editione1.0.1
Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
At the beginning of this book, I told you that your go-to-market would have two stages: First, you would need to figure out how to sell your offering (the approaches for which were discussed in the first two-thirds of the book). Then, you’d begin to scale that up (which is what the last part of the book was about).
If you are now successfully scaling up, then congratulations! You’ve moved beyond the province of this book. You are now a bona fide sales professional. And if you have a set of sellers reporting to you—successfully closing business—then guess what? You are now a sales leader. Way to go!
At this point, it’s usually a good idea to hire someone to handle the day-to-day work of managing the sales team so you can move on to other parts of the organization that need your assistance.
However, before you progress to professionalizing your sales organization, it’s key that you’re ready to do so, and that you’ve met the exit criteria for moving to the next stage of your company. Remember how the exit criteria for knowing that it was time to hire dedicated sales staff was that you had successfully sold to a statistically significant number of customers? Well, the exit criteria for knowing that you’re ready to hand the reins off to a dedicated sales leader is that you have a set of sellers who are successfully selling your solution at least as well as you were.
This isn’t to say everything will be humming like a fine-tuned machine, because startups are chaos and that will likely never be the case. However you will want to know that you have successfully gotten one, two, or three sellers to the point of repeatability. If you have, you should definitely congratulate yourself. That’s a very powerful thing. SaaS sales orgs “scale up via scale out,” which is to say that revenue growth comes from more sellers selling more deals—not from a small number of sellers magically selling bigger and bigger deals more quickly. So proving that you can bring new salespeople into your organization, and that they can generate ~$30k, ~$50k, ~$100k, and up in revenue a month, is a momentous occasion in the development of your company. It’s also something that investors will likely be very excited by. You’ve now proven that you can take the money an investor gives you and turn it into salespeople who, just a few months out, will start bringing cash into the organization. That’s a good return on investment!
If you haven’t proven this quite yet, well then you’re probably not ready to move on to professionalized sales management. While it’s tempting to make it someone else’s responsibility to own the management and enablement of your small band of experimental sellers, it’s a rather dangerous exercise. Having proven the ability to sell this repeatedly yourself, you are now the most expert person in the world at selling your solution. You’re the one who cracked the code, so you’re also the best-positioned person to teach others how to sell your solution. Having someone else do it would be engaging in a high-risk game of telephone—with you teaching the new leader, who would then teach the reps—and that’s a situation that your company likely doesn’t have time for. So this is your warning that prematurely adding a sales leader before you’ve systematized your sales process is likely a losing proposition in all but the rarest of cases.
If you have indeed met the exit criteria for professionalizing your sales leadership, the next question of course is what type of person should you be looking for?
Just as it was when you were converging on a hiring profile for your reps, it’s important to understand the difference between varying candidate characteristics, and what is stage-appropriate for your organization. People throw around the term “VP of Sales” quite a bit (and boy, people LOVE to spill it all over LinkedIn profiles), but please be clear about what you’re actually hiring for.
For the most part, assuming that you’re hiring a sales leader to slide in on top of a handful of AEs and SDRs to stabilize that team—and then likely double it in the short term, and maybe even double it again shortly thereafter—what you’re looking for is a hands-on tactical sales leader. That person is currently probably running a single sales team (for example6 AEs), or perhaps a director who sits on top of a handful of teams (such as an 8-person SMB AE team, a 4-person mid-market AE team, and a 6-person SDR team). And this tactical sales leader is probably working at a similar organization to the ones we used to target our AE candidate profile: a scaled startup that’s in your space, or a tangential space, with a similar sales motion and average selling price, and that’s scaled up to dozens or maybe low hundreds of sellers but isn’t a doddering dinosaur. If you’re a new business intelligence (BI) company, hiring a sales manager or director from Looker, Mode, Domo, etc., is the better bet than hiring one from Tableau, SAP, or Oracle. If you’re a new recruiting solution, it’s the better bet to hire from Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, etc. than from, say, Oracle, Taleo, SAP, or SuccessFactors. Whatever your space, you should be able to figure out the set of companies to consider.
I won’t get much more into this, as this is something that I haven’t done enough times to speak authoritatively on (whereas the stuff earlier in the book I’ve done the hell out of). Suffice it to say, this is an extremely critical hire, and the key is to reference, and back-channel reference, the heck out of any candidates who get down to the finish line. Once they’re on board, your job is to help this new sales leader ingest your well-documented sales process and quickly get up to speed successfully managing the team. Congratulations! You are no longer the Sales Manager. You are now the manager of the Sales Manager.
That was quite a journey, eh? For those of you who are reading the end of this book because you’ve advanced your organization through all the steps described in previous chapters: Congratulations! You’re at a stage that very few get to, and should be very proud of your work. And for those of you who are reading this conclusion while still partway through the journey: Keep at it. While acquiring knowledge is important, having the perseverance and grit to put it to work is paramount. This book is set up to be a constant companion for you as you go from step to step. It’s less a one-time read, and more a handy desk reference that’s here for you as you hit challenges along the way. And you will.
Either way, acquiring the skills of selling is an important arrow in your professional quiver. Far too many startups have floundered for want of being good at sales, and the same is true of individual startup executives and operators. Deciding to get good at sales is the first step, the next step is learning about it (this book!), and the step after that is honing your craft through ongoing effort. Having internalized what’s presented in this book, you’re well on your way.
Founding Sales was written because there wasn’t yet a tactical textbook for early-stage sales written specifically for founders and other non-sellers. But there’s a whole constellation of high-quality sales books for sales professionals. I’ve listed my favorites below. I highly recommend you check them out to help further your sales education.
The Transparency Sale (Todd Caponi)
The Challenger Sale (Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson)
Triangle Selling (Hillmon Sorey and Cory Bray)
SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham)
Cracking the Sales Management Code (Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana)
The Sales Acceleration Formula (Mark Roberge)
Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization (Jacco Van Der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro )
The Sales Development Playbook (Trish Bertuzzi)
Leading Sales Development (Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan)
Fanatical Prospecting (Jeb Blount and Mike Weinberg)