I work with many founders and a popular topic is early sales efforts. Often these founders are operational or technical in nature. Sales can be new to them and not something they particularly feel comfortable with. Founders may also wait to sell until their solution is perfect or have added all the features they think they need. Here are a few tips for those early sales efforts.

Founder-led sales

I truly believe that founders make the best salespeople. They know the solution and have passion for their business. It is important for them to be involved in the sales process. At the beginning, that means having the founders doing a bulk of the sales effort. It is better that they have a strategy and a clear ideal customer profile before they pay a sales person or consultant to do this research.

Create a plan

Creating a sales plan can take some time, but it will save time and help to maximize early sales efforts. The plan is a guide through the sales process, ideal customer profile, messaging, sales cadence, and more. This will remove guesswork and provide things like call scripts and email templates. It will mean more efficient and consistent emails and calls. The founder can then evaluate the process and messaging knowing it is consistent with them and the team. Having a plan that can be updated will also make it easier to bring on new sales team members.

Learn from conversations

The early sales conversations are very important to sales success. Founders can learn more about their customers’ challenges, test their messaging, check pricing, and better understand competition. It will also allow the founder to practice their sales craft and learn from it. They should start selling as early as they can.

Fail or succeed fast

We talk to founders all the time about leveraging their networks and finding early meetings. LinkedIn is a great way to find 2nd connections and either ask for an introduction through a shared connection or reach out to a 2nd connection directly. The key is getting early sales meetings for prospects that meet your ideal customer profile. This allows you to fail or succeed fast. Both cases provide learning for the founder. In some cases that may also mean expanding through networking events. The one caveat is making sure that meetings outside of your ideal customer profile don’t cause you to alter your strategy if there is no long term fit with other similar companies. Founders should also not shy away from cold outreach.

If you need some help with your founder-led sales efforts please reach out to me so we can help you sell more, faster.