Why We Made Perch Harder to Buy

We added friction to our sales process. On purpose.

Most sales advice says to remove every obstacle. Make it easy to say yes. Get the demo on the calendar as fast as you can.

We did the opposite.

At Perch, the first person to reach out was often an assistant strength coach. Interested, but not the person who controlled the budget.

So we had a rule. No demo without a decision maker on the call. Which often meant no demo on the discovery call. Discovery came first, and the demo came later.

On the surface, that looks like it turns one call into two. And sometimes a prospect would go quiet after discovery. That's always a risk. But if someone ghosted after a single conversation, they probably weren't going to be a serious buyer anyway.

Without a relationship with a decision maker, you are selling through an internal champion. That's a bet. Sometimes it works out. But our team was trained to sell Perch every day. They were the most equipped to showcase the product, with the champion's support behind them.

During discovery, we could ask who else needed to be involved, then ask our champion to pull those people into the demo. 90% of the time, we'd get the budget holder on a call, build a relationship with them, and handle objections directly.

Another area of intentional friction. The eval agreement. We asked teams to sign an agreement before they could evaluate our product in their weight room. We never just sent it over for signature. We walked through it together, set expectations, and set goals with the customer before anyone signed.

It looked like a waste of time. It was also a filter.

A buyer who couldn't be bothered to get on a call about the agreement probably wasn't going to meet with us regularly, give useful feedback, consistently use the product, or go to bat for it when budget was tight. Sending out evaluation devices costs the company real money and time.

The real constraint was never lead volume. It was who was in the room and whether they meant it.

This won't work everywhere. We were asking buyers to spend more than they were used to on similar technology, so qualifying intent mattered. For a low-cost, familiar purchase, I'd probably remove the friction.

Where in your process is a little friction doing the qualifying for you?