Show Up Sales
One of the most powerful sales hacks that no one ever told me about is what I call "Show Up Sales". "Show Up Sales" is a phenomenon where being present at the right time, with the right offering, can be more powerful than the most polished pitch.
Let me illustrate using the digital advertising industry which I have been associated with for more than a decade.
In advertising, on one side, you have the advertisers. These are big companies, like Ford or BMW, who want to advertise their products - cars in this case. On the other side, you have the publishers. These are companies like news channels, website publishers, or video platforms like YouTube who create content and monetize it by showing ads alongside.
Advertisers buy advertising for their products through ad agencies. A company like Ford, for example, would ask an ad agency to spend a million dollars a quarter to advertise its latest launches. The ad agency will spread this budget over a diverse set of publishers.
Publishers, on the other hand, use ad networks to sell advertising on their behalf. The ad network represents the publishers to collect advertising budgets from different ad agencies and streams it using technology alongside publisher content.
This is where I learned the concept of "Show Up Sales." The ad networks deploy an army of sales executives to sell advertising dollars to ad agencies. But most of the time, this happens with a minimal sales process. Just a sales executive showing up at an ad agency is often enough to secure some advertising budget.
If the ad network is new and unheard of, the ad agency will grant a smaller ad spend and evaluate for a quarter. But the sale itself requires minimal validation as ad agencies can monitor performance directly. The validation is sometimes around whether the ad network can deploy those advertising dollars in a given period. But the specific sale itself is very easy to make.
The reason for this is that the ad agency is already primed to spend the advertising dollars in a given period. Any ad network which shows up is a good candidate to deploy that spend.
"Show Up Sales" happens frequently in the ad industry. But the concept is relevant everywhere. Let me give another example.
A founder friend bootstrapping his way through found his startup listed on Hacker News. Hacker News, for the uninitiated, is a popular community among founders and investors.
He got contacted by an investor on the other side of the world who wanted to invest. Here's the interesting part - the investor didn't speak English, and the founder didn't speak French. The founder tried very hard to pitch to the investor, but he couldn't learn French in a day. The investor still wired the funds through.
The subtext is that the investor had recently raised a significant funding round to deploy through his firm. And he was looking to deploy the capital as soon as possible. The founder's startup fit his interests, and the minimal Hacker News validation was enough to make up his mind. A pitch was coming in his way to deploy the rest of the capital. This was "Show Up Funding." The investor was already primed to invest. The founder just had to show up.
I have always thought of sales as a (hard) process of convincing someone to buy whatever you are selling. But when you are in a "Show Up Sales" setting, you just need to show up and speak as little as possible.
The key is spotting these opportunities. Look around - Who's under pressure to deploy resources or spend allocations? Those are your "Show Up Sales" moments waiting to happen.
What do you think? Where in your industry could you benefit from just showing up?