whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com

Stanford Invite [from Entity, REDACTED]: “Larry Chiang, come chat about ‘Sales Skills'”

by Larry Chiang on December 4, 2015

By Larry Chiang

This is a text message I got to 650-283-8008. Its an invite to speak thats a sequel to “How to Get 3 Legendary Internships in a Row”.

Hey Larry — would love to bring you to chat with the ________~__________~_______ about sales.

We’re a group of student entrepreneurs working on projects from alternative food startups to enterprise HR tools. Fellows include YC grads, Thiel Fellowship finalists, LSVP and Mayfield Fellows.

Hit me up if you’re interested.

I removed the entity’s name that invited me and will later post more exact notes after the keynote. Here is the pre-reading DRAFT of the Sales Skills My Mentor Mark McCormack taught me in Chapter 6 #Ch6. Of course, I am open to questions about my keynote before the keynote

Larry Chiang, executive keynote Larry Chiang, executive keynote

LARRY CHIANG: Thank you for the A2S (ask 2 speak).

Selling as an engineer helped Elon Musk. He sold things to self fund the voracious idea of landing a rocket vertically. Two things he sold included business directories. And stored value cards. (zip2 and PayPal, respectively.

Mr Musk is not the only engineer forced to sell Pages de la Yellow. The Wright brothers sold bikes before co-founding a major called aerospace engineering. The address was #1127WestThirdStreet. It’s important because I see selling as important. Einstein too. He came up with #RuleOf72 to help him fund the Theory of Relativity…

Let us break sales down into theorems. Remember Geometry your freshman year!? Sales has a bunch of proofs. Sales has a slew of protocols. Sales has a bunch of stuff that’s counterintuitive.

Proofs.

Every sale that happens is pattern-istically similar to a sale someone else has sold. Let me repeat what I said. Every future sale you make will seem CRAZY. That’s why the faster you realize doing sales are like proofs…, the faster you will sell something like how someone before you sold something. Doing sales is patternistic where you deal with objections

I just broke a cardinal rule of public speaking: Never use something more complicated to explain something seemingly strait forward. But, I chose to break this public speaking rule because I see sales as more complex than DiffEq (differential equations). This transitions nicely to a movie example and “p-r-o-t-o-c-o-l-s”.

Remember the Matt Damon character in Good Will hunting. He could do an MIT chalkboard math proof on the chalkboard right below the math proof. Elegant. Concise. Sales is like that MIT proof. Most people give up. At best, they complete the proof but it takes pages and pages, all sloppily slopped. What’s worst…, seeing The Janitor do the proof demoralizes us like seeing Stanley Tang walk into CS183b Lec8 with a $25,000,000 Roelof Botha termsheet.

Stanley, are you taking CS 183b or teaching #CS183b. Setting aside the genius “proof” of Doordash’s M.V.P…. {Movie example END} Let us tweak the sales mentorship settings from PROOFS to P-R-O-T-O-C-O-L-S.

P-r-o-t-o-c-o-l-s.

If you’re taking notes. Minimally. Viably. Elon Musk, Wright Brothers, Einstein. Larry.
If your notes are empty, jot down: Elon, #WrightBros, #RuleOf72
100% of your notes should be from this point onward. Via protocols, I’m boiling down my 20k expert hours. {think of these P-r-o-t-o-c-o-l-s like stackOverflow :-}

Protocol: Pop Up Internship #1 – #7.
Each internship is 7 hours from beginning to end. No internship has any risk of failure. Every internship is engineered to help build confidence via practice selling as an engineer. Each internship, you work for yourself.

Google em or text me and I’ll send you the links. There are 30+ links because Pop Up Internship #1 had a sequel called #puInternship1u and 13 others. Yup, you lead gen UBER during #puInternship1u

Voodoo.

New protocol. “internal escrow”. There are 150 tweets I’ve tagged #InternalEscrow. This protocol is a signature business recipe my mentor gave me. It works like this. Say it to a prospect like this:

“Regular escrow is where the money you pay us would be held by a third party. #InternalEscrow is where you hold it in a bank account that your legal entity controls.”

The sales prospect says, “How does it transfer. Do we do a contract?”

You say: ‘no contract. We do a #OneWayLetterOfIntent’

Prospect says: How does that work??

You then rifle off my YouTube vid, “#OneWayLetterOfIntent”. It’s a 35 milestoned, road map. Once you’re happy with 17 of 35 milestones, client released half the money from #InternalEscrow.

Let me repeat this so you get it word for word: #OneWayLetterOfIntent is 35 milestones in an email that serves as a road map. Once CLIENT is happy with 17 of 35, *client* releases half the money from #InternalEscrow. You can even let the client tell you what 35 milestones to do.

Sales is seemingly strait forward but it’s so, so complex. A lot of sales is massively counterintuitive.

Do you guys want more protocols or do you want to do Q and A. OR behind door #3’s “The Counterintuitive”…

{no response}

Let’s combine protocol and counterintuitive
/1/ Set aside your need to sell something.

You must plainly state this.
/2/ Voicemail is still in use.

How to close a deal via voicemail. That’s an article on GigaOm.

/3/ Real world events help you sell

Pop Up Internship 2 was doing an 11 minute party. Plot spoiler, it’s an AfterParty

/4/ Slideshare decks help you sell and help you speak at industry conferences. Pinnacle=
How
To
Do
What
(Your startup)
Does
Without
Having
To
Hire
Duck9.

Offer up your secret sauce for free. If you’re a founder under 30, this will make zero sense to you: Offer up your method for free. Execution is all that matters. Offer up the ideas “How to do what Duck9 does without having to hire Duck9″, for free.

Insight: Old people don’t trust us when we sell to them. Remember, the #WrightBros had to do a sale via escrow after their airplane worked. P128 David McVullough’s “The Wright Brothers”.

Insight: Read Paul Graham’s post: Do things that don’t scale
http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.htm
[Sales is so painful to advocate that industry titans tip toe around it]


I am saying that your classmates are thin skinned. People that go to great schools tend to be thin skinned. Get tough. Allow people to laugh at you. For example, this student athlete could not have escaped Halloween without getting made fun of…

Richard Sherman (photo courtesy of Richard Sherman's friend REDACTED) Richard Sherman (photo courtesy of Richard Sherman’s friend REDACTED)


Lisa Falzone swam here on the Farm.
http://www.duck9.com/blog/stanford-entrepreneurship/lisa-falzone-student-athlete-founder/


Zip2 was a business directory (aka a b2b Yellow Pages)
PayPal was debit cards out of Omaha which at first had not debit cards. Read Reid Hoffman’s #cs183c app. He saw a loophole in the FDIC ‘terms of service’.


Cameron, co-founder of StartX, hurt his hip.
If you have read this far I am guessing that you have taken great and real paper notes. Enjoy being rich and on the right side of the bell curve. KEEP GOING.


This is how I got to be EIR at MIT. By helping MIT students dabble in sales.


https://t.co/s2ZhXIWxSC

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: