Understanding is selling in silence

Attending a trade fair to look for customers is violent.

Companies that have a booth are there to sell. Most of the people at the booth are sales people and, if you approach them to offer your solution, you will most likely be dismissed as politely as possible... if you are lucky. Handing over your card or flyer means nothing: if the person is not interested in your solution, that paper ends up in a drawer or in the trash.

To increase the chances of having a real conversation, the first thing I do when I approach a stand is to ask directly for someone in the department I am interested in:

Sorry, I don't want to waste your time, could you tell me if there is someone from [X]?

At large trade fairs, the whole team usually comes. If you manage to talk to the right person for 5 minutes and discuss something that matters to them, you almost do them a favour: you rescue them from sales work.

The first time I attended a trade fair with StepAlong We didn't even have a product. We had barely defined the core functionality of the platform, but we needed to validate hypotheses with real users. So we had to have conversations. The methodology was the same as in product research in consulting: open conversation, broad questions, trying to discover needs. The difference is that no one had come here to give feedback and most people mistook me for a salesman. That created friction, as I said at the beginning.

I perfectly remember the first comment made to me by a girl at a stand:

- Excuse me, but... you're not from sales, are you?“
- “Why?”
- It's that I'm a salesman and it's obvious: you speak slowly and well... it shows“.”

I didn't know whether it was a compliment or a reproach. I was not ‘salesy’ in the classic sense, but I was there to sell in some way.

Because of my professional training in user research I don't talk much, I do open-ended questions, I let the other person complete sentences and express their ideas in their own words.. That gives me clues about their mental model.

Many founders (and I have met a lot of them in my career) do the opposite: they rush to explain all the features of their product, as if they were a shopping list. They believe that because they are enthusiastic about every detail, the customer will be too. But the most interesting conversations come when you really understand each other's problem.

The green light moment comes when the interlocutor responds with “Exactly!” to the way you rephrase their problem. Only then can you talk about your solution. And the demonstration should last no longer than 90 seconds. Here's an example:

If I understand correctly, your marketing team spends almost half of their time documenting manuals, which delays launches by 3-4 weeks and affects your quarterly revenue targets. Is this correct?

If the person says “yes, exactly”, it's time to show the product: brief, concrete, solving that problem. The harsh reality is that most founders show functionality, not solutions. The best product demos, especially when you're at a trade show with a lot of background noise, are 30-90 seconds long and answer a specific question. The demo should be a TikTok video, not an Iker Jimenez monologue.

There are three things that, regardless of the purpose of the conversation, almost always work for a rich exchange: ask rather than tell, do not be afraid of silences and do not extend the conversation if it is not necessary.. It seems obvious, but in practice it is very easy to forget.

In the end, your job as a product manager or founder is not to deliver a brilliant pitch whenever you get the chance. It is to help the other person to think about their problem better, even if in the end they don't choose your solution. That mentality (closer to research than to selling) makes you a partner, not a salesperson.

If you have ever felt that awkwardness, especially when you have to start a conversation with a potential client, you know what I'm talking about. Write to me, I'd love to exchange experiences. Maybe we'll discover together a different way of doing it.

 

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