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Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

micael.substack.com

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Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#11

Post by hnracer »

taffer wrote: post #8
gumby wrote: post #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 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.

This was the basis of the scepticism towards Dropbox in that infamous HN thread. In the end if I'm either an individual consumer or a business consumer I just want my problem solved really well and not have to always build a custom solution in house for everything.

But I can see other contexts where OP's advice applies, either when requirements are very bespoke or when the problem is little more than a small annoyance and existing tools do the job just fine

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#12

Post by nof1 »

You're often not selling what you think you're selling or not selling it to the person you thought you'd be selling to. Approach your sales process the same way you did your product development - you need to beta it. Get a few early customers in and really learn from them. How did they make the decision? What do they think the main benefits are? How are they using it? What would they tell a friend? Who influenced the purchase and who paid for it?

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#13

Post by kevsim »

As part of an accelerator I did with my startup [0], I had the chance to check out a talk by Scott at https://salesqualia.com/. While we have less of an enterprise sales approach and more of a bottom-up distribution approach, I still found Scott's structured approach to thinking about sales really useful. I recommend people check it out.

0: 0: https://kitemaker.co - the product management and collaboration tool that's crazy fast, loaded with hotkeys, and has deep integrations to your favorite tools like GitHub, Figma, Slack and Discord.

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#14

Post by preommr »

> 5. Listen and improve your pitch.

> Listen! You will get a lot of feedback from customers during your first calls, use that feedback to make adjustments to your messaging and improve your pitch.

It's easy to say just listen to your customers, but it's a lot more complex than that.

People will often give bad advice in an attempt to be polite, or because they're not understanding something.

It's not just about taking customer feedback at face value but also trying to figure out if you're getting the feedback you expected. And to be able to draw out as many insights as possible. Something that's rarely if ever straightforward.

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#16

Post by orliesaurus »

The most important thing to remember when selling anything, is to understand whether or not the person you’re facing wants to buy it. The word sales people use is “qualification”.

If a person is qualified to purchase, selling them your product is a no brainer. When you qualify a person wrongly, you’re going to regret it. Waste of time (yours and theirs) and money (mostly yours).

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#17

Post by CamperBob2 »

gumby wrote: post #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 bel…

Disagree. Any company that employs electrical engineers "has the in-house skills" to design their own office light fixtures and repair the microwave in the breakroom, for example. But is that a good use of engineering time?

It's just a recap of the infamous HN DropBox argument.

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#18

Post by herodoturtle »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #7
gumby wrote: post #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 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?

Or providing the same service but much better, and at a slightly elevated price that's justified. Took me a long time to learn that I can charge a lot and still add value.

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#19

Post by Silhouette »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #7
gumby wrote: post #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 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?

Exactly. I'm a professional programmer. I certainly could create my ideal text editor, from a technical point of view. It would probably only take me a few days to get the essentials covered.

But then it would probably take another month or more to polish it and fix a few annoying bugs. I'd want to integrate things like themes for when I feel like a change of style. And language servers for when I want more powerful integration, obviously. Oh, and integrated Git support is all the rage right now. But best make it modular in case my next client prefers Hg.

Then there would be a fortnight when I got obsessed with fuzzy string matching for search and replace and how it might interact with multiple selections to create a highly efficient quasi-macro system. That would inevitably lead down a rabbit hole of reading a dozen papers and watching several conference talks. OK, at least I might have got a nice speaking gig at the end of this one, at least if there were any local meet-ups actually happening by then.

But by that time it's mid-2021. I still haven't actually got a better editor overall than half a dozen choices I could have used the day I started. I also haven't made any money for the last three quarters, and the bills are coming due.

Just because I can fix something for myself, that doesn't necessarily mean I should or want to.

Re: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

#20

Post by indymike »

Three really good takeaways from the article: Be passionate, don't oversell and follow up. I've seen each of these trip up other founders and... ahem... me. There's another kind of overselling the article doesn't mention and it kills deals dead: selling after the buyer says, "ok let's go." I see this all the time in founders who are selling, mainly because... well... they are passionate.
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