Over the past couple of weeks, Evan Addams, a GCC grad and entrepreneur, has come into speak to our class 3 times. Evan shared some great nuggets of wisdom with us. In his first talk, Evan told us that he was on the NoWait team. He told us that success takes a lot of perseverance and time. He said that he worked a lot of late mornings and early nights. He also emphasized the need to ask clients questions so that you know what they need. He said that this process is also known as product market fit. Evan is now in sales consulting in the medical industry.
In his second talk, Evan explained the 5 different ways to interact with a customer. The 5 categories are hard workers, relationship builders, lone wolves, problem solvers, and challengers. Hard workers believe that hard work will make everything work out. Relationship builders build relationships with the customer and do whatever it takes to make them happy. Lone wolves work alone, but they are usually the top performers. Problem solvers figure out a way to solve problems. They don’t always have to go out to get customers. Challengers differentiate themselves by pushing customers into what they believe is the best option; then the client realizes that the seller can fix their problem and they give them their business. He also talked about tailoring for resonance and taking control of the sale as the seller.
Today, Evan talked about customer success in the startup. Customer success is asking people what could be improved by customers. This helps to improve different areas of the sales funnel. He also talked about scaling the business, in areas such as marketing, sales, operations, and customer success. He closed by talking about leaving a margin so that sales people can flourish. He related it to the book of Leviticus, specifically when people weren’t allowed to plow their entire fields. They had to leave some room on the margins open. God let this happen because it allowed the poor people to work (plant) in the margins so that they would have food to eat. Similarly, if we leave margins in business, it allows us to create space for customer success.
Overall, I really enjoyed having Evan in class and learned a lot from him,
BoweryJE22
I really enjoyed Evans third talk. I didn’t even know that customer success existed and the whole idea is really cool. I think it is a really efficient system that sales forces should be implementing as much as possible. I really liked his talk on the margins too. I heard Andy Crouch give a talk on that himself and Evan did a great job of rearticulating it for the class.
I enjoyed all of Evans talks, however my favorite was how he talked about persevering to achieve success. Nothing is ever easy and sales especially will have its fair share of bumps in the road. In sales you can not expect to start off at the top and it takes a lot of hard work to get there.
I really enjoyed having Evan as a guest speaker. He had a lot of great advice to share and this article recaps what he said well. I found the talk on the different types of salespeople most interesting. Each of us have different strengths and weaknesses and knowing how we operate will help us maximize our productivity.