I wrote a bit about scrappy early sales for founders: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales … Some thoughts on this:
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The engineering community massively culturally devalues sales skills, and we largely lack role models for folks doing it in a positive way.
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This results in founders attempting to either Field of Dreams their way to sales or spin up the passive SaaS marketing engine.
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The passive SaaS marketing engine is a wonderful thing to build. Unfortunately, it takes ~18 months to get running. That's a long, long time
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When we did my last company, I tried to roleplay as someone who was actually comfortable doing active sales. It worked pretty well.
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I cannot emphasize how much absence-of-rocket-science is in Sales 101. If you could get hired or do a conference talk, you can do sales.
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The fundamental primitives are just identifying someone in the world who would be helped by your thing and then having a conversation.
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Devs get *massively* skeezed out by the first part, because cold outreach sounds "spammy", but that's largely alleviated by doing it right.
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e.g. Here's a cold pitch from two Irish guys who had never talked to me before, trying to woo Bingo Card Creator away from Paypal.pic.twitter.com/okCyE7Hd5x
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(I'll take "Most expensive spam filter false positives in history" for $1000, Alex.)
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Business owners spend most of their day pitching and getting pitched. They/we are FAR less offended by it than engineers are.
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The bar for a good pitch is *shockingly* low. You get into the top 20% in my inbox by getting my name and company right. 5% for humanity.
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The best pitch I've ever gotten was ~1 paragraph. "I read you were looking for X. I have an idea about X:
$IDEA. Want to talk turkey?"Show this thread -
"Actually cares about my expressed needs. Clearly not a bozo." That sales over my bar for "Worth 15 minutes to investigate."
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Sales calls are intimidating. Believe me, I get it. It's easier if you treat them as goal-oriented geeking out about a problem space.
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The only thing that distinguishes them from other geeking out is that you have one sentence of next steps at the end of the call.
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My last company's canned ask: "It's been great chatting. If this has been interesting, can I send you an LOI for your review?"
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If a prospect said no (or if I had disqualified them during the call when talking about their business), I thanked for time and parted ways.
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If they said they were interested in getting an LOI, I spent a few minutes customizing our stock one, mailed it, then followed up.
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I enthusiastically subscribe to the
@steli school of following up, which is that you're not done until you get Yes or No. Either is fine.Show this thread -
Engineers should believe sales folks more often, especially on the specific topic of "Deals come in, frequently, on the ~19th email."
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I have been the guy buying things after 18 unanswered emails. Life gets busy; that's the nature of being a business owner.
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If you've ever worked at a company, you know how much of work is not convincing people that you're right but organizing them to do things.
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A significant portion of sales, as distinct from order taking, is project managing the implementation of your thing at their company.
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Friction-free available-any-time onboarding has made a lot of SaaS companies very happy, but a little friction in the early days is useful.
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You cannot buy market research as good as a user telling you, in real time, that your setup process/etc is broken. You can compensate.
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One way to compensate is to take the implicit software offer (you're not just buying software, you're hiring expertise) and make it explicit
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If you're selling e.g. email marketing software, for your first ten customers, you can literally just write all the campaigns.
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For every reason people have for today not being a good day to do it, test whether a fanatically dedicated free person fixes that or not.
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We made a sale for Appointment Reminder from someone whose only way of getting data into the system was to fax it to us. Guess the cheat.
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If you guess "CEO signs up for HelloFax, receives the fax, and types 600 patient names and phone numbers by hand" you have good instincts.
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End of conversation
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