I have a weird habit. I bought a car 9 years ago, and I usually ask people I do business with how they are being paid and measured on. Most of them tell me even. And this one was amazing:

You know these big car "shows" where you just go and there's 100s of cars standing around so you can have a look at them. I checked online their stock and saw immediately a KIA that interested me.

I wanted a test drive and at the same time despise car sales interactions, as they tend to be pushy, and the price negotiations.... ugh. But this guy Mohammed was not pushy at all, it almost felt like it didn't matter to him whether he sells the car or not but he made sure I was aware of everything with the car, limitations, warranty etc. 1h testdrive? Sure, no problem

The price was already good, I still asked "what about the price?" He went "We don't haggle, our prices are good and that's what you get. We know the margin we need and we lower prices of cars that are not selling automatically"

I was interested "so you're not getting a bigger bonus if you sell a car for a higher price?"

"No ,we're not measured on sales quota or price."

"Oh, what then?"

"The ratio of complaints vs. purchases and how severe they are and I like it. We (the sales guys) can't influence what cars corporate imports but the quality and price of those influences whether they sell more than someone convincing others. They are measured on the quota, we're measured on customer happiness. Also we want the people to really come back after a couple of years."

I remember this interaction after all these years and I totally believe him. This is as customer centric as it can get. I'm sure there's more than just the complaints he's measured on but the concept is really cool and they are as far away possible from b2c SaaS as you can be. They even care about multi-year retention. 🤯

Product-Led Sales is not about making sales teams obsolete, it's about focusing on the users journey as much as possible and one part of this is how we measure success, also of our sales funnels if possible. My point is, it's not just for SaaS (96% of them have sales) to explore. And don't forget that product-led is not only how you sell but also how you build your organization and incentivize people.

Let's be honest here, it's also much more fun to sell something someone actually wants, no strings attached. Product-led is not perfect though, it doesn't account well for minorities but that's a topic for another day.

If you made it all the way down here, consider joining #productcon in London on Thursday, I'll be there, you can also have a free online viewing ticket.

#business #business #sales #cars #pls #productled