Selling Trust
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I've been deep in enterprise sales cycles at Voltade lately, mostly learning by sitting in tonnes of sales meetings with Leonard. We have good yin-yang energy, I think. Leonard brings the voice of authority, I bring the enthusiasm and energy in delivering the pitch.
The last few weeks we've closed deals with brands most people in Singapore would recognise from their day-to-day, market leaders in their space. Felt worthwhile to pen down a quick reflection. Three things have stuck.
#1. We're selling trust more than anything
The buyer isn't really buying a product. They're investing in Voltade's ability to deliver AI projects for them.
This drives my positioning from day one. Rather than talk about Volty or Envoy, I engage them on the broader AI landscape. Our first few meetings with enterprise customers are rarely about products. It's about sharing our internal agentic workflows, the latest developments in the market, even going down into the more technical details of how LLMs work.
The latest deal we closed, we spent three hours just talking about everything under the sun related to AI. We went as far as buying the new Meta AI Ray-Ban glasses to showcase how they could connect to our AI agent. Our main customers are traditionally run companies trying to introduce AI agents to reduce human man-hours, so all of this really works. We're a deeply AI company, and that's exactly what we want them to see.
#2. To be effective in sales, you need to be likable. And the only way to be likable is to be unapologetically yourself
This takes guts and a lot of vulnerability, but it's the best way to develop trust. If you're a chatty guy, be chatty with the customer. Be witty, crack jokes. If you're on the more mature side like Leonard, with a stacked CV to back it up, double down on that.
I never came from a sales background, I came from engineering and product. And I tell customers this openly: I'm not commission-based, I'm a product manager, I'm just here to share about AI. In a recent sales call one of our partners sat in, a career salesperson attending from a partnership angle. At the end of the meeting she told me "you know, you don't sound like a salesperson at all". I'll take that. The buyer's guard drops when they can tell nobody's trying to sell them anything, which links right back to the first point.
If you're not completely, unapologetically yourself, the customer will sniff out the facade you're playing pretty quickly. Never sell while being someone you're not. Of course you want to present the best version of yourself to the customer, but the key word here is "yourself".
#3. At some point, the customer wants to convert you
I've noticed that if you've been really effective during the sales cycle, the customer starts selling themselves to you. That happens when the fundamental negotiation point is price, not ability to deliver.
That's the best sign for me, because it means two things: they trust us, and on their end they've already decided to proceed. They're just trying to get the best deal out of it.
I've learnt a lot about negotiation from this stage (perhaps a post for another time): price anchoring, loss aversion, the sheer amount of psychology that goes into selling stuff.
Everything we've learnt across 3+ years and 100+ AI projects is going into Volty, our latest product. Whether the trust we've built selling projects transfers to selling a product at global scale, we'll find out soon.