Turn 'we already use a competitor' into a discovery call

I typically beat myself up after sales calls.

Not because I didn't close. Because I didn't feel like I learned enough.

That felt like the real failure.

Early on at Perch, I had a mental model that was backwards. I was measuring every call by whether it moved a deal forward. In enterprise sales, that's a slow and noisy signal. Deals take months. There are a hundred reasons a prospect doesn't buy that have nothing to do with your product. You can go an entire quarter without knowing if you're on the right track.

The faster way to learn is to ask the right questions.

Here's the shift that changed how I sold: early sales calls are market research first, sales second.

The goal isn't the opportunity in front of you. It's the story you're building over the next year. Every call is a chance to sharpen your pitch, your product, your outreach, your positioning. A call where you close nothing but uncover a real constraint is more valuable than a closed deal that teaches you nothing. This requires patience.

The questions that unlocked the most for us were uncomfortable ones.

What would you change about what you're using today? Where is it actually providing value? What do you wish was different?

For instance, coaches would bring up a competitor on calls. My instinct early on was to pivot to our differentiators and start selling. The better move was to get curious. We asked what they'd change. The same complaints kept surfacing. That became the backbone of our pitch. Not because we invented that insight, but because the market handed it to us.

We applied the same mentality to email. When prospects responded to our outreach saying they already used a competitor, we didn't immediately jump to differentiating our product or pushing for a call. We got curious instead. We'd tell them we were new to the space, that we genuinely valued their perspective as someone already using a solution, and that we weren't trying to change their mind. We just wanted to understand. Most people are generous when you ask that way.

If you're in the early innings of founder-led sales, measure your calls differently. Did you learn something about how your customer thinks? Did you uncover a complaint about the status quo? Did you find out what they actually care about versus what they say they care about?

That's the work. The close comes later.