https://youtu.be/0fKYVl12VTA?si=HzpZus5f2gBo4_G9
Book recommendation: "Founding Sales" - Petre Kazanjy (FREE Online)
Sales is a learnable skill.
You are the only person capable of selling your product. If you can't sell it yourself, you won't be able to hire someone else to do it.
Can't I hire profressionals to speed up the process?
Sales before you find product market fit is very different from sales after product market fit.
Pre-market-fit sales is fundamentally entrepreneurial, it requires vision and credibility with customers and lots of experimentation, and a tight feedback loop with the people building the product. It's a role for founders.
Does that mean if you are a technical founder that you need a business co-founder? You don't. Why?. Becase you have several advantages.
- You are an expert in the problem you are solving and solution you are building.
- You have conviction. You honestly believe in the product.
Expertise and conviction are surprisingly important in sales.
Sales isn't about tricking people... It's about helping people solve their problems.
Finding potential customers. The output of this step is a list of companies that might need your product AND the specific humans in those companies you think might buy it.
To find them, you need a hypothesis to make prospecting easy by clarifying who you should be talking to.
Customer X has problem Y and our product will help them solve it.
Example hypothesis for Optimizely:
Marketers at small and medium tech, media and ecommerce companies want to run A/B tests on their websites, but they can't because off-the-shelf experimentation tools require users to write code. Optimizely will enable them to run A/B tests without writing code.
Get a list of companies and start qualifying them to narrow your target list. You need a list of specific humans that are likely to buy and you need to get their attention.
The goal is to schedule a meeting with a prospect.
The easiest way to get to a meeting is to get the prospect to reach out to you.
No matter what type of sales you do, do everything you can do generate inbound demand.
- Launch early and ofter.
- Create technical content. Videos and blogs that prospects can find while searching for solutions to their problems.
- Build self-serve demos that people can share.
- Find online forums where your customers hang out and answer questions.
If all your customers hang out at conferences, you should be there too. Find a list of attendees and set up lots of meetings in advance.
Once you've identified a specific prospect, try to find a warm introduction.
Sending cold emails is the least effective way to get attention, but can still be effective if you do it right.
- Write each email by hand.
- Make the email short and to the point.
- Make the ask clear.
- Address recipient directly.
- Make it clear why you are reaching them specifically.
Humans have built-in spam filters, and if your email sounds generic, it will be deleted.
Only send emails that you would be excited to read.
Don't waste time chasing bad prospects that want to just talk to you. They give you an illusion that you are making progress. You will get lots of feedback from them thinking they're doing you a favor... Which is useless at best and counter-productive at worst, because you are not talking to someone that needs your product.
- Don't sell enterprise software to startups.
- Don't go bottom-up with a product that is top-down. Ex. Notion can be used by individual teams in a company independently, but a billing software for large hospitals will need an executive approval and heavy integration.
You need to find people who have the problem you are solving AND the budget and decision authority to buy.
DO NOT sell your product on your first call.
You need to do 2 things:
- Qualify the customer i.e. do they have the problem you are solving, and the budget and decision authority to buy.
- Schedule a follow-up product demo.
Many fail by diving straight into a sales pitch.
The biggest mistake is not asking questions.
A big misconception is thinking of your customer as this big monolithic entity, and looking at sales as adversarial where you need the perfect pitch to break down defenses.
The reality is that you are selling to an individual human and understanding their problem and helping them solve it.
Great sales people spend most of the time listening and asking questions.
What made you decide yo make this call?
Tell me about this problem.
How long have you had it?
How bad is it?
Who else does it affect?
How do you quantify the impact?
Why haven't you solved it already?
What's your budget for solving it?
How does your organization buy software?
Who makes the buying decisions?
Who else will need to weigh in the decision?
If you discover that the prospect doesn't have the problem, or they have it but don't care enough to buy, or don't have the budget, or any reason they won't be a customer... You've just saved a bunch of time, and you can focus your energy on someone that will buy.
If the prospect does qualify, you can now show them how the product works.
Most founders think of the demo as a chance to finally show off their product... This is a huge mistake and will lead to a bad demo.
Your job is no to show off your product, but to convince your audience that you can solve their problem.
Think of the demo as a script for a movie, where you start with a recap of who the main character (customer/user) is, and the problem they are trying to solve.
This is a chance to demonstrate how well you listened in the first call. If your audience believes you understand their company and problems, they will take you seriously when you explain how you will solve them.
Resist taking your audience on a feature tour, where you go screen to screen showing what the product can do. Instead, tell a story how the main character solves their problem.
Great demos feel like good stories. They have a flow where each step leads to the next, and every feature has a reason for being there.
Great demos are also personalized for the audience, based on all the info collected in the first call.
Tailor the demo to them. Use their logo, website, customers, names of employees...
The more you can help them visualize how the product will work in ther organization, the better.
Example for Optimizely.
They booked demos with all their competitiors.
Every single one used a dummy website to show how their product ran A/B tests.
Omptimizely spent weeks building a feature that allowed to demo their product right on the customer's website, instead of a dummy one.
Their prospects' eyes lit up.
If you do a good job, the audience should be convinced you will solve their problems.
There isn't a simple formula.
The questions you've asked up to this point should help you.
How much is this problem costing your company?
How many people are responsible for maintaining your in-house solution to this problem?
What's your budget for solving this problem?
How much are you spending on my competitor?
It's ok to wait to share your # until you've asked these questions.
Think of each # converstaion as an experiment to test your price point.
Offer a basic self-serve price for swiping a credit card, and an enterprise plan that requires going through sales, where the price is not published i.e. you can test a different price each time.
The most common mistake is charging too little, or making it free in exchange for feedback.
Founders think they'll scare customers away.
When a customer really likes your products, it's hard to scare them away.
Higher prices can help you figure out if customers actually need your product. They make customers more serious.
The most important # conversations happen without you in the room.
The prospect will need to convince others in the organization that your product is worth the price you are asking.
You can make their job easier by giving them documents explaining how the # works, along with an overview of the product with its benefits if the prospects needs to talk with people unfamiliar with it.
Don't spend too much time on # in the beginnig. Pick a number that makes you a little uncomfortable and pay attention to how they react.
It's ok to be negotiated down. In the first few sales, you optimize for learning, not unit economics.
Closing is not a single conversation. It's a bunch of things that need to happen from the moment they decide to buy, to the moment they actually buy.
Big companies, especially in highly-regulated industries have formal procurement processes that include security, privacy, legal and compliance reviews.
It's less formal for smaller companies, but expect at least a red-linning process with a legal team.
The biggest mistake is getting surprised by thinking it was a done deal, while it may take weeks or months to actually close.
To avoid this you must ask questions about their procurement process.
Do everything you can to move through this stage as fast as possible by trying to preemptively solve steps and keeping documents simple.
Keep timelines and scope out of the legal contract and put them in an order form or some shared document.
Your prospect now becomes your champion and your biggest ally.
You should be in constant communication with them, and when you need someting getting unstuck, you should inform them. They can't solve their problem until the procurement is done, so they are heavily incentivized to help you out.
The single biggest mistake founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job.
Optimizely closed 6-figure deals with customers excited to use their product, and discovered a year later at renewal that the customer never used the product.
This happened because the marketing team who bought the product couldn't convice the developers to install it.
The real reason was, Optimizely didn't do their job.
The customer is not buying a product. It's buying a solution to a problem.
So, it's your job to help them use the product.
Ask what is required to start using the product. Build detailed implementation plans well before the contract is signed. Don't sign a contract without one.
Treat the customer implementaion the same way you would treat a high priority project inside your own organization by project managing it.
Put together a shared roadmap with an owner to every task and hold regular check-ups to hold everyone accountable on both sides.
Your sales funnel only really ends when the customer is using your product habitually.