The first ten customer calls

Part 18 of 20 in How to Sell: The Key to Success← Part 17Part 19 →

This chapter provides a structured approach for making the first ten customer calls, aimed at identifying key issues and testing assumptions. It is designed for founders looking to refine their sales process by focusing on customer feedback rather than immediate sales.

A field guide for the week you stop editing the deck and start the list.

Theory ends at the tenth conversation. Before that, founders are still negotiating with themselves. Here is a shape for those ten calls that follows Bettger without pretending you are an insurance agent. The aim is not ten yeses. The aim is ten key issues, written in the buyer’s words, and at least three clean asks.

Calls one to three: learn the Tuesday

Do not demo. You are not ready to demo, even if the product works. Open with how you found them, in one sentence, and ask what the painful hour of their week actually is. When they generalise, ask for last Tuesday. People lie in abstractions and tell the truth about Tuesday. Ask who else feels it. Ask what they do today. Ask what they have already paid for that did not stick. Thank them, summarise in their words, and ask if you may come back when you have something specific to show. That is the close on a learning call: permission to return, with a date.

After each of these three, write the four lines before you allow yourself to feel good or bad. If the three Tuesdays do not resemble each other, you do not have a customer yet. You have three anecdotes. Do not build. Talk to seven more.

Calls four to seven: test the sentence

By now a phrase should be repeating. Use it in the first minute and watch the face, or the pause on the phone. “Others in your kind of work tell me the matching goes on till eight. Is that true here, or is your problem different?” A founder who can say this is enthusiastic in the only way that counts: interested in whether the pattern holds. If they correct you, take the correction. The correction is the product.

On these calls you may show one screen, tied to the sentence. Not the product. The screen that answers the sentence. Admit what it does not do. Ask why they would not try it on one real week of bills. Ask what else. If a third person appears, sell the meeting with that person before you hang up. Leaving with “I’ll send details” is a failed close, however warm the tone.

Calls eight to ten: ask for money

Pick the buyers whose key issue you can actually touch. Ask for a paid start, small enough to be a test and large enough to be a decision. Name the date it begins and the date you will judge it. Welcome the objection. Use why, then what else. Bring one witness from calls four to seven, even if the result is modest, and do not inflate it. Then silence.

You may get zero paid yeses in the first ten. That is allowed. It is not allowed to finish the ten without knowing why. A founder who can say “eight of them do the work in Excel and will not pay until the CA is in the room, and I have not earned a CA meeting yet” has learnt more than a founder with a vague pilot and a hopeful CRM. The next ten calls have a clearer job. That is the machine working.

A warning from Bettger’s record-keeping. Do not average these calls into a mood. Call six may be awful and call nine may be the company. The record holds both. Read it on day eleven before you change the homepage, the price, or the hiring plan. One awful call is not a pivot. A repeated sentence is.