Why That Instagram Sales Hack Would Get You Fired

Good Morning. Happy National Unicorn Day. In tech, that means companies valued over $1 billion that are still private. If you're hunting for a new sales role, unicorns are usually a good bet. They have product market fit, they're scaling, and the comp plans usually don't suck. Here’s some unicorns worth looking at. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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You've seen those videos I’m talking about.

A car salesman on Instagram walks you through his "closing technique" where he creates fake urgency, refuses to let the buyer leave, and pressures them into signing before they can think about it.

And people think that’s the right way to sell.

Try that on a $500K enterprise deal and see what happens. You'd get laughed out of the room, blacklisted from the account, and an email from HR.

The problem with sales advice on the internet is that most of it requires context that’s usually missing.

Here’s our no BS guide to learning from internet sales advice.

Neil Rackham spent 12 years and $30M studying 35,000 sales calls.

His biggest finding from the research (which eventually became SPIN Selling) was that traditional closing techniques actually work in small, transactional sales. But those same techniques hurt your close rate when the deal gets bigger and more complex.

The data backs this up. HockeyStack analyzed 150 B2B SaaS companies and found that deals over $100K in annual contract value require roughly 417 touchpoints and nearly 5,500 impressions to close.

That's almost double the average that’s required for smaller deals.

The tactics that work when someone is buying a $50 product on a whim are the opposite of what works when a buying committee is spending six months evaluating a $500K platform.

There's another version of this I see all the time.

The sales rep who was employee number 15 at a rocketship startup rode the wave as the company went from $2M to $200M in ARR, and now posts on LinkedIn about "how I built a sales engine."

I’m not saying they weren’t there or didn’t do great work. But a lot of times, the product was so good, and the market timing was so perfect that almost anyone in that seat would have looked like a genius. The product sold itself, and the rep was a beneficiary.

That doesn't mean they're bad at sales. But it does mean the stuff that worked for them in that environment might not translate to yours. Especially when you're selling a product that nobody's heard of into a market that doesn't know it has a problem yet.

Context matters a lot.

You can learn from founders about how to think about value and positioning.

You can learn from marketing about how buyers research before they ever talk to you.

You can learn from reps in completely different industries about objection handling or outreach methods.

But the key is taking all of it with a grain of salt.

Understand that the advice is coming from a different context with different deal sizes, sales cycles, and buyer expectations.

If you want advice that actually applies to your situation, look at the best rep on your team. They sell your product, to your buyers, at your price point, with the same tools you have.

Alex Hormozi talks about a framework that boils down to something simple: find the person who's already winning, copy exactly what they do, and then double the output.

Shadow their calls. Read their emails. Study how they run discovery. Then do all of that, but more.

It sounds too simple. But if someone is closing 40% of their deals using a specific approach, and you adopt that same approach with twice the volume, the math is hard to argue with.

The best sales advice is usually comes from the other side of your sales floor.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.