Sales Support Sunday: Get help from the expert

BTW thanks for Sales for Founders, it's awesome.

Thanks!

How do you conduct Discovery calls? What's the best practice for that? Do you focus on learning about your customer's needs, demoing the product or on something else?

That really depends on what stage your business is at, and what you're hoping to get out of the call?

I'd almost never recommend demoing the product though. The only possible exception is if you have a potential customer who uses a competing product, and literally only needs to see the 5 things that makes your product better suited to them.

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How do you ensure/raise conversions from content?

That's all about structuring your content around the "journey" you need your potential customer to take while reading it...

1. What is their awareness level before starting reading?
2. What do they need to know/feel after reading in order to want to convert straight away?

Consider the difference between #1 and #2 --> that's the journey you need to take the potential customer on in your content.

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How do you approach courses? Your Sales for Founders is awesome. Wonder what are the tips and tricks on making a great course like this.

That's kind, thanks!

Honestly, I stumbled my way through it a bit. Here's my Indie Hackers podcast episode where I talk a bit about the process.

Does this make sense at this stage?

I don't know the full story, but based on what I've heard so far and my experience, I'd say probably not.

Finding, recruiting and training a decent sales hire takes months. It's more work, not less.

Plus, it takes you personally further away from your customers. Which is what's most important right now.

How should I find the right hire and how should I onboard them?

You'd want to hire at least 2-3 sales reps at once (and end up keeping the best one). It's almost never a good idea to just hire one salesperson.

Here's a great guide: https://blog.close.com/sales-hiring-101-for-startups/

I’m a solo founder funding the business myself, so my preference would be to mostly use commissions early on. (Maybe 30-70 salary-commission) does that make sense? How can I hire someone with a low salary and an ok commission?

Probably not. That's how you get unethical sales hires with nothing to lose. Wait to hire until you can afford them.

Each customer they find could bring me ~1200 in annual revenue on avg. some may go much higher (5x-10x) but I haven’t landed any yet. How much commission would be attractive?

Depends how many deals they can close per month.

A good salesperson based in the US will want to be safely making at the very least $5k/month (probably much more).

How much commission do you have to pay out to get them to at least that number every month?

No problem!

So - in general - I think cold email is pretty inefficient for most indie hackers.

I'd nearly always recommend doing warm outreach instead.

And I'd NEVER recommend using a cold email template. Those are almost guaranteed not to work for your individual product, situation and recipient.

That said, here's a link to a breakdown I did of a good cold email someone sent me: https://twitter.com/louisnicholls_/status/1248578404435333122?s=20

Great question!

This strays a bit away from sales and into marketing, but here's my $0.02...

The first thing I'd do in your situation is to work out what your most painful growth bottleneck is.

Broadly, you can split that into three challenges...

1. Getting attention/eyeballs from more potential customers
2. Helping those potential customers understand that they need what your product does (and why your product is the best solution for them)
3. Creating enough urgency/motivation for those potential customers to actually buy

Once you know which of the above challenges is hurting you most, you can focus on fixing that and quickly get the best returns on your time investment.

When it comes to organic channels for growth, there aren't that many to choose from.

A good starting point might be Julian Shapiro's guide to content marketing: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/content-marketing

or Ryan Kulp's breakdown of referral marketing: https://www.ryanckulp.com/anatomy-of-referral-marketing/

We have been unable to build a soft email list for a while now. What do thing we should do build our email list?

What do you mean by building a soft email list?

Getting website visitors to give you their email address?

Or finding email addresses of potential customers to send cold emails to?