Thread by @businessbarista

Sales is hard.

It's an absolute grind filled with thousands of NOs.

Here are my biggest early learnings selling @MorningBrew.

Rule 1: Lead with curiosity
Rule 2: Sell audiences
Rule 3: FOMO drives decisions
Rule 4: Appeal to bosses

Time for a Masters in Sales 👇

It's 2018. @austin_rief and I had gone full-time on the Brew, we felt good about the product, and the audience was around 100 subscribers.

Making money felt like the obvious next step if we wanted to build a business.

But we had ZERO idea how to do it.

We never worked in media.
We had never sold ads.
We had no idea how much to charge.

So rather than starting with selling the Brew, we started learning all we could about how to sell the Brew.

I forced myself to get an informal Masters in Advertising in three weeks.

I started by talking to every industry contact I had.

Friends at agencies.
College peers at brands.

I just said to them "Teach me everything about your job."

I closed my mouth, spoke little, and just sponged info.

It was these convos that helped me learn a new language.

Every industry has its own language.

I learned the importance of acronyms like RFP, CPM, and AOR.

I learned what agencies expect from media partners.

I learned how to think about marketing funnels and how long sales cycles are in media.

I LED WITH CURIOSITY.

With the foundation of knowledge, it was time to start selling ads.

I did by selling people & stories, not ads.

Most companies focused their sales decks on stats: audience size, ad units, etc.

We focused our sales deck on the Morning Brew reader and the lifestyle they live.

We talked about our reader in excruciating detail.

Their interests, their accomplishments, and what makes them so valuable.

We even came up with a name for our audience! The Modern Business Leader.

Marketers' eyes lit up as they saw in the MBL what they saw in themselves.

Rule 2: Always, always, always sell the audience and sell their lifestyle.

Don't sell the product and its specs.

Once we hooked advertisers, it was about building up the right amount of FOMO.

We were intentional about creating competitive adrenaline when pitching the Brew.

We'd paint a picture of an audience that has massive life moments (marriage, home purchase, etc) coming up.

And we'd emphasize that this audience will choose their loyalties to brands over the coming years.

It became the advertiser's choice whether they wanted to become a staple for our consumer.

The FOMO of missing out on an entirely new set of customers was too great to bear.

Rule 4: Employees make decisions based on what makes their bosses happy.

Especially with larger companies, we found senior marketers tended to be more risk averse.

They were incentivized to make decisions based on long-standing relationships with media partners.

At the time, we didn't have a big audience and weren't a conservative marketing choice.

As you'd expect, that led us to focus most of our early sales efforts on smaller, more performance-focused brands.

Junior marketers were more incentivized at these co's to take risks.

And that is how we transitioned Morning Brew from hobby to business!

While this story is about a media company, I believe these principles around sales are applicable to many types of companies.

Lead with curiosity.
Sell a lifestyle.
FOMO is powerful.
Appeal to bosses.