Counterloop

I have always struggled with sales.

As a founder I have always felt it was incumbent on me to drive the growth of the company. But the reality is, I have always relied on referrals, which are always welcome, and SEO.

Sticking my fingers in my ears and hoping for the best!

Recommendation and SEO are great ways to find new clients, but also, they are largely passive ways of winning new clients.

That doesn't mean to say doing a good job and developing a good reputation is worthless, it's the golden ticket in some ways in the right set of circumstances. And I regard it as one of the hallmarks of a well run company and product.

But it is not an active means of driving growth in a perhaps something you can pin your hat on for future planning.

This, I always felt, in my previous company, was a failing. So this time around I wanted to focus on outbound sales to drive growth. And when I started looking at it I realised I didn't really know how to do it properly. Cold calling is hard, as is cold emailing, but once you do it, and you start getting into conversations, then what?

One of things I have found is that once prospects start making objections it often feels like a 'no', which actually if you dig a bit deeper you can unearth a way to develop the conversation further.

Learning how to do this is one of the keys to developing future sales. Rather than going all in and trying to a get a sale now, its possible to develop trust and understanding in your target audience, and learn about what problems they have and how they are currently solving them. This builds trust and helps you develop the conversation in a meaningful way. And this way, it doesn't have to be an embarrassing toxic "salesy" conversation.

When I started talking to other founders, I realised I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Having done quite of a bit of sales myself over the past 20 year with my previous start up, I found that once I had the person in front of me, who was qualified and genuinely interested in my product, then I was good at it.

I offered to put together a sales training package for one founder and whilst I was doing that I started to think about more deeply. What were the problem, people like me faced.

And this was the genesis of Counterloop. If I could come up with way to teach myself how to develop my skills, there may be others out there who also need the same.

I started validating the idea on Twitter and in Reddit and DM'ing people about the idea and seeing what pain points they had. Very quickly I got 10 people on my waiting list and developed a string of positive conversations with other on LinkedIn.

It's pretty exciting. I will post some more as I get to work!