From Code to Customers: A Software Engineer’s Journey into Sales

Engineering Sales

You will see how appropriate this heading is as you read along.

In case you don't know me, hi! My name is Tom Piaggio. I left the confort of the Google offices to build a startup with three of my friends. Friends who had a total combined sales experience of zero days, including myself.

This article will probably be a series, where I'll be documenting my failures, wins and learnings, going from zero to (hopefully) some sales. If you can help in any way, I love learning, and I'm not ashamed of being told that I'm wrong, so please, do tell me if I'm wrong!

Chapter 0: We Need to do Sales

I’m a software engineer with ADHD, as evident from my zero-indexed chapters. I even like to turn small things like making coffee and toast into an optimization challenge. While the toast crisps, I move to the coffee machine to begin brewing. The goal? Finish spreading butter just as the coffee machine finishes.

But I digress. Being a second time founder of a failed startup, I can say with a big degree of certainty that a shiny product doesn't mean you'll get customers. In my old startup, I believed if I just had this other feature, customers will come. That was never the case. I built an amazing product for imaginary customers. I only ever sold to one customer.

The learning: Get real customers.

Amount of customers: 0

Chapter 1: Engineering Approach

Of course, being who I am, I started consuming every piece of information there was to consume about selling. My initial thought was the following:

Selling is a numbers game. If the industry standard is 0.5% conversion rate, I need to send 200 emails and I'll get one customer.

Easy peasy! I'll just get an automation software, use sales navigator and get those 200 companies into the automation.

As I soon found out, that wasn't the case. The mindset of optimization, iteration and analytical thinking that had always helped me in the past, wasn't working anymore. I needed to leave my engineering mental model. I needed to unlearn everything that I learned in the past.

The learning: Selling is not about numbers. It's about people, caring for their problems, and trying to solve them.

Amount of customers: 0

Chapter 2: Leverage Your Network. But Not Too Much

We were lucky to be able to talk to some amazing mentors along the way. When we would ask them how they got their first customers, most of them would spit out the phrase: "we got our first customers from our network". At the time we were at the University of Chicago, meeting tons of new people that could introduce us to other people. We thought we had it in the bag!

We made a list of 200 people that we had met in the last couple of days, started going through each of their LinkedIn profiles, with the aim of finding connections in companies that we wanted to work with. We wrote to each of those 200 people asking for a list of 10 or so people for each, and got some meetings.

Spoiler, it didn't work. We were choosing these companies based on guessing if they had the problem. We didn't have an ICP, buyer persona, or target market. The prospecting we were doing at that time was so broad that companies landing our search would have vastly different problems. We were meeting both with startups that just had their Series B, and huge old corporations who have been present for the last 50 years. We couldn't possibly solve problems for all companies. We needed a niche.

The learning: Quality of leads is much more important than quantity.

Amount of customers: 0

Chapter 3: You Can't Escape The Grind

One thing that we couldn't figure out is that when we were doing fundraising, we were getting like fifteen calls per week with investors. How are we not getting any calls with customers?

In hindsight, this was very na?ve from our side. There was a clear effort mismatch. When we were looking for investment, we went through a list of the top VCs in Silicon Valley. After that, we went to each of their websites, and filtered out the ones where we didn't match their thesis, weren't deploying capital or didn't lead rounds. We'd look for one or two investors in that VC and contact them directly, either via email or LinkedIn. For customers, we'd write an automation in half an hour and let it run for a month. Of course we weren't getting any meetings.

Having seen this, we took a similar approach to the one we used for VCs. We ditched any automation software, for a more manual approach. We narrowed down to the smallest possible niche we could think of and starting looking for people. We realized that we needed to find companies that had the problem and get a meeting no matter what. Instead of contacting a thousand people from a thousand different companies, we're contacting a few people each week from a set cohort of companies we thought might have the problem with the information we had. This approach seems more intellectually sincere.

The learning: You will get out as much effort as you put in.

Amount of customers: 0

Chapter 4: Pull over Push

Don't think you know what your customer needs and go build it. That thinking is backwards. You first find a problem worth solving, and then think creatively of how you could solve it. I came to build a mental model of a problem worth solving and I think I can describe it in the following words:

A problem worth solving is a problem where companies spend money in an inefficient way or, leave opportunities that could have been converted to customers.

This is a simplistic way of thinking about it. Of course, there are other variables that affect the purchase decision like the risks of working with a startup, the pain of migrating to a new tool, or the volume of money you are actually saving them. The pain should be bigger than all of those blockers in order to get a sale.

Instead of trying to push new features or services to our clients, we took a 180 degree approach and started exclusively listening to our customers as if we didn't have any product, trying to quantify the amount of pain the customer had.

We figured out that our vision of the product could be broken down into much smaller features that would solve very vertical problems to some customers. Just when I think I’ve understood the phrase "make something people want" or "talk to customers", I get slapped in the face with the reality that I just don’t know what I’m doing and I need to keep grinding.

The learning: Listen to your customers, more than you listen to yourself.

Amount of customers: 0

Conclusion

This is where we are currently at. We're grinding LinkedIn, Hubspot, email and our network; trying to meet with people that might have the problem that we're trying to solve, and learning a ton.

If you know B2C companies that have strong competition and are struggling with support tickets, bugs or sorting through feedback, dm me. Or if you can help in any what, I'd love to know your thoughts.

I have to give a shoutout to the author of the book Founding Sales. If you can relate to what I'm saying, please read that book. It's a free online book and the author is really approachable via email.

PD: We don't have any money we can't buy anything from you.