You can go top-down.
Knock yourself out.
That meeting with the CTO is hard to come by. It’s also as slow as molasses.
You’ll hold C-suite summits to try and spread the good word. You’ll try luncheons and masterminds and thought leaders too.
Bottoms-up works as well when you’ve got a product that scales. SaaS for example. You can let thousands of people onto the platform early and free, and they march down the hall to the CTO in mass, clamoring for that good-good enterprise edition of Yammer, then Slack. Zoom and then HubSpot.
But even the great SaaS founder David Sacks would tell you that those freemium leads don’t close themselves. You’ll still need a sales function if you want to bring home some ink.
Supply side, demand side, spin. All these sales frameworks and strategies but nothing really hits the mark.
You can pitch the niche. Land & expand. It works. It’s how you cross the chasm. And that is the goal of many ambitious businesses.
“So the rules of thumb in crossing the chasm are simple: Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, good fit with your crown jewels.”
Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm
What if it’s big enough to matter to you, but it’s not the next iPhone? What if it’s so small, so fragmented, all you can hope for is to take down your little corner but not much more? And what if it’s not just a fit with the crown jewels, it’s the crown. It’s what you do and who you are.
I’ll offer an alternative that works in services, consulting, and solopreneurship. Coaching too.
The Rickey Triple.
A walk, and two stolen bases.
Instead of the big hit, they let you on base. You just need to be patient, attentive, and take what they give you.
Instead of power, it’s speed and timing, and guts.
You still need some help to score but you’ve got yourself on the doorstep, third base, without anyone doing much of anything. It’s more passive than all these war analogies.
You see the walk all the time. The free pass analogy crosses over to a LinkedIn or Twitter follower. In the physical world, they see you leading classes in the park.
Taking second base is the newsletter sign-up, smashing that subscribe button on YouTube, a free consultation, a quote.
Third base might be when they listen to you on a podcast or read your back catalog of blog posts. They download some of your tools and share them around town. It’s a larger exchange but not a big purchase. Time and attention are the currency.
You’ve provided specific knowledge, and you’ve advanced through the sales process without anyone really noticing. They let you on base and you progressed down the sales path. You quickly moved from one base to the next without incident and without much resistance.
And now look at you. Ready to score at any opportunity. It won’t take much.
Noah Kagan is a great example of this through his company OkDork.
You might find your way to him through Twitter or YouTube.
So, you head to his blog, or maybe sign up for his newsletter.
See, you let him on first and he quickly stole second. Now he is in scoring position.
If he is making his impact, you start thinking about ways to run a business on the internet and that leads you to his company AppSumo.
But starting a business is hard, right? Maybe. You’ll probably never know, because you are scaredy pants.
Or maybe you’ll take a quick and easy and super cheap TEN DOLLAR course on how to make a $1,000 a month business.
Maybe you’ll even finish it. And if you do. You might need some of those AppSumo tools and might feel good about buying those tools from the company that brought you along the way.
What just happened?
A walk, and two stolen bases.
You let Noah in, he took second, took third, and now if you are still with him, he can score.
In consulting, we want to talk with the users, the builders, and ideally the outsourcers. But what is the best way to find them? For years we went bottom up, and it works, but it is slow as all hell. You talk with thousands of nonusers and nonbuyers.
So, we asked ourselves how we could more directly get to the buyer and the user?
The answer is the Rickey Triple. Getting the free pass from prospects.
Taking a few pitches, being patient, and waiting for them to let us on first. Online training, networking events, free tools, maybe some compelling information on their corner of the internet. Even free consultations if we have the time. From there we look around their operation. We start to understand their business. And we provide some good old-fashioned unsolicited advice. In short, we help them make progress and put ourselves on third base if they have a larger opportunity for us to work on.
The recipe is free, but you’ll pay for the ingredients. We hope you’ll shop with us!
It’s not top down, it’s not bottom up, and it’s not a beachhead either. A walk, a free pass, more like permission marketing than hard nose selling.
It can be tricky to be like Rickey. Making progress to second and third is closer to chaos theory than predictable and repeatable sales. You read and react but are never quite sure what you’re getting into.
Find an open door and walk in, look around, and make the next best move.
For Rickey that was second base, and then third. For you, it might be walking down the hall to marketing, or heading upstairs to see the executives. You choose, use your creativity, your insight, your intelligence, and make it happen.
When you are looking at your sales strategy, make sure it’s a fit for your business. Top down, bottom up, land & expand. They all have their applications. But for something smaller. Something a bit less aggressive. Something with less scale. Consider the Rickey Triple. A walk, and two stolen bases. And consider the various ways you can get yourself in position to score.
