What Do I Do when I Stop Believing in the Product I'm Selling?
When you stop believing in the product you sell, work out which of three things broke. The product may fail everyone. It may fail the accounts on your current list while serving others well. Or the company may have changed its story faster than you could catch up. Each one points to a different move.
You memorized the new deck in three days, and you still don't believe what it says.
Why Did I Stop Believing in the Product I Sell?
"I don't believe in this" can bundle three different situations into one feeling. Name which one you're in.
The product helps no one. Customers leave even when they fit well. Nobody inside the company can point to an account that got real value. This is the case where the company itself is the problem.
The product doesn't fit your list. It works for some kinds of companies and not for the ones you've been assigned. The deals you lose keep failing on the same point, such as a missing feature, a price that doesn't fit their size, or an integration they need.
The story changed and you haven't caught up. The company repositioned, repriced, or pivoted, and you are selling a pitch you don't fully understand yet. In that case, the fix is learning the new story.
What Does It Cost to Fake Belief on Every Call?
The cost is to your own well-being and how you feel about your job. Alicia Grandey's 2000 paper on emotional labor separated two ways of managing emotion at work. Surface acting means showing a feeling you don't have. Deep acting means changing what you feel.
Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe, in a 2011 meta-analysis of three decades of that research, found surface acting linked to worse well-being and worse job attitudes. Deep acting carried far less of that cost.
A full day of calls spent performing enthusiasm you don't feel is surface acting.
James Diefendorff, Meredith Croyle, and Robin Gosserand, in a 2005 study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, found that expressing emotions you naturally feel is a third strategy, separate from both surface and deep acting. The fix is a narrower claim you can make honestly, because a claim you believe can be delivered with the interest you already have.
How connected you feel to a brand also shapes effort. Douglas Hughes and Michael Ahearne, in a 2010 Journal of Marketing study of salespeople at a consumer products distributor who carried several manufacturers' brands, found that salespeople who identified strongly with a brand put more effort behind it. That held even when the distributor's control systems pushed their effort elsewhere.
How Do I Find the Accounts This Product Helps?
Pull your last ten closed-won accounts, or the company's if you don't have ten yet, and write down what they had in common. The kind of company, its size, the problem that was urgent for them, what they stopped doing once they had the product.
Product teams run a version of this. Rahul Vohra, in First Round Review's account of how Superhuman measured product fit, describes asking users how they'd feel if the product went away, then studying the users who would be very disappointed and setting aside feedback from people who were never the target. Your closed-won accounts are the group to study in the same way.
If the ten accounts share a clear pattern and your list doesn't match it, your problem is fit. Take the pattern to your manager and ask to re-sort your list toward it, or to add accounts that match.
If they share a pattern that matches your list, and the pitch is what feels wrong, your problem is the new story, and it is solved by learning it. If the ten share nothing at all, look hard at the first possibility.
What Can I Sell if I Can't Honestly Say It's the Best?
You can sell fit, timing, and plain accuracy. Fit means this product is right for this company's situation, which you can say with confidence about accounts that match your closed-won pattern. Timing means something changed for them recently that makes the problem worth solving now. Accuracy means saying what the product does and what it doesn't.
Buyers hear a lot of vendors describe themselves as the best. A smaller claim that holds up under a hard question gives them something they can check. Build the pitch from claims you'd defend on a call with your own manager listening, and drop the rest. If a limitation will come up in the demo, raise it on the call yourself.
Martin Eisend's 2006 meta-analysis of two-sided advertising, which pooled studies of ads that mention a drawback alongside the benefits, found that the payoff depends on how much negative information the message carries, where it is placed, and whether the marketer offers it voluntarily. Volunteer the limitation this buyer will run into, and leave out the weaknesses that don't touch their situation.
What if the Problem Is the Company?
Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the company is the problem. The signs are structural. The closed-won accounts share nothing. Customers who fit well still leave. Leadership keeps changing the story because nothing is landing. The people who know the market best are leaving.
Marc Andreessen, in a 2007 essay on product-market fit, described what its absence looks like from the sales side. Long sales cycles, deals that stall, and customers who don't tell anyone else about the product.
Gartner's research on seller motivation, described on its page for sales leaders, finds that sellers have plenty of drive and lose output to drag, the friction that wears it down. It also finds high-drag sellers more likely to be planning to leave. Losing belief in the product can add to that drag.
If that's what you see, it is useful information for your manager, with the closed-won data attached. It is also useful for you. Decide whether to stay based on that evidence.
Pull the last ten closed-won accounts this week and write down what they share.
If you want to get better at finding the right person in an account, Find Who Can Say Yes is a process for working out who in a company can approve a buy.
References & Related Reading
- Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor, Alicia A. Grandey, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2000.
- On the costs and benefits of emotional labor: A meta-analysis of three decades of research, Ute R. Hülsheger and Anna F. Schewe, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2011.
- The dimensionality and antecedents of emotional labor strategies, James M. Diefendorff, Meredith H. Croyle, and Robin H. Gosserand, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2005.
- Energizing the Reseller's Sales Force: The Power of Brand Identification, Douglas E. Hughes and Michael Ahearne, Journal of Marketing, 2010.
- Two-sided advertising: A meta-analysis, Martin Eisend, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2006.
- How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit, Rahul Vohra, First Round Review, 2018.
- The only thing that matters, Marc Andreessen, pmarchive, 2007.
- What Is Sales Enablement? The CSO's Ultimate Guide (seller drive and drag research), Gartner, current page.
