🎓 Learning Sales as a Technical Founder
As a first time founder embarking on my (intended to be a VC-backed) startup journey 🚀, I quickly realized there are a lot of skills that I need as a founder that I didn’t have. I was comfortable with talking to customers & product development due to my engineering background but I massively struggle with copywriting, marketing, and the most important one - Sales 💸.
I have shared some of the tips and resources I’ve found helpful when trying to learn about Sales. These tips are still applicable to my current bootstrap project District
👨🚀 Know your customer segment by heart
Knowing your customers is extremely important in finding out the right messaging and sales strategy for your product. It is best to create a very detailed and specific customer profile that fits best with your product. For our B2B SaaS revenue-based financing product, we created a detailed customer profile as a part of this exercise:
📩 Cold emails actually work
As an individual contributor all of my professional life, I was never comfortable directly reaching out to “strangers” asking to try out our product. I came across a few posts on Reddit and Hacker News which read the following:
“Cold Outreach alone drove over $1.2M ARR in SaaS sales for me over the last 4 years.”
I was extremely hesitant in sending Cold Emails in the beginning, but posts like this convinced me to do it. I quickly learned that I had to make it short, to-the-point, personalized & actionable.
If there is enough interest, I’ll do a separate post on how to reverse-engineer cold emails. Let me know in the comments!
🕴️Figure out where your target customers hangout
In the early days, without any ad-budget and sales representative, it is important to know exactly where your target customers hang out the most. Then focus on building out separate strategies for each of those platforms. In our case, since we were targeting Founders & CFOs of B2B SaaS companies, it was platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and industry-specific conferences.
👨🎓Learn from the folks who have done this before you
Tyler Bosmeny from Clever shared some great insights about “How to Sell” for B2B High-Touch, Long cycle sales process here on YouTube
My take-aways:
- Sales is YOU! Figure out your own process in your own context.
- Your Passion is powerful! Utilize it in sales.
- Your Network is bigger than you think. Do not underestimate it.
- Selling is about Listening. 80% listen, 20% asking questions.
- Do religious Follow-ups. Make sure these are thoughtful & personalized.
Lastly, learn by doing Sales over and over again!
My final tip is to just do it. You’ll probably suck at it in the beginning, feel sad or get discouraged but so does everyone as a beginner. A/B tests your pitch & strategies until you get it right.
All the best out there! 👍
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Share your thoughts:
How did you make your first Sale?
What would you do differently next time around?
Shout out to "Cold emails actually work"!
I was hesitant to send cold emails for the longest time. You may only get a small percentage of responses, but those responses and the relationships that grow from them will be valuable enough to justify the effort!
Agreed.
The more targeted and customized you can make your cold emails the better, but I've had very positive experiences with cold emails as well.
I think a lot of technical founders tend to undervalue email marketing in general. We engineers might be annoyed by marketing emails, but many other professionals live in their inbox.
Absolutely!
It is a little hard for technical founders to wear "marketing/sales" hat and think from another point of view.
Even at my previous organization, the biggest enterprise deal with HP (Hewlett-Packard) started with a cold email. It blew my mind when I learned about it from our business development team.
Good point about building long-term relationships with the customers who reply!
There are also amazing tools available to semi-automate the process and allows you to personalize emails. Once those are set up, it should not take too much effort as well.
Thanks for sharing!
I've been having difficulties finding email addresses for potential customers. Did you cold email individuals, or companies generic information emails? How did you find their emails?
@egavro
We emailed individuals. You can try services like RocketReach, Hunter.io, Snov.io etc to find email addresses. They are not 100% accurate all the time but gets the job done.
How's @VidRec doing so far?
Do you have a similar "persona" for the actual buyer within your customer? In my experience, there are different buyers that have different drivers, leading to different sales plays and messages. Curious if this applies in your space and how you're handling it. Thanks for sharing!
@andrewgassen
Yes, that's true. Different people in "Decision Maker Chain" have different buying motivation.
Luckily for us, the chain was smaller since we were directly targeting CFOs and Founders. We just combined the customer and buyer persona and added the "Buying Motivation" record to keep track of it.
I found sincere, personal, thoughtful cold emails have gotten me a 30% response rate, which doesn’t seem bad. I would agree they work.
100%!
Justin, what other sales methods you tried to go beyond cold emails?
Excelent Post, thanks.
Glad you enjoy it @ViktorDeveloper