How to Become a Killer Start-Up SalesPerson!

Perhaps you believe that you have to find these kind of sales people for your early stage company. The truth is that while there are some out there you better know how to build them because your odds of finding enough of them are pretty low. Hiring ONE is how you build the rest!

Every salesperson that has been successful at a start up technology company had no idea how succeed until they learned. Yes, most were self taught because they had no other alternative but to learn or fail. But the fact that they learned tells you that these skills can be taught.

The first thing you realize as a salesperson that undertakes a startup company is that you have little of the infrastructure you had in a more established company. You also figure out very quickly that no one has ever heard of your company, or your solution and that no one defines the problem the way you solve it.

When you hear any salesperson complaining about any of the above you indeed have the wrong person. The persons job is to figure out how to sell in this situation and to help build the required infrastructure to scale as the company grows. The operative question then is how do you succeed?

The first thing you must do is embrace the situation and figure out how to move forward.

The most important thing to focus on is how to get your message to the right people at the right companies and start to sell! You must realize that most of what you have learned in the larger company will fail here. The entire approach is counterintuitive!

You were taught in a larger company that you need a lot of leads. But in a tiny start up you would not have the time or resource to follow up on a lot of leads. Larger companies want to reach as many people as possible. But early stage buyers are the innovators and early adopters which Geoffrey Moore explains in "Crossing the Chasm" (which all early-stage CEO's, sales and marketing people should read) that this is only about fifteen percent of the market. This means that eight and half of every ten buyers are NOT your buyer! Generating a large number of leads likely means you are now getting more leads than you can possibly follow up on and eight and half of every ten are false positives that are not going to buy anything! Yikes!

Ok so what do I do? Well not the above lol! You want enough of the right leads! Great, and exactly how do i do that? Well let's see, you have a market that does not know your company and does not define the problem the way you solve it. Innovators and early adopters are looking for a new way to define and solve old problems! Hence you must focus on the unique definition of the problem you solve! This is what you build your website around, this is what you build your marketing content around, this is what you build your sales presentations around. This is also why your first priority is to create this message. You need to outsource or hire these resources so that you can lay the foundation for success. Once you have this in place a salesperson (who may in fact help you build in and refine it once they are on board) has a much higher chance of success.

When a salesperson and marketing function target accounts most likely to have the problem you solve with a unique problem definition the responses you get are going to be from a much higher number of innovators and early adopters. You do not get as many leads but you get a smaller number of the right leads! Since you have a limited amount of resources and eight and half of every ten buyers are not your buyer this is what you want! You are getting the majority of your leads from qualified potential buyers! The lead itself qualifies itself as someone worth following up on because they have responded to your unique problem definition. The likelihood is they are an innovator or early adopter.

Salespeople in large companies are taught to focus on their product presentation and pitch. But a standard pitch to innovators and early adopters is not going to work! You have to develop a pitch but the core of it is NOT the product it is the problem you solve. An early stage salesperson has to be able to sell the problem! The solution is much easier to sell because you are the only one that solves the problem the way you define it. Therefore you need to figure out how to sell the problem. This takes a certain talent. Mike Bosworth in the sales course "Solution Selling" calls this re-engineering the problem vision". This is something the early stage salesperson must master. How do you do it? Well taking Solution Selling by Bosworth will help and I think all early stage sales people should take this course. Basically you must learn to take the way people define the problem now and change it keeping the unique features in your product (some call it the special sauce) at the core of how you are going to redefine the problem vision. When you converse with the prospect you want them to tell you how they view the problem and what the causes are. Then you take those causes and you show how all those causes are really just symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is defined as what your product does uniquely to solve. You must be able to show that all or most of the symptoms go away if you take this new view of the problem and approach. This is effectively a proof statement on why their problem vision was less accurate and why your vision of the problem is the right one! Prospects never define problems in terms if solutions they do not know exist. However, when you have a new technology you get to define the problem in a new way because the new solution has now capabilities. The prospect will be open to the new definition if the salesperson is talented and expect a solution that addresses the new problem definition. You have now created a new definition of the problem in the mind of an innovator or early adopter!

The next thing you have to do is create a solution vision that they believe will solve the problem. Again in the larger company you are taught to do a full on product presentation. You do not do this in this situation or you will overwhelm and confuse the prospect. You simply present and explain the unique features that are at the core (the special sauce) that solves the problem. Remember that the prospect is building the solution vision in their minds such that they see how it can now solve the new problem definition. They have to get there on their own. You can lead them there but you cannot get them there yourself. Answer any questions they have but do not overcomplicate it! You simply want them to get to the point where they see a new problem that is solved by a different approach with what is unique about your solution. There is no need to go further as they are going to make you prove it anyway!

The proof or more detailed evaluation is where you again need to forget what you learned in a more established company. When you get to this phase in a more established company generally you follow a path that the client has determined to evaluate your solution as well as the competition. When you are selling a new solution and solving a problem differently you need the prospect to evaluate the technology with a process that will succeed. However, they have no idea what that is! You may not know it completely either but you know what will not work. You must sell the prospect on how they MUST do the evaluation. Again its the same skills that were used to re-engineer the problem and solution vision. The prospect has a vision of how they do evaluations. You have to take that vision and re-engineer it to the way you need them to do the evaluation. You do this by hearing what their process is and then pointing to the concrete reasons why that process will fail when evaluating this kind of solution. Remember that the innovator or early adopter wants you to succeed. They will be receptive but you have to have solid reasons why they need to change their process. Sometimes the evaluators are not the buyer or the change agent in the account. Sometimes they are the opposite! When you have this situation you have to have your executive sponsor use influence so that the evaluation is set up correctly. You also have to have the executive sponsor either pick people that are more open to change or convince the ones that who are not that they will be rewarded if they prove the technology successful.

Lastly, you can be sure that the buyer has no idea how to build the business case and ROI around the solution in order to justify its purchase. You must do that with them and you must be sure they can explain in in layman's terms. The likelihood is that the purchase will go before a committee or at the very least a final approver that knows little about technology!

Those that have been successful in start-up technology companies have every one of these skills! Most of them developed them in the school of hard knocks! Learning these skills is not for the faint of heart! You have to be smart, bold, analytical, courageous, collaborative, and hard working. But knowing that you need the skills and approaches outlined above is half the battle! Those that really know it have succeeded in multiple start-up companies.

When you hire your first start-up salesperson hire one of these! They are not easy to find and you are not likely to find multiples. But if you can find one they will teach the rest. Believe me when you have learned the above you learned it the hard way and you know how to explain it to others for this reason!

Good luck to all that take on the early stage company. You are the unicorns that create the unicorns!