Founder led sales

For the last 10 years I’ve been advising founders on how to sell. How to scale.

It’s my favorite type of person to consult. There’s no higher stakes than a founder who is burning through capital and has questions on how they keep the lights on.

There’s also nothing more personal. Think about it. If you can help a founder succeed early on, the people they can hire, the economy they can create.

Founders being successful is a very good thing.

Disclaimers for the readers. If you’re a founder, sales is hard. You have an advantage though. You have a vision for your product that no one else has, You have a passion no one else has.

If you can’t sell your product, your vision, your dream, and your problem statement., Then how can you expect a salesperson to.

If you’re a salesperson, there’s a lot to learn here. Specifically, how to sell like a founder. What does that mean?

Selling a vision. An idea. A way to think, work, act differently. Even if you aren’t a founder, if you take something away from this article, you might be a better salesperson by the end of it.

1/ Disqualification > qualification. Momentum is the strongest force multiplier on your business. At the end of every first call. After you’ve talked through the problem you’re solving, why it’s important, and how you are solving it — you need to pressure test interesting. You need to understand where it would fit in the priority level inside the org.

What’s this sound like?

- “Is this something interesting?”

- “How interesting?”

- “Is this something worth prioritizing?”

- “How impactful would this be on the business?”

Focus all your efforts on those that are in the upper right hand quadrant of high impact, high priority. 

You need to capture momentum. Capture evangelists. These customers will bring you into their network as a trusted advisor and be the foundation of your company.

Plot twist. If you find yourself pitching. Having first calls. And leave every first call with someone along the lines of “this is cool.” You are tackling low impact, low priority items and might be missing product market fit.

Product market fit = thriving fans.

It’s either a product market fit problem or a positioning problem.

Either way, you have a problem.

2/ The best sales advice you’ll hear. Always close every call with a next scheduled interaction. If you don’t have a next scheduled interaction, you don’t have a prospect. You are in the chasing mindset. “Following up”. 

There’s three things that happen after every call.

1. You’re closing the deal won.

2. You’re closing the deal lost.

3. You’re closing the next step.

Pick one.

3/ Adopt a prescriptive sales process. Humans struggle when to ask for money, ask for introductions, ask for decision makers, ask for next steps etc. You need to be prescriptive in how prospective customers can buy your product. My filtering mechanism is to front load all objections. Explain what the process looks like, where it goes wrong, and what needs to be committed on their end.

At the very least you aren’t wasting time with “poor buy cycle” prospects. At the best you are closing deals.

Create a document that outlines step by step how a customer should buy to maximize implementation and “days till success”.

This is important. Customers don’t buy a drill, they buy the hole. Better yet, they buy the hole, that can hold up a picture frame.

You want to paint a very clear vision on how they get the end objective they have.

You need to frame it as a “best practice”.

Step 1 – Qualification

Step 2 – Problem Specific Demo

Step 3 – Free Trial

Step 4 – If trial success, move to pilot program.

Step 5 – Etc.

This needs to be customer to your customers success cycle. 

4/ FOMO is real. So is the limited bandwidth your team has for on-boarding. Best suggestion is to release cohorts of clients that you AB test different methods for onboarding.

Look at ACV, onboarding success, time till ROI etc.

“We’re onboarding 10 companies in our pilot program. 7/10 spots have been filled. We expect the last to be filled in the next 3 weeks. You’d be a perfect fit for the program/product/etc based on our discussions. We’d love to invite you to join this cohort. Please let us know your interest level and we can move forward accordingly.”

You can also go for no here.

“We’re onboarding 10 companies into our pilot program. 7/10 spots have been filled. We expect the last spots to be filled in the next few weeks. Based on our conversations, my assumption is you aren’t interested in the initial onboarding? 

The key is to not over index on this.

Don’t be manipulative.

They can see right through it. And it’s.. Just cringe.

5/ Active customers > perfect pricing model.

This is similar to entrepreneurs wasting time over the perfect name, website, and font.

Don’t optimize for pricing models. Optimize for paying customers.

Easy mental model here.

Pick a problem. 

Say it costs them $100k a year. Would they pay $50k to solve it? 2x return. What about $20k? 5x return. Better yet, how about $10k? 10x return.

Pricing models are that easy.

 There are very few people on this planet that wouldn’t pay $100 to get back $1,000.

As time goes on you’ll fine tune this model. 

Rule of thumb.

2 to 1 pay offs are aggressive.

10 to 1 pay offs are amazing 

Anything else is fair game.

 6/ Build relationships. This seems so basic. So simple. Meet people in person. Do deals in text messages. Send people WhatsApp. 

Building 1:1 relationships is the lowest hanging fruit you can have.

They will become friends. Future co-workers. Employees.

The most cliché sentence I’ll ever say in this newsletter. “Your network is your net worth.”

Talk about deals over dinner.

Give demos live over buffalo wings.

Create a buying experience that is [First name] to [First name] not [company] to [company]

7/ Concentric circles. Lean on your network. And your networks, network. And your networks, networks, network.

This is a real life inception.

The best founders at sales I’ve seen have been creative in getting first meetings.

And getting first meetings is your biggest bottleneck to successfully launching your company.

Demand -> Conversion -> Implementation.

This will solve demand. And improve conversion.

Until next week,

Chris