I was talking to a CRO this week and we were talking about why it takes so long to learn about

sales.

And one of the things that we came up with was that people go through these stages.

I think they're kind of four major stages.

And I'll cover three of them today.

The first is that we focus on the product. We learn

product knowledge, features functions, question and answer.

And this is kind of what I call typically,

you know, the service clerk level.

There's nothing really wrong with it,

and if you have strong inbound, it usually is pretty good, or you don't have much of a competitor, many alternatives.

This works great, or if the person who's interested doesn't care

about looking at the market, they just want a product to fix what they need at that moment. And this person feels good when it works. They play fetch. You need a quote, here's one. You need another. Here's another one. And usually we stay about six months to a year at this stage. And then we move on to the competitive rep. This is the person who got frustrated at the first level because they lost more deals than they would have liked to.

They invested too much time and got little to nothing in return.

So they had to compete. So here they really start understanding the competitive landscape, product versus product, company

versus company, price versus price. And this rep typically does pretty good because there's a lot of in-market demand

and they're able to get some of the marginal deals by beating the competition.

I bet I'm speculating that most of you are probably at this stage,

or know at least what I'm talking about.

The third stage is that you get into more of how

companies buy. You're understanding that there's more than one person

involved. You're understanding that even though they say

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