First time entrepreneur here. I am creating a product that will solve address a large potential. The more I think about it and read about startup, I am finding that a key to early and often success is Sales.
I am been engineer by choice and engineering manager by profession. I have never done sales. I understand you learn by doing similar to driving. I am a bit talkative but sometime I have hard time not getting bogged down by emotions.
How do I get started? Can you share books, videos, tutorials, prior recorded sales call references?
Where can I learn about metrics to track? Any ideas?
For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.
For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.
I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.
For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).
Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.
Sales can best be distinguished by indirect sales and direct sales.
Direct sales is where you go out and find clients.
Indirect sales is where you go out and find partners to bring you clients.
You don’t buy Coca Cola from Coca Cola. You rarely by HP from HP.
Companies tend to be more successful when they find ways to grow using “channels”.
This is a good summary of finding your path toward channel sales:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297479
This is a good kit to start a channel sales program:
https://chanimaluniversity.com/product/reseller-program-kit-...
Close, but not quite.
Marketing is the brand, the image, points of differentiation, etc. It's the message.
Advertising is the broadcast. It's how the message is communicated. It's the medium.
Marketing + advertising = prospects and leads.
Sales is the last mile. It takes the results of marketing + advertising (i.e., leads and prospects) and guides those to closing.
Contrary to myth, successful sales is about listening, not talking.
Sales is
I've been in pre-sales for about 8 years now. From the vendor and reseller side. Mostly on the technical side (SE) but I also know the process side of the account executive (AE) very well at this point.
Yes, you need to listen. But you'll never sell anything if you can't articulate a destination, lay out the path and showcase to the customer how what you're representing will benefit them more-so than the products you're trying to displace or something new that will bring with it a myriad of gains for said customer. If a customer is always telling me what they need from me then I'm not providing any value. And, honestly, it's very rare to find a customer who's ahead of a good sales team. We have full access to PMs, internal business units and access to far more insight to our bits and pieces than any reseller or customer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying customers can't be experts. But I'm here to know and bring things to the plate that they just can't.
Understanding your customer is often times more valuable than listening to them outright. I've found paths for the customer that has helped them avoid making mistakes, saved them money or improved their operations through paths they hadn't considered or didn't know existed. Good sales teams work hard across the board through strong technical positioning as well as strategic deal creations.
There are sales teams that rinse and repeat for every interaction and then there are sales teams that are looking to help their customers, trying to find where the wins are for the prospect. I've walked away from deals by telling a customer we weren't a fit for them. Sales gets a bad rap, but there are some of us out there that walk into every conversation not with the only intent of closing quota, but trying to make a positive impact.
Many firms that don't advertise--or do very little advertising--and are still able to generate leads, that's why it's normally included in marketing as one of many channels.
Effective marketing people also talk and listen to customers.
:-)
I have done technical sales-like engagements and this is the number one pattern I see from relationships that went well. The customer determined, for whatever reason (rightly so) that I could solve their problems. So they opened up and explained what the problems really are. If you can't get this, you can't help someone.
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Don’t “learn” sales. A lot of reading material and courses could actually negatively effect you by causing you to overthink things. At best, you will come across as calculating and at worst you’ll lose deals due to getting lost in the weeds.
Here’s two things:
Whenever you deal with someone, try to conceptualize yourself as a consultant and not a salesperson. Great sales people are more like matchmakers, people have some kind of problem and you have some kind of solution. People are pretty sensitive to in situations where they could be persuaded. Conversations should have the feelIng like you are trying to convince a friend to watch a really cool movie rather than high pressure, ultra confident wolf of Wall Street closing.
Two, if you really want to learn the actual craft of it then put yourself in more situations where you can talk to a salesperson and put them through their paces. Start taking calls from telemarketers and instead of hanging up tell them you would rather they send you an email. Go to a car dealership and tell them the car you want is too expensive. This is a decent way to get experience.
B2B to be precise. I am positioning my self as a consultant rather than salesperson. building trust and develop close cooperation with potential users/clients. not a easy way for geek like me, but trying is better than do nothing.
I’ve had so many different approaches over the years but I find that being lovable and genuine works best (but you still have to close those deals, it’s not all roses.)
I am arguing that a book won’t cut it and may do more harm than good. Advice from great salespeople must be taken with a grain of salt. Because the core of sales, making deals, is more feeling than logic.
I’ve seen people sell extremely well with zero experience as well as seasoned pros who are inherently terrible at the job. Salespeople overthink the strategy and lose sight of what really makes money: making that motherfucker say yes. If you want to do that then you need to really embrace your role properly and forget about being a shark or a shooter or whatever. You are helping someone or some organization either make more money, save money, or do their job easier than before. Everything else is bullshit strategy for guys who don’t actually believe in what they are selling.
Edit: that reply could be misconstrued as aggressive but I’m set in my ways, which I know work best.
If OP doesn’t want to mentor under a sales manager in a business and learn the job that way, then as a practical suggestion:
Skip the self help books. Zig Ziggler and how to make friends and influence people, etc etc. Skip all that.
Get a College textbook on being an Entrepreneur. Something that will help you with the nuts and bolts backend stuff.
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Most of the books recommended in this thread assume that you're working for a established firm, with product / market fit, etc.
Clearly that's not the case for a start-up.
Read up on what Pete Kanzanjy publishes https://www.foundingsales.com/ - it covers the the "founder-led sales" phase.
How I did it:
- you interview as many prospects and customers as possible
- you understand what keeps them up at night, what specific pain points they have, the language they use to describe their situation
- you shape your messaging to solve those specific pain points, using their own language
- wrap your messaging into a story - the worst you can do is "problem / solution". people don't buy that way. people buy change, and you use the story to communicate that change.
I wrote a totally too long Medium post on the whole topic:
https://medium.com/@larskamp/the-5-cs-an-operating-framework...
as somebody else pointed out on this thread - be read to deal with objection! You'll likely collect 9 "No's" for each "yes!"
> you interview as many prospects and customers as possible
Did you do that before or after completing your product / service?
this is 4 years ago, the market we were going after were the cloud warehouses like Redshift, BigQuery and Snowflake.
In the beginning, we just had an idea for a specific product / service. but we knew that the customer would be the lonely data engineer in charge of building the analytics stack.
I started with cold outreach via my network and linkedin. I would use pretty broad language around data warehouse usage, to cast a wide net with terms like "usage, performance, metadata, etc.", and cover all potential use cases. Engineers are always short on time, so you need to be affirmative, authoritative and present a clear ask that shows what you want and how the engineer will get value out of spending 30 min with you.
Of course I pulled the founder card, and that does help. I made it clear that we don't have a product, but working on building one. Turns out that most people are helpful, and want you to win!
The first signal that you're onto something is when they reply to your message, and are intrigued.
we built our first product around that feedback. Companies like Postmates, WeWork and Udemy bought version 0.5!
I made a point out of keeping in touch with every customer, and do a quarterly check-in. What's changed? What are your plans? For this coming week, month, quarter and year. Where do you want to be in 2 years? What problems are you trying to solve for your company? What are the expectations for you and your team? What tools are you using to solve that problem? What tools have you looked at and decided to not use them, and why? Etc., etc.
I rolled around in THEIR situation, trying to walk in their shoes. We'd talk for sometimes 90 minutes, often in person here in SF, over lunch. We'd often not cover our product until the final 5 minutes.
Of course, that's a huge chunk of time out of your calendar. Huge opportunity cost, in particular for a founder.
So here's actually something I'd do different. We hired our first sales reps after our first 10 customers. That was a mistake. Our product was very technical, it's not like selling email software. So you need a technical rep. Our first rep was a class act, but let me tell you, it was a goat rodeo for him.
Rather, I should have hired a customer success person, and have them do the quarterly check-ins. That way I could have kept selling. Then let the customer success rep also write (technical) blog post, customer stories / case studies, and documentation. You're building out (credible) marketing materials that build the top of your funnel.
It sounds like everyone ‘improves’ their offering based on feedback - but some folks seem to ‘just know’ what they are going through, and that somehow resonates with others.
I’ve always wondered if there’s a difference between approaches or if it’s all just window dressing.
What browser are you using? Sounds like maybe a Memberspace issue with a config you have?
Check to see which of these chapters you can access: https://www.foundingsales.com/table-of-contents
My biggest advice is get a coach/mentor/consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional sales people learn in practice (eg from a sales manager). This will accelerate you learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise it’s easy to flounder on the wrong ones.
RE metrics- closed business is the only one that matters! Do whatever gets you that as fast as possible.
I wasted a year when I first founded Amplitude trying to brute force it myself and closed a grand total of two contracts for $36k. After that I ended up working with a guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year. He cost me $5k a month and increased our market cap by $20M, it was well worth the investment. I’m happy to make an intro if you’d like.
Good luck on the journey ahead and I’m excited for you!
I am very curious as a bootstrapped founder myself. Would you be willing to tell us more on some of the high level things Mitch Morando helped with ? What bottlenecks did he solve that you didn't/couldn't know ?
We went from literally $0k ARR to high 6-figure ARR in 8 months before getting acquired. He taught me everything I know about SaaS sales.
Mitch was recommended to me originally by Peter, CEO/Co-founder at Segment.
I just did a podcast on it if you’re curious: https://theboostvcpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ep98-the-e...
The best mental picture of a salesman is as a consultant. You're there to solve their problem, hopefully using your product. But if your product isn't their best solution send them to your competition. You do it by asking them questions, then stopping to listen to their answer which prompts more questions.
If they don't have the problem, apologize for wasting their time and leave. I remember one of Gary Vaynerchuk's DailyVee videos where he flew to Chicago for a single hour long meeting. In less than ten minutes he realized he wasn't going to get the sale, said goodbye and headed back to the airport.
The other thing to remember is to always be asking for the order. I can't tell you how many times ten minutes after getting there I threw away the rest of my questions and wrote up an order. It is entirely possible to talk yourself out of a sure sale, when I was starting I did it multiple times.
I know a lot of introverts think they can't do sales but sometimes they make the best sales guys. That's because they have less of a problem talking all the time. Ross Perot was definitely more of an introvert yet he was once IBM's top salesperson in the country. He once made his entire yearly quota in a week!
Your situation is why I wrote Founding Sales: https://www.foundingsales.com/
The full text is available online on that Squarespace site.
I wrote it after selling my last company - it chronicles what I learned going from a PMM / PM at VMware to a business generalist founder, who then had to learn how to sell, and then manage sales people.
Also, this deck will be useful to you: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pcSy-zV-776abGmZ8WJ7...
Hope that helps!
Here some resources I found useful to do first B2B sales and get a general understanding of the process.
1. Peter Levine course of sales for tech entrepreneurs https://a16z.com/2018/09/02/sales-startups-technical-founder...
2. Steve Blank's 4 steps to the epiphany https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...
3. Close.io SaaS Sales Book https://close.com/resources/saas-sales-book/
4. The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million by Mark Roberge https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1119047072
Also I advice you to fasten you educational feedback loop as mush as you can. The last boo can help you with metrics as well.
or the better one:
study -> try selling -> success -> study even more
My claim is you don't have to do, say, MBA to study sales.
It doesn't matter how good of a sales person you are if you are not getting any leads. Conversely, you can be a bad sales person, even with a bad product, but with enough leads, eventually they will buy - you can see this with crappy restaurants at airports for example.
Successful startups are very aware of this and they setup processes to generate enough leads so their sales people can close them, to generate their target revenue. Also, the sales person's responsibility is to close the people that "come through the door", but it shouldn't be their responsibility to bring those people in.