activity facilitated by your app, by involving everyone scanning the QR code and getting into your demo thing on your webpage. Just make the onboarding easy (e.g. scan QR code)
Anything that involves friction, do 1 on 1 (e.g. private chat) and put all the structural stress on a third party (e.g. some onboarding process, or your app, or someone who gave you the questions to ask, or whatever)
2) Once people have made a commitment or purchase, invite them in a group chat (social proof)
... make it exclusive and valuable access, for both networking opportunities and content, and access to celebrities you bring, access to recordings, and ability to show off the access by bringing a +2 to events
3) Use social proof (e.g. when asking them to do an action, show actions others like them have taken, with their faces / results)
4) Control the messaging (e.g. if they leave a positive testimonial, make it easy for them to spread it, but if they leave a bad review, route it to a support team internally and don't make it easy to share it publicly)
5) Economics: reward them with credits every time someone follows their link / comes through their video etc. The credits can even be something like 10% of whatever the people they bring in spend
Don't think in terms of money only. For example, if someone brings a Twitter celebrity, you can have the celebrity auth with twitter and get their follower count. And then that is a valuable thing in and of itself, so you should scale the rewards both the celebrity and the person who brought them. Make this clear to your community. But it's only valuable if your app has integration with at least Twitter intents, allowing this celebrity to keep posting stuff on their channel, which links back to the app. Make every invite link unique so you can track and reward the one who posted it when people who come through the link make a purchase.
Group psychology opens up a whole set of interesting possibilities, up to an including starting an entire movement or viral brand. Look up the video "leadership lessons from the dancing guy" to get an idea of what's possible.
I could go on and on, but "group psychology" is a huge subject and a lot more fun, in my opinion, than trying to hack the sales with 1 on 1 prospects. But having said that, current state of the art in sales is the 1 on 1 thing. So just have salespeople who do that on commission, and their goal is to get prospects to buy something or book something (setters) and then you verify it and put them into a larger group... and do the group psychology.
You can have recurring memberships and much more.
You can train AI agents to essentially do the "sales calls" but they won't be very good at the "tonality" part.
In terms of what you offer:
1) you should have what's called a value ladder, which is that you keep delivering things to them of increasing value, while they keep increasing the amount of money. ideally have a way to deliver free and customized value first ... but them using that thing gets them invested (entering data, spending time, inviting friends, are all forms of non-monetary investment)
During the initial call you can also have them authorize $1 for some small demo, make sure to explain to them that's all you're going to charge, until they actively indicate that they want to start. Then the goal is to get them to invest so much "non-monetary" stuff above, that they don't want to "lose all that investment" and they'll actively agree to a recurring subscription to "maintain it". Just like you'd pay to continue your hosting or email service.
2) do "consultative sales", in that you walk through what your customers need, and then produce a "statement of work" for them. Whenever you set up the next call, always ask "same time next week?" and "until then, I will have the team prepare the proposal" and ask for their email.
Encourage them to bring other decision makers on the call (this is a form of investment and preventing objections from people behind the scenes).
The "same time next week?" is a good default question if you don't have their calendly, and also allows your prospects to fill a certain "weekly time slot" until they are closed and become customers, and are handed off to a case manager etc. It also allows your sales team to manage their calendars better. If people correct you and change the time to another that's fine too.
The key in sales is to keep the conversation going and either anticipate or address all objections. Including the ones of "hidden decision makers". You can sort of get a sense of how important someone is by how much time they take to talk. If they don't talk very much they have a lot going on.
3) As long as you deliver something customized that "took a lot of effort", they will appreciate your text 24 hours before the next call, and they will make sure to get on the call (it's the "least they could do" after you did 90% of the work for free).
4) When discussing the cost, designing your statement of work, give people a choice of A, B or A+B in same time frame, so this way they can choose to pay the large A+B amount if they want it "fast" for the same price it would take doing it piecemeal.
Meaning, never put them to a "yes" or a "no", but always a continuous trade-off, so they are likely to choose something on that curve. That is somewhere in your value ladder and once you get a foothold, the relationship grows, the trust and dependency grows, their stakeholders will be telling them to keep going with you.
5) my favorite hack: open a company specifically for the new product, and if your product still has bugs, offer your customers shares in your company in addition to the product (legally allowed under Rule 506b if there is a substantial pre-existing relationship, or through Test the Waters leading up to an upcoming crowdfund through Reg CF, e.g. https://wefunder.com/Qbix).