5 non-obvious reasons every indie hacker needs to be good-enough at sales

If there's one thing I've learned from growing our SaaS, SparkLoop, into a 6-figure business over the last 12 months, it's that being good at sales is like playing a video game with the cheat codes enabled.

Everything is that little bit easier.

So I've decided to take a break from my Christmas break...

... to share with you five of the most painful business challenges sales can help you overcome in 2021.

That way — when enrollment for my new, free Sales for Founders course opens on Tuesday — you'll know if it's worth investing your time in (or not)!

Here's why sales matters more than you think...

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1) Your marketing will be more effective, sooner

We'd all rather do marketing than sales. It's easier, less work, and more scalable.

But the downside of marketing is that you only get binary feedback. Create a landing page for your product, and all you'll find out is "yes, the customer bought from this page" or "no, something was wrong so they didn't buy."

It can take months or years of tweaks to learn enough from your audience to make your marketing effective when you start out this way.

Start with sales, on the other hand, and you can just ask potential customers anything you like!

They'll teach you what words to use and what (not) to say in your marketing if you want them to buy.

It's like having a brilliant marketing coach, except they pay you!

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2) You won't lose motivation

Do you ever find yourself starting a new "business" full of excitement, only to lose motivation a few weeks (or months) in?

That happens to a lot of founders who don't do sales.

At the beginning, the tech and the challenge is new and shiny.

But — as time goes on and the "newness" wears off — you lack the close relationship to your customers to be really motivated to help them.

Doing sales fixes that.

It gives you skin in the game.

You become invested in your customers. Friends with them. You care about helping them succeed in a way you couldn't without spending time with them.

Just like how changing a diaper isn't so bad when it's your baby.

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3) You can increase prices and serve 'high-value' customers

Self-serve SaaS products are great.

But — if you don't offer any sales calls to potential customers at all — you'll miss out on a lot of the higher value, more corporate customers who are willing to pay the big bucks.

I'm not talking about the song and dance of enterprise sales. That's not for everyone.

I'm talking about the 20% of potential customers who would buy your product and pay A LOT for it if they could just speak to a real human and ask one or two questions on a 20min call.

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4) Save yourself from wasting time building something nobody wants

Yes, we all know "build it and they will come" is a myth.

But "validate your idea with some marketing" isn't any better!

When you try to start a business that way, it's basically a pass or fail. With no guarantee you'll ever start a business that "passes."

That's why being good-enough at sales is a superpower for new founders.

By starting with sales, you're forced to focus on the customer not the "idea."

It becomes almost impossible to avoid learning from them. Discovering what value you could provide them with that they would pay for.

In other words, sales massively de-risks the process.

So you aren't right back where you started 12 months later, with nothing but an "I failed" write-up on Hacker News and a red warning message where your savings used to be.

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5) Avoid getting stuck in a "rut"

Of all the challenges I help founders overcome in the S4F community, this one's the worst.

When you start your business without doing sales, you end up with knowledge gaps about your customers.

Gaps that you paper over with assumptions made by observing when you should have been asking.

Often, with enough time and hard work, these assumptions hold up for the first $100, $1k, even $5k MRR.

But then all of a sudden, you hit a road block.

Your growth slows down to a crawl. Churn increases. And — what's worse — you have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it.

You can bust open those gaps and fill them properly by doing sales. But it's a long, painful process.

Like getting to the end of a multiple choice exam and realising you skipped over one question right at the very beginning, so now all of your answers are off by one.

It's much, much easier to just do sales well from the very beginning.

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Happy to answer any questions you have about sales here too. Hope that helped with your plans for 2021!