Learn to Sell or Die

A good friend, and amazing founder, Adalberto Flores, says that being an entrepreneur is very humbling because you’re always begging for something - you’re trying to convince people to join your company, you’re convincing investors to invest in your company, you’re convincing journalists to write about your company and you’re convincing customers to bet their jobs on your company.

I completely agree - there is a tremendous amount of salesmanship, marketing and storytelling in building a company. And as a founder, it’s not something that you can delegate. And perhaps most important, if you’re not good at it, you better get good at it - fast.?

Given this environment, here’s a few tips on signing those first few pilots/customers:

1. Build and Protect Your Reputation: Warren Buffett famously said ‘if you lose money for the firm, I’ll be forgiving. If you lose reputation, I’ll be ruthless.' Build your brand as someone trustworthy, hard-working and innovative. The best way to do this is to work somewhere that is fast growing where you can leverage the brand of the bigger company and get to know people who are or will be influential in the future. While in college, I tried to start several companies. They all failed. But after graduating, I had the opportunity to work at Google where I worked alongside amazing people who saw me in the trenches doing whatever was required to make my products and Google successful. When I left to co-found Ooyala with Belsasar Lepe and Sean Knapp, it was much easier to raise capital because I had connected with early Google investors. And when I started calling media companies, they were willing to take my calls because of the work that I had done at Google. It’s been almost 20 years since I worked at Google, but the relationships I made then are still helping me with my various endeavors. Building your reputation is the best form of networking. And… it’s also important that you do your part - if you get to an influential place, pay it forward.
2. Invest Time in Positive Press: While there is a lot more noise now compared to when we started Ooyala in 2007, positive press and good media relationships still matter. Getting an article in Business Insider, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and/or appearing on a well-known podcast will make it much easier for you to get a call back when you do your outreach. Unfortunately, most of the media industry has turned into a volume game. Do your outreach, and you will get someone to write about your company.
3. Do Your Own Legwork: There is no way around it, when you’re getting started a lot of what you do is evangelizing. The more activity at the top of the funnel from the founder, the bigger the pipeline and the faster you will get to sales. I pride myself at still being the best SDR at my companies - even at $100s of millions of revenue. My outreach is a lot more targeted now, but when we got started at Ooyala, I found that on IMDB, I could find the contact information of producers, directors, agents and other people involved in the media industry. In the first couple of weeks, I was reaching out to 100+ people every single day. Eventually, I started to get responses. And while most of the initial connections weren’t the people I needed to speak to, they started to make introductions to people who needed the Ooyala platform. A tip I usually give entrepreneurs is that on the weekend, do the research of the people that you want to reach, and write the emails and cue them up to go out during the week.
4. Be Bold: There was an executive at Viacom that was not responding to my emails. So on my next trip to New York, I parked myself at the coffee shop in the building and on the second day, I “bumped into him,” and he invited me up to his office to get a demo.
5. Practice, Practice, Practice: The more pitches you do, the more you will learn about the industry and what is interesting to your market/customer. This is also a great way to get to Product-Market Fit. Over time, you will see that more prospects will nod their head and say it’s exactly what they’re looking for.
6. Foster Relationships, Not Transactions: I feel comfortable leveraging my network because I always believe that I am adding value. I now have relationships that I made at Google who have purchased products/services from me at Ooyala, Wizeline, MiSalud and Cerby. And some of these people were present at my wedding in Argentina. People create walls between their personal and work lives and are afraid of leveraging their relationships to build their business. If you feel uncomfortable reaching out – there may be a problem with the product/service that you’re trying to sell.

Yes, being an entrepreneur can be humbling, and scary, and exhilarating and hopefully most important, rewarding. And it’s important to remember that building a great company is very similar to building a great product. It involves understanding your audience, realizing what that audience wants and needs, as well as a targeted and strategic selling and energetically evangelizing that company.?

There’s no better feeling as an entrepreneur than being in the middle of this experience, steering the ship, and watching all this come together.