Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress

I lead marketing for my company. I follow a lot of marketing experts, read both blogs and books, and listen to a lot of podcasts. What’s missing in most of those conversations is the customer-driven framework Bob writes about in this book.

First, seek to understand the progress your customers are trying to make. Then build marketing and sales processes that help them discover progress can be made, and how to do it. This books offers up a great foundation of how to apply the Jobs to be done framework to marketing and sales.

Reading this book and following Bob’s work has led our team to rebuild our marketing and sales approach. Our team members are now more in tune with why our customers purchase our solution, and are not simply working a sales funnel or evaluating MQL and SQL scorecards.

We are now building and delivering content and presentations that help prospects make progress, not just convert. This has led to a much more integrates marketing and sales environment.

Example: Having a conversation about helping prospects within a specific Job make progress from Active Looking to Deciding – vs – How can we convert more MQLs to SQLs (what’s our content calendar, etc).

When framed as progress your content becomes much more impactful, resulting in more sales.

If you want to build sustainable marketing and sales content rather than chase feature and benefit trends, read this book and start helping your customers make progress.

I’ve been in enterprise software sales, as an individual contributor as well as a sales executive, for over 10 years. But I’ve been “selling” my entire life – I just hate calling it sales. To me, sales is a bad word that evokes strong emotions inside of people and society. “People hate being sold to but everyone loves buying.”

When I first read Jobs-To-Be-Done theory years ago in the book, Competing Against Luck, I felt that this approach to building products was also directly applicable to sales. At the end of the day a company is meant to help improves the lives of it’s customers.

And then I met Bob who was working on exactly that – a “sales” book that I believe will change the narrative of what is means to sell (and more importantly how to go about doing it).

I don’t say this lightly: I believe that Demand Side Sales is the next revolution in how we approach sales. The ultimate focus needs to change from improving outdated tactics (“the best opening line when cold calling a prospect”) and move towards helping prospective customers make meaningful progress. Yes, there are a ton of tactics out there that can improve your ability to reach quota but these efforts are incremental and short-lived at best. What Bob has given us is a guide to ensure that the foundation of how we sell is rock solid and built with a purpose in mind that genuinely helps the customers we serve.

“Money follows it doesn’t lead.” If you are in sales (by the way, you are no matter what your role is) then understanding the progress that people are looking to make is far more important than figuring out how to write a good subject line for your next email blast. You must truly care about the people you are trying to help, focus on the progress they need to make and I promise you that the money will flow in faster than ever before in your career (and you will also feel great doing it).

Demand Side Sales is the book that is going to start a new age in what it means to sell, how to go about selling and how CEOs/CROs should be structuring compensation to create organic alignment between customers and employees.

This has already become required reading for my entire sales team at Autobooks. I’ve also engaged our partners that help us sell and have offered to purchase the book for their entire team. If you are reading this review to figure out if this book is worth the purchase, I don’t know if there is a better way I could say it.

I absolutely love “selling” but I’ve always hated being called a sales guy.

Bob, thank you for opening my eyes to what I actually love – helping people my progress with the products/services that my company has created. I have said this to you before but it is worth repeating – you have given be a feeling of liberation in my sales career. I’m really a concierge for those that we aim to serve.

In the end, there is no such thing as “selling.” There is only “helping people buy.” Or, as Bob Moesta would say, “helping people make progress.”

Bob taught me that lesson many years ago, and I consider it maybe the most valuable lesson I’ve learned in business. Valuable in the business sense, in that it earned our company millions of dollars I’m certain it wouldn’t have earned any other way. But even more valuable in a personal sense, in that learning to “sell” Bob’s way allowed me to sell by genuinely helping others. He taught me to stop “persuading” and “convincing” customers, and start understanding what customers were really trying to do in their lives, often even better than they themselves could, and helping them do *that*.

Until I learned that lesson, and how to actually do it day in and day out (easier said than done), I HATED sales. With a passion. At the best of times, I felt awkward about selling; at worst, I felt it was destroying my soul.

But learning the “demand-side” approach was a breakthrough: it’s endlessly motivating to help people, and when you learn, as Bob and Greg teach here, how to ask the right questions (and how to make sense of the answers), you’ll realize that there are nearly endless ways to help people (and therefore, endless opportunity), and they will happily pay you a premium when you really figure out how to do it.

That’s why I’m so excited to see this book published and out in the world — it’s a short, practical guide to selling the “demand-side” way, written so that you can actually start using the method the day you’re done the book.

I consider it one of the 5 top business books in the last 15-20 years. It’s that important. Principles, by Ray Dalio; Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson; High Output Management, by Andy Grove; Primal Leadership, by Daniel Goleman. Those are the ones I keep coming back to.

Now, “Demand-Side Sales 101” by Bob Moesta and Greg Engle goes right up there with those, an instant and timeless classic. I couldn’t possibly recommend it any more strongly. Get it on your bookshelf, put it into practice, and enjoy the breakthroughs that follow.

This book is a paradigm shift for me on effective selling. By moving the emphasis away from shifting products and services (supply side or push) toward helping the customer by understanding their specific underlying needs and guiding them to make the necessary trade offs (demand side or pull) you design a process that adds value and addresses the risk off buyer’s remorse later on.

It takes you through the customer decision process toward meeting their underlying and sometimes unarticulated needs. Very useful framework on selling in a way that shows genuine concern for helping the customer effectively and one I will reread again to internalise and apply. A useful book for all seasoned and aspiring sales and business professionals.

I’m a practitioner of JTBD and a fan of Bob’s job for a long time. This book is a nice condensed toolbox of different techniques you can apply to start with JTBD. It contains a lot of examples that help you to get started and in a format that is very easy to follow.
I like the way it’s framed from the sales standpoint. At the end, if you want to sale something you need to understand the demand-side of it. It will make you more like a helper / concierge than a pusher.

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