Sales Safari in a Nutshell

Sales Safari is the process of learning what naturally attracts and motivates people 'out in the wild.' It uncovers what pains they are going through and builds context for how the community individually and collectively deals with that pain.

The Sales Safari technique includes three ingredients for you to start speaking your audiences language: Pain, Jargon, Recommendations.

Sales Safari is not an optimized workflow because it's more about how your brain processes the data you collect than collecting the most amount of data out there. You want to feel the pain of your audience so you can truly know where they are coming from.

Feeling your audiences pain sets you up for success when you develop solutions for their pain

Recommended Resource

Strategy of Preminence

Everything in business is marketing

You need to understand your market. You need to read their mind

Marketing is used to:

to attract people to persuade people to serve people

Rules for Picking an Audience:

Your audience is your peers, people who wish they were your peers (newbs), and people that would hire you and your peers (clients).

  1. They need to be online.
  2. Must buy on value.
  3. You must already belong to your audience.

Ebomb

Sales Safari is the raw material that will inform you where to go next, not necessarily build a product. The recommendation is to start stacking the bricks (Ebombs) before trying to build a business.

Recommended Resource

How to create infinite Ebombs - a free 30x500 Academy Lesson

Definitions

  • Sales Safari - The term is used because you want to go to where people are acting naturally, not a zoo where interaction is forced (already a customer, asking 'what's your problem')
  • Watering hole - Places that your audience naturally congregates in your community to talk amongst themselves. The zoo version is doing cold-calling and outbound marketing.
  • Pain - Pain is composed of the facts; outcome vs. situation. The key is to identify the actions and behaviors that trigger the feelings around it.
  • Jargon - This is the Insider lingo. This is important when creating e-bombs. Look for specialty words, terms of art from the community.
  • Recommendations - This is advice that's given in the community. References are resources “Breadcrumbs”
  • Ebomb - One output for Sales Safari. An Ebomb addresses the pain of someone in your audience by showing you understand where they are coming from and offering solutions that work. The "I get it" version of marketing.

Sales Safari Format

This is the format that you will use when doing Sales Safari:

A Sales Safari Session

Url


Date


Pain
The posters' pains (current, past, implied)


Jargon
Terms of art, technical lingo, community phrases


Recommendations
Advice what to buy, read, share, try... or NOT to

Sales Safari Exercise - Example Output

👟 Future for a Frontend dev

Url
Is there a future for a front end dev who doesn't know how to use React/Vue/Angular?


Date
June 20th, 2020


Pain
I can’t wrap my head around React, Angular, and Vue
Not sticking.
I lack the layers of understanding of JS (and node, TypeScript, CLI, npm, yarn, Babel, ES6, etc).
“I don’t have any interest in this kind of depth of programming.”
Frameworks - have to much to learn
The problem here is no motivation.
High levels of complexity.
Web development had gotten complicated the last few years


Jargon
Web components
Frameworks
Frontend
No-low code
UX/UI


Recommendations
Focus on performant and accessibility
Learn about Web Components and make UI components
Focus on the fundamentals: HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Learn low-no code development
Move to backend
Move to UX/UI

You'll NEVER STOP Sales Safaring, but you will add new skills and practices to your repertoire that come straight from your Safari notes.

Cheat Sheets

Painful Emotions

  • Anger
  • Annoyance
  • Anxiety
  • Avoidance
  • Boredom
  • Contempt
  • Concern
  • Delay
  • Despair
  • Disappointment
  • Disgust
  • Doubt
  • Embarrassment
  • Envy
  • Failure
  • Fear
  • Frustration
  • Guilt
  • Helplessness
  • Hurt
  • Irritation
  • Powerlessness
  • Sadness
  • Shame
  • Shock
  • Stress
  • Tension
  • Uncertainty
  • Wastefulness
  • Worry

Hidden Pains

Start taking note of the more subtle pain while you're on safari! You'll be able to use these notes to write even better ebombs, and soon, to write effective pitches...

  • Take a close look at the Original Poster’s (OP’s) behavior. Is this their first time posting? Do they come back and reply in comments? What can you tell from how they’re acting?
  • Note and quote comments that seem to stem from a painful emotion (use Painful Emotions CheatSheet), OR a painful action/reaction/lackofaction/result/lack of result. When you notice a pattern, add that pattern to your notes too!
  • And don’t forget the replies! Are they familiar with the problem/sure of themselves? If so, what does that tell you? If not, what does that tell you?

Types of Watering Holes

  • forums

  • mailing lists

  • meetup groups

  • Google groups

  • in-person communities & their online accessories

  • industry magazines

  • industry news sites

  • industry link blogs or aggregators

  • blogs, blog comments

  • LinkedIn groups

  • Facebook groups

  • industry Twitter accounts

  • "famous" members on Twitter

  • Twitter hashtags

  • Instagram communities

  • support forums for products the audience uses

  • Github or other collaboration tools

  • product reviews (Amazon...)

Watering Hole Search Terms

Need to find watering holes? Combine these terms with your audience name and choice jargon. Try plugging different combinations into google & see what new source you find!

  • forum
  • mailing list
  • community
  • group
  • Twitter
  • list
  • Facebook
  • share
  • sharing
  • chat
  • IRC
  • blog
  • best
  • resources
  • tutorials
  • help
  • FAQs
  • reviews
  • questions
  • wiki
  • meet-up, meetup
  • user group
  • advice
  • awards
  • competition
  • problems
  • association
  • customers
  • client
  • sales
  • tools
  • system / systems

Jargon Hunting

Collect all of the jargon you can find while you're on safari!

Did you remember to:

  • Collect Jargon that you recognize as audience insider terms?
  • Collect words that you're not totally sure about?
  • When you see a term that you don't recognize, take a second to look it up (Google is SO much faster than the dictionary - no excuses!)
  • When you DO see a term that you recognize, make sure you take a moment to think about what it means to that person, in context.

yes, even hidden code blocks!

print("hello world!")

Recommendations

There are lots of different kinds of recommendations!

Make sure you don't forget any of them when you're on safari:

  • Read this...

  • Look at this...

  • Use this...

  • Try this...

  • Do this...

  • Think about it this way...

  • No, you're wrong...

  • You're right...

  • Buy this...

  • DON'T use/try/do/think/buy/etc this...

  • When I x or did x/tried x...

  • When I bought...

  • That is too...

  • That is not enough...

  • Experts say / consensus is...

  • Newbies / experts / outsiders often... (good or bad)

Contributors
Lauro Silva, Zac Jones