blog: how to do sales with no experience

contents/blog/sales-no-experience.md

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+---
+date: 2024-09-30
+title: How to do sales with no experience
+rootPage: /blog
+sidebar: Blog
+showTitle: true
+hideAnchor: true
+author:
+  - james-hawkins
+---
+
+"I just need to hire a sales person so we get some revenue". There it is people, the start of the end.
+
+Here's the rest of the movie:
+
+* salesperson starts
+* they get a few meetings, they're pretty random feeling
+* you start building stuff that people in the meetings have talked about
+* nothing happens for ages, or at all
+* you now don't know if the salesperson is at fault, or if you don't have product market fit
+
+## Who I'm writing this for
+
+Are you the founder of a startup that has never sold before, and you're trying to figure out product market fit? This is written for you.
+
+## One job, people
+
+You have one job. Get to product market fit.
+
+It's a _terrible_ idea to out
+
+It _could_ of course work, but it just adds another variable to the most important and most multivariate problem you will _ever_ solve as a startup.
+
+## A little pep talk
+
+_You_ are the best salesperson for your product. There will _never_ be anyone else as well qualified to sell.
+
+* You get the _why_ behind what you're building
+* You are the parent of your startup (TODO INSERT LINK TO AIRBNB FOUNDER MODE BIT ON THIS). This means you are able to tweak things - like shipping an extra feature on the spot, your pricing, or how you pitch the product.
+
+You need to prioritize figuring out making money as one of the very top things:
+
+* do users like your product
+* do users pay for it
+
+Everything else is a distraction early on. So what are you doing if you don't care about this? Likely being avoidant from all the rejection and fear of failure! You may not want to hear it but a magical salesperson will be _far_ less likely to figure this out than you.
+
+## Getting meetings
+
+Things that worked to recruit users:
+
+* Friends
+* People you've worked with before
+* Posting on your social media
+* LinkedIn DMs - customized
+* Cold emails - customized
+* Posting our startup to places where our users hang out (like HackerNews for PostHog), in a non spammy way
+
+Things that didn't really work:
+
+* Going to events - this just felt awkward and spammy
+* Automated emails or DMs - you aren't trying to scale up, you are trying to get just a few paying customers early on, so don't try to scale up your outreach, focus on the quality early on
+
+## Running a sales meeting
+
+As a more technical person, the first thing to be clear on is that this is a _sales_ meeting not a _product_ meeting.
+
+In _both_ types of meeting, you should be asking lots of questions. However, there are some key differences:
+
+* In sales meetings, you are aiming to _close down_ objections. In product meetings you want to _expand_ on them.
+* In sales meetings, you are steering the customer. In product meetings, you should let users meander.
+* In sales meetings, you learn by seeing if it closes or not. In product meetings, you learn based on what people are saying.
+
+We should talk vibes for a moment. First, don't make it painful for the customer to interact with you. _You_ are leading the meeting because you asked forit. A good way of doing this is to have some friendly rapport at the beginning, then layout "hey so there are four things I hoped to run through with you in this meeting. First, I want to get a grip on your company and priorities, second I'd like to cover X problem space a bit, and third, I wanted to talk about our product and show you a few relevant bits of it. Is that a good use of the next 25 minutes from your perspective?" Asking for _permission_ to ask questions means it'll feel less awkward when you do. Because you should.
+
+Failure mode - you go straight into a demo without any understanding of their business. This _feels_ like the easy thing to do, but you'll leave having no real idea _why_ they maybe don't move forward or return your calls.
+
+Keep the call light hearted, be energetic and funny if you can manage it. You are talking to a human being, not a robot. Gossip about the tech industry, whatever you might have in common. Introduce yourself properly at the start of the call, "Hi, I'm James, I'm one of the cofounders, I'm working on X because I kept seeing Y problem in my last company and couldn't help myself but to go out and solve it! I'm an engineer originally but here I am doing sales, wish me luck." Include _everyone_ in the discussion. Ask questions to specific people in the call and make sure _everyone_ on their side gets some time talking and gets some questions. You will need a relationship to close deals, so I'd avoid having your cofounder join or multiple people from your side joining the call - it's just harder to do it when you're doubled up. You can introduce others later as you see fit, but you need to quarter back things.
+
+Tone is almost more important than what you're saying. You are trying to give confidence to a customer to move forward with you. Acting confidently yourself will make it seem more like you know what you're talking about! Answer questions directly - if you are asked something that is yes or no, start with "yes - ...." or "no - ....". Act like nothing is a big deal - _you_ may feel stressed about pricing, but the customer won't be "so this costs $X a month, we'd normally do 14 days as a free trial so you can check it's worth it, can I count you in?" is better than saying "I'll email you pricing" and hiding from it. The prospect will _feel_ that you aren't confident if you hide from closing the deal. Just act like you've done everything many, many times before. Social proof helps a lot with this - you may not have _any_ customers, but you are talking to lots of people hopefully. In which case, talk about your other conversations (without sharing secret info obviously). For example, use phrases like these:
+
+* "People normally pick X because"
+* "I'd recommend you start with Y because usually..."
+* "I am willing to bet that you have an issue with X in your org, but tell me how much of a priority it is"
+* "Something I've seen from most of my other customer conversations is they find X painful"
+
+Be proud of who you are. When you're tiny, it can feel like you have no hope - you're maybe one or two people up against unicorn companies. Why would _anyone_ pick your product that _even you_ don't have complete confidence in yet? Well, there are many good reasons. First, it's very cool getting to meet the person that built the actual product. That's not an experience that customers ever normally get. This makes _you_ an interesting person to talk to. You can explain authentically _why_ you thought your product was worth building, and why you're excited about it. Be honest about what you do and do not know may be most useful. If you've never had a single call before, own that - "hey, I'm building this thing, you are _literally the first person_ I've ever talked to about it, so would you mind going gently with me?" Don't lie or pretend to be a fortune 500 if you're just one person! Customers are as clever as you and can see through it.
+
+## Closing a deal
+
+* Work backwards. Ask the customer something like "so to get you up and running as a customer, what are all the steps needed?" then get them to go into detail. Do they actually _have_ the budget or do they need to get it? If they need to get it, who do they get it from? Could you run a demo for the other person?
+
+Managing stakeholders is ultra important. If you are selling to businesses, it is likely that multiple people are involved in the decision. If you are single threaded into the customer, there are two ways you can easily fail to close a deal. First, your stakeholder may love you, but someone internal quickly "no, but..."s the deal without considering it. Second, your stakeholder may be unreliable or trying to be kind and acting more interested than they really are. Building up relationships with everyone who is relevant dramatically increases your chances of closing a deal, depending on its size. You can ask about this too "hey we could start at $100/month, is this a decision you can take totally solo or do you need to run it by someone else? Does your buying process change depending on the value?" Our first enterprise customer at PostHog miraculously started at exactly the budget under which more stakeholders needed to get involved in the deal! Consider yourself the quarterback of the deal, not just one of the team members.
+
+I'd encourage you to use group and individual dynamics to get stakeholders bought in. With larger deals ($50K+ generally) you probably need 1/1 relationships with multiple people, instead of having one stakeholder "control" your relationship with their organization. The way to achieve this is to suggest break out calls based on people's roles. For example, if there is an infosecurity person on the call, follow up with them directly with anything they need. Likewise, an engineer may need to have a more technical call with your technical cofounder.
+
+So, how do you figure out who needs to be involved? Working backwards from signature, make sure you ask who needs to say yes.
+
+Finally, qualification matters. Don't get happy ears. Pause for a minute, and now read this: the _majority_ of deals you work on will _not_ close. Sorry. Losing time to people that will never buy is the number one way you will fail to sell anything. So, how do you qualify? There are lots of frameworks, just use MEDDIC (one of the most common from what I gather):
+
+* Metrics - quantification of the potential gain (even if rough). Note: I've often found companies don't really care that much about slightly BS numbers.
+* Economic buyer - you are in contact with them
+* Decision criteria - how you are being evaluated
+* Decision process - the steps the company does to move forward
+* Identify pain - dig a level deeper here than you naturally would to get a good understanding "what is the impact of not solving this problem"
+* Champion - lots of people might like you but do you have someone fighting for you
+* Competition - do you have any?
+
+## A word on pricing
+
+Sometimes it makes sense to launch a product for free. For today, I'm not going to go into when I think that does or does not make sense. For this piece, I'm going to assume you are trying to valid product market fit and thus are trying to charge money for your product.
+
+The amount you charge makes a material difference to how the sale goes. Massively generalzing, I'd put these as:
+
+* Below the amount anyone cares about - $10-100/month territory
+* Something one person can buy by themself - $500-$1k/month territory
+* Something a couple of people can buy - $1k/month-$2.5k/month
+* Quite a big deal to move forward - $30K-$100K+
+* A very big deal to move forward - $500K+
+
+Think about your product strategy and what your pricing says about it - is your product a one person product to buy? It feels weird that you could company-wide dramatically help a company succeed but then charge $10/month. Get your pricing in an appropriate ballpark to how you see it being adopted else it signals you won't solve the pain point you're promising to solve.
+
+If you are a product-led company - somehow you have people coming inbound, _and_ you believe that this is your future too, then your pricing model should be to _get out of the way of adoption_, so don't "price to value". Otherwise, I suggest you start by charging close to how your competitors charge, then going from there. If you have no competitors, you should experiment with wildly different pricing to make sure you don't undercharge by 100x, for example.
+
+Use your pricing _model_ too - it's not just about the amount you charge. Sometimes it's the _way_ you charge. Sometimes it's not the price that's the issue, it's the perceived risk of moving forward. You can offer things like a free trial or usage-based pricing to counter this concern. Sometimes the perceived risk might be security related - sending data to your company. Think through likely objections in advance - run a "pre mortem" with your cofouner - and figure out how you'll handle the likely objections a buyer may have.
+
+## What about sweet, sweet self serve?
+
+The developer's dream - ship it, build a payment flow and let people buy. This worked incredibly well for PostHog. However, in the early days, it wasn't necessary - and building a payment flow before we had done some sales manually would have meant:
+
+* we'd have not known objections people gave us on a call
+* we'd have had the wrong pricing
+* we'd have not known why some companies were churning (non technical people) compared to others (more engineering led) because we'd have not had a chance to "get" them
+* we'd not have had any human relationship with customers, so when they had problems they told us about them instead of just cancelling
+
+## Don't stop though
+
+Once a deal is sold, the work _begins_. Your number one priority should be to look after your existing customer base. Delight them, and they'll bring you more customers anyway.
+
+Generally, an easy way to do this is to have clear responsibility for existing customers (I would have my cofounder solely focused on this whilst I got new ones in), and as open as possible communication - the goal is they tell you about a problem before they churn, and _ideally_ they give you a chance to clarify what you should build next.
+
+I'd recommend you default into creating a private slack channel with each customer. Customers can easily add their team, you can DM individuals or the group, and people tend to share easily on slack - they're often in it all day for work so will tend to reply quickly. Whereas people love ignoring emails.