$0-to-hero template for Indie Hackers

I cannot imagine a World without sales. I see that sales have been portrayed as some form of trickery performed by a person wearing a suit. Forget wolf of wall street. Forget the jargon. Forget Jerry Maguire for a moment. Forget psychological tricks. Let's get to basics, that is my 0-to-hero template.

Sales is an art and science of transferring feelings and solving problems.

Here is what should a founder or a Indie hacker do?

Make Sales function the centerpiece of everything in building the company. It has a multi-fold impact. Below is the new way to look at sales.

When you are building a product, you are building it with your unique insight about the problem. You never know whether that is something people want. You need to validate it. Sales empower you to put the product in front of real users (potential paying customers). Forget about landing page, forget about positioning, and all the jargon out there. Write down what is the ONE pain point your product is solving. Solving that ONE pain point is your value proposition. If there are existing solutions, then speak about how you are solving the pain point better than the existing solutions. Here is a simple template for the founders or sales folks to reach out to potential customers.

Email Outreach template:

Hey {{first_name}},

Best

Sandiep

Most of the time you wouldn’t see replies coming in for the first email. Usually, you should have 7 email cadence before giving up.

This outreach will help you validate your product, get those first paying customers, and give your race car the necessary tires.

In the early days of building the company, Sales and Support are the same. One of the founders does both these activities. Both these functions feed each other. I have often seen that the language or the level of transparency the customer displays before (evaluating the tool) and after (becoming a customer) is different. Being in support or onboarding the customer will help you understand why they choose you, and what does success mean for them. These insights will help you sell better.

There is a lot of buzz around growth hacking and most of the founders spend a lot of time reading about it. But one of the key aspects to figure out even before growth hacking is “positioning” of the product. Positioning is tricky and it is always a work in progress. It takes quite some time to get the positioning right. Positioning is key for building a brand using marketing. The inputs to build positioning will come from sales.

April Dunford, Author of Obviously Awesome says -

"If you have enough customer traction positioning could be as fast as a couple days."

During the sales process, you should ask prospects - where do you search for solutions to solve your problems, where do you hang out most of the time to discuss your problems, who else in your networking are facing similar problems and who are some thought leaders I should follow. In this process, you will find the potential marketing channels, the language they are using to describe their problem (this will become your website copy), and the kind of conversations they are having.

One common mistake we did is to build features that we thought would make sense for customers. Every time we pushed a new feature we only saw that there is insignificant usage of it. Later we tweaked the process of building new features or product improvements. We prioritized product improvements based on the inputs from prospects during the sales calls. The continuous feedback from sales calls will help you build the product roadmap.

Sudheesh Nair, early sales team member of Nutanix (a public company) and currently CEO of ThoughtSpot says -

"The sales function is no longer about just sales, this function is a centerpiece to make the product better. Selling-understanding customers-improving the product-Selling again. Different motion altogether."

How to sell SaaS?

Anyone can learn sales. Unfortunately, no B-school or University has a course. I did a search on platforms like Lamda School, Upgrad, etc but even they don’t have any courses. For the starters in sales, be it a founder or someone trying to sell SaaS here are some key pointers:

Write as you speak & concise emails
Focus & follow-up are key to win 80% of the sales
Get comfortable on the phone or talking to strangers
Learn and iterate from every interaction
Listen as much as you speak
Talking to users is sales

Again no tricks, no jargon. Just keep it simple by understanding your customers and solving their problems. Hope this is helpful.