Building a two-sided marketplace is one of the toughest jobs out there. Ian Markowitz and the rest of the sales team at The Grommet has managed to pull it off by building deep relationships with both the buyer and seller sides of the aisle. On this episode, we talk about compensating sales people based on long-term customer success, and how the discovery team at The Grommet reliably finds cool and unique products to bring to the market.

John-Henry Forster and Erin May join us from userinterviews.com to talk about the role of customer interviews in designing a great sales process. John-Henry reveals his top online pillow company as we discuss how sales can trust product, product can trust sales, and how maybe everyone can just agree to hate marketing instead.

Over his career, Nic Warren has sold software, services, investments, and... chocolate. He joins us to explain how the real value of "networking" isn't about collecting business cards; it's about building trust, and getting to know your customer on a personal, human level. We discuss whether you can succeed in a sales culture that doesn't correspond to your personal values and priorities, and why the most successful sales people truly believe in the product they're selling.

Adam Honig from Spiro joins us to talk about AI, CRM, and Scarlett Johansson. We discuss how sales organizations are adapting to the emerging trend of using artificial intelligence to support the sales process, how Spiro is trying to replace the classic sales CRM with a more proactive, intelligent solution, and why AI in sales probably won't lead to global nuclear annihilation.

Ryan Fennerty from General Assembly joins us to talk about selling to the enterprise when your own offerings are evolving quickly. We discuss how can the sales team can keep up, how they can evolve their sales process itself by learning and iterating from firsthand customer experience, and how they can speak the language of product without needing to learn what "kerning" is.

In the design world, when we don’t understand something, we talk to people, we observe their behaviors, and we create prototypes to test their reactions. What if we could bring the same approach to designing a sales process? What if we could use design thinking to discover the ways customers want to buy — and build our sales processes around them?

In this show, we’ll learn from leaders who are at the forefront of this new way of thinking, and see what ideas we can steal from the worlds of technology, user experience, and product management. Ideas like research, testing, prototyping, iteration, and data-driven optimization.

Welcome to Design the Sale.