Startup Sales - When life or death of your startup happens knee to knee with the customer

It is Monday morning. Or Sunday Morning. It’s hard to tell. All the days bleed into one another. A blur of cascading urgent priorities and unforeseen challenges whipsawing your attention back and forth, up and down. 

Products that stubbornly don’t want to work all-of-a-sudden before a big meeting. New investors asking for a ‘quick call’ that will take you 3 hours of frantic preparation to get right. Key employees having crises of confidence at the worst possible moment. Cash running out. The constant hot breath of the board of directors on the back of your neck reminding you of the ticking clock and asking you “Why haven’t you closed a deal?”

You must sell. 

And you are not designed to sell. 

Every decision is potentially fatal. Every mistake a hole you may not be able to climb out of. And you don’t have the time or mental energy to give any of them the attention they need.

You’ve long since given up getting enough sleep or having any kind of life outside this startup. All roads lead to you. You are the startup. A hundred urgent, high priority tasks line up in your to-do list. You get to choose the 4 or 5 that you will be able to complete today and resign the rest to the chaos of the universe. 

Your inbox throbs with people and urgent things. Your mind is foggy and blank. Your world has turned into a work marathon that never ends and never becomes less urgent. You fall into restless sleep each night surrounded by the screeching demons of the things you need to do. You wake each day to the exhaustion of just trying to keep your head above the ocean of urgency.

Your life speeds by in herky-jerky scenes like it is on double fast forward and you wonder why you chose to do this. You have long since cast aside the fairy tale success fantasy scenes where everyone is congratulating you as you give the big speech to the aspiring students at your alma mater about self-realization and grit.  Now it is all day to day survival. Survival is success. You grimly march on through the days doing what you can. 

You must sell. 

And you are not designed to sell. 

Today is different. Today you must sell. As a founder you never wanted to sell. You love your product. You believe in the solution you have engineered. You have a passion for the product. You created this company on the dream of that product, the problem it solves and the value it creates. 

The phone sits in front of you like a poisonous snake. You have a name of an executive you have never met. Today you must pick up that phone and call that executive and sell them the passion of your product. You must convince these executives that your product adds that value and solves that problem in a way that is compelling enough for them to become your first customers.

Your passion and your narrative must carry the day. You have no proof. You not only have to sell the value but you have to convince them to go out on a limb and trust you to fill in the blanks as you go. 

You’re an engineer. An introvert. It’s not that you can’t call people or can’t talk to people. But it doesn’t give you energy. It takes energy away. It’s one more thing that drains energy and you’d rather avoid it. Maybe one of the other 200 urgent tasks is a better use of your time? Maybe you can avoid that phone call? Maybe you can send a quick email? Surely, they will be smart enough to see the value of your solution and call you back?

No. 

You must sell. 

And you are not designed to sell. 

“Surely”, you think, “ I can hire an expert in sales to do it so I don’t have to do this thing I’m not designed for?” After all, it is in the business plan. You have a line item for ‘hire sales’. Why not do that? Why not focus on delivering the best product and abdicate this awful sales thing to someone who knows how to do it?

Unfortunately the same thing that makes you bad at selling as a founder/operator makes you bad at hiring that first sales leader. This is the highest risk hire your company will ever make. Your neck is stretched out and you are handing someone the axe. The wrong hire is at best a six-month delay in your business plan and at worst the death of your dream. 

The truth is that you are looking for a silver bullet. You are looking for someone to take this burden off you. The truth also is that the person you need to hire doesn’t want to work for you. If they are that good at what they do there’s no reason for them to be looking for a job. 

They will say the all the right things. They will convince you. They are sales people. You are not. Then they will waste your time and ruin your company. This is a game you cannot win. 

Can you hire a sales executive to make those first critical sales?

No.

You must sell. 

And you are not designed to sell. 

Without sales, your company dies. Sales is not an evil afterthought. Sales is the entire reason for your solution to exist. Sales should be the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night. Sales is the key to startup success and the sooner you turn to embrace sales the more likely you are to survive.

Sales is finding customers who will use your solution to solve a problem and gain value from doing so. That is your entire reason to exist as a company. A solution that is not deployed by customers has no purpose. 

When they solve that problem and find that value, they will pay you. This is the value exchange. This is when your startup moves from being an idea to reality. Without those customers solving problems and exchanging value everything you have is hypothetical.

Once you have that traction from those first sales everything else is enabled. Now you can worry about building a sales process and a sales team and everything thing that goes with it. That’s all mechanical. That is all known. That is all learnable. 

But first you need that traction.

It may have struck you by now. I think you know who needs to make that first sale. I think you know you need to refocus your company on sales.  I think it scares you, but you realize the truth. You know who must make that first sale.

You.

You must sell. 

And, still, you are not designed to sell. 

That’s ok. Now that you know the truth. You know the onus is on you to make this happen. You can sanction yourself to get the job done. You can lean into the fear and grow into the success you know you can be. 

I’ve got a shocking bit of news for you. You can sell. You are passionate about your product and the problems it solves. You live and breathe it every day.  You may already be good at pitching your business plan and your idea. You may have already gotten investors to commit their checkbooks to your idea. That is selling, my friend.

You just need help to hone that approach and message in a way that resonates with a target executive who is willing to take a risk on your passion the same way those investors did. 

You need to understand your and be able to pitch value. What is the problem you are solving? Who has this problem? Do they have a budget to solve this problem? Is this problem big enough to make it onto their radar?

You need to summon your passion. First engagements are all passion driven. What is your origin story? Why does this solution need to exist? Why is it important to the world? – viscerally, emotionally, important.

And you need to focus. Time is all you have. The clock is ticking. Shift your founder energy and focus to sales. Find the right people. Say no to everyone and everything else. Be prepared to turn over a hundred rocks. Learn the objections by being thrown out of conference rooms. Be prepared to go back against the No’s with power again and again.

Because sales is the most important thing in your startup. Your idea, your product are potential energy waiting to be unleashed by customers through the sales process.  You, the founder, are the key to unlock that power.

You must sell. 

And you are perfectly designed to sell. 

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Chris Russell is a startup warrior. He has been a founder and held senior commercial and operational roles in multiple companies. He is incidentally an endurance athlete with a predilection for the Boston Marathon and a published author of mountains of valuable content. 

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cyktrussell/ - cyktrussell at Gmail dot com

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Start up Sales

An insider guide to tactically and emotionally navigating the birth of sales in your start up.

Why Start Up Sales? I have been a founder. I have been responsible for sales in multiple start ups. I know the pain and suffering of being the tip of the spear for an emerging technology in an enterprise market. 

It’s not easy. It is no wonder that most people view the sales role as some sort of dark art populated by fast-talking magicians. But, it’s not magic. There is a play book and it is a fairly simple one. Sales is a learnable science. In the practical part of this book I’m going to lay out step by step what you need to do to spin up an enterprise sales process from scratch in your start up. 

But that’s not the good stuff. The other half of the sales equation is the magic part. This deals with understanding the emotional washing machine that is the sales process. In the alter-ego part of this book I’m going to tell you how to prepare yourself to approach sales.  

Looking forward to the journey!