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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.
Generally speaking, we’re taught that we should conserve resources. We’re told not to waste things. We’re all probably guilty of this—saving those extra MP3s in our iPhone’s music app, or leaving that email in our inbox, telling ourselves that we’re eventually going to get around to it. Don’t throw away that half sandwich; you can keep it in the fridge for later.
Stop that, now. Reject a mindset of scarcity—and, hence, hoarding—and embrace a mindset of plenty. The thinking should be, “Even if this one does not work out, there’s a line of thousands standing behind it that I need to get to.” So if a deal is stalling, if the customer doesn’t have the budget, if it turns out an account is not a perfect fit, and so on, great, fine, close it out. On to the next. You’ll get them the next time around.
The thing that is scarce in sales is time. To quote one of TalentBin’s key early sales staff, Brad Snider, spending “good time with good opportunities” is paramount. And, by extension, that means not spending time on opportunities that aren’t going to pan out. We’ll talk more about this later as it relates to qualifying accounts, and there certainly is an art and science piece to judging whether an account is worth it.
You should be ruthless with respect to truncating unproductive conversations with marginal opportunities, especially at the earliest of stages, when the world is a greenfield of untouched accounts in front of you.
If you do not, those marginal, crappy opportunities will cruft up your pipeline, hiding the golden opportunities on which you should be spending your time. It will be unclear which action you should take next on which account; the good will be hidden by the bad, reducing your ability to act at scale, and generally eroding your efficiency. Even if you do end up closing the marginal opp, a customer who is a bad target will consume more than their fair share of customer success resources, likely not achieve the best ROI, form a bad opinion of your solution, and tell others about it, before churning out themselves.
Spend good time with good opportunities. Let go of the marginal opps, knowing that you can get them later if they become more viable. There’s plenty of opportunity here.
Everyone’s a fan of working smarter, not harder in the modern knowledge-worker economy. Well, sometimes you just have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. There are certainly ways to ensure that your activity is high quality; you can also leverage it with technology to get more in less time and higher impact out of each unit of activity. We’ll dig into that more later. But to quote Joseph Stalin (likely apocryphally), “Quantity has a quality all its own,” and internalizing that is key.
More time on the phone. More demos. More proposals sent. More emails sent. More dials. More keystrokes. All of the above is activity, and activity is the goal.
This is often in direct contravention to typical notions of quality work: Thinking deeply about the perfect response to that email. Spending five minutes to game out a call before you make it. Reading, and rereading, that email to understand every nuance. Studying up on the materials to make sure that your pitch is perfect.