You have to create them and help your customers sell your product internally. There won’t be established budgets or needs. If you're a new market, aka there hasn’t been existing products solving the same problem in a similar way, you’re really breaking new ground. The value that you're establishing has to be much, much clearer, and much stronger because your customers are taking a risk by buying your product. If it's an established market, as a startup, you're coming in as the incumbent, and you have to have a very strong reason for replacing the status quo. The second thing is in regards to your market. You're really going to be establishing a lot of the processes for selling your product as an employee vs a CEO. The CEO may be the only person selling the product when you join a company, but CEOs sell very differently from a sales person. If you're one of the first sales representatives, you're really striking new ground. The biggest one depends on the stage of the startup. What are the differences between selling at a startup and at a big company? I imagine that selling a startup product is not the same as selling a big company product, especially as the owner. Founders and CEOs often need to take more time setting expectations and training their first hires to avoid losing them early on. We’ll often see the CEO hires someone, put them up for a quota that they think they should hit, but the quota's designed in an arbitrary way. It's also knowing how to set your sales person up for success. It helps the CEO get their feet underneath them and takes some of the more administrative tasks off their plate.Īn added bonus here is that when the CEO does end up making their first sales hire, they have someone to support them in training that sales person and supporting them as they ramp up. It's usually a more junior person, so they're a bit more flexible than management They don't have a set way that they're used to being managed. Meaning someone who basically serves as a support person for the CEO while they're selling. The second one I see most frequently is hiring a salesperson rather than a sales development representative. It's also knowing how to actually take it to market, and it's a really critical role for a founder to take on. Selling your product is not only knowing the direction of the product. Learning how to sell your product early on is important because you need to serve as that bridge between your customer and your product and really understand what your go-to-market is going to look like, not just what product you need to be building. They're touching all aspects of sales, and if the CEO doesn't think they're selling, they're crazy. And they're selling the vision when they're hiring. ![]() They're selling their ideas when they're pivoting to their board and their internal team. They're going to be selling their company when they're raising money. It's critical for a CEO to know how to sell. One of the biggest issues I see early on is the founder trying to hire a salesperson instead of doing the selling themselves. From your experience, what are the most common mistakes you catch startups doing when it comes to sales? ![]() I’m also the CEO of a company called The Sales Method where we offer a market framework that helps founders clearly and systematically map their go-to-market. We invest in and work with pre-seed to seed stage enterprise SaaS startups. I’m a general partner at Acceleprise, a 4-month long, B2B SaaS accelerator based in San Francisco with programs launching this year in New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for having me! My name is Whitney Sales. Could you start by introducing yourself ? She took the time to talk about the do's and dont's of sales in a startup environment and recommends a few tools might need to kickstart your endeavours.Ĭheck out her resources for startup founders! Thanks for doing this. ![]() Whitney Sales is a startup sales expert and coach based in San Francisco.
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