Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
micael.substack.com
Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#23 is only an issue when you are small. Everything's different the moment you have spare funds and engineering manpower.
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#33 is only an issue when you are small. Everything's different the moment you have spare funds and engineering manpower.
The advice says "Don't commit to things you cannot deliver on." No matter how big you are, if you can't deliver, this is the correct advice.
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#4> Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem.
The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good.
First the bad:
1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too.
2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by believing that your potential customer thinks the same way you do. If your prospects are quite different from you (say you’re a programmer writing a tool for doctors) you’ll work harder to understand their real and perceived needs.
But sometimes this is good advice:
1 - Even if you are different from your customer (say you’re writing something broadly applicable like a web site design tool for small business), “eating your own dog food” will find bugs and infelicities faster.
2 - if your customer has the same needs as you perhaps you already know how to meet said customer easily, such as trade groups you’re already in.
In general the advice in this post was pretty basic and generic but I didn’t want to let the issue above pass I commented.
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#5I'm an engineer turned bus-dev/sales person. I found the transition very difficult and was recommended to sign up for sales coaching. It was excellent advice and I learned a lot about my inherent weaknesses when it comes to selling and how to compensate for them. I wrote a few of my lessons on my blog. A bit dated but perhaps of value to others:
https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/134157/Sales-trainin...
https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/135376/Secret-to-sal...
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#6I'm an engineer turned bus-dev/sales person. I found the transition very difficult and was recommended to sign up for sales coaching. It was excellent advice and I learned a lot about my inherent weaknesses when it comes to selling and how to compensate for them. I wrote a few of my lessons on my blog. A bit dated but perhaps of value to others: https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/134157/Sales-trainin... https://…
interesting. thanks for sharing!
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#7> Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem. The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good. First the bad: 1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too. 2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by bel…
SaaS is less about the capability and more the opportunity cost. Anyone can do anything with the appropriate amount of human capital and resource investment. It’s more can you provide the service cheaper by specializing and providing the service for cheaper than they could do themselves?
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#8> Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem. The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good. First the bad: 1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too. 2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by bel…
I think you make good arguments, but #1 is a typical techie argument: Why would I ever use $SaaS if I could just cobble something together with rsync and Excel?
Well, because $SaaS is a much more polished product with all the headaches removed.
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#93 is only an issue when you are small. Everything's different the moment you have spare funds and engineering manpower.
The advice says "Don't commit to things you cannot deliver on." No matter how big you are, if you can't deliver, this is the correct advice.
The qualifier is that in true enterprise, you can do proserv deals to ramp them to full size, and you can sell roadmap pretty hard because a lot of the time the decision and the implementation happen in different quarters or years. So it definitely does honour their process to let them know something is coming if they're making a 5-10 year decision and something is only a few months out. You definitely have to follow through, though.
Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
#10> Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem. The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good. First the bad: 1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too. 2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by bel…
I've worked in multiple startups/bootstrapped enterprises that started as consultancies to pay for the development of internal tools with the ultimate goal of licensing the tools. It doesn't always work but its the least bad validation strategy I've seen.
I find 1) and 2) of your "bad" items to be more nuanced. Mostly because outside of software development most industries do not have the capacity to build a solution outside their particular flavor of a problem, and they don't do it internally. They hire consultants to do it, and there are enormous inefficiencies that prevent their solution from turning into a product.