Evangelical Sales Is Not Scaling Sales

You’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.

When you’re first starting out, there are many things you will do in your sales role that don’t look anything like sales you see in the movies, at a large sales organization, and so forth.

The goal of the first section of this book will be to discuss what those stage-appropriate activities look like, to ensure that you actually get to the second part: scaling what works.

One hallmark of this section will be doing the activities yourself. A lot of time founders think that once they’ve built a product, they can “sprinkle some sales pros on it” and poof, it’ll work. This is an incredibly destructive misconception, largely popularized by both founders and funders who don’t actually know terribly much about sales and are falsely pattern matching off of bad blog posts, movies, and sales books targeted to behaviors they’ve seen at later-stage organizations. This misconception has historically resulted in delayed or never-reached product-market fit. Steve Blank talks about it substantially in his Four Steps to the Epiphany. Much like startups are not just littler versions of large organizations, startup sales is not a smaller version of large, established sales orgs.

There’s an old saying that an organization can’t really start scaling until they’ve fired their first VP of Sales. This conception falsely presents this as a failure of that VP of Sales. Rather, this is more a failure of the founders in thinking that they could hand a sales professional who’s not a product manager a nascent product, and magically she would be able to sell the hell out of it.

At this stage, sales is in large part evangelical product management and product marketing, and this is why you, as a founder, need to be involved in it. There needs to be as little abstraction between the person crafting, the person taking the message of your value proposition and probing its utility to would-be customers, and the people who are working on deciding what to build, what to build now versus later, and doing the actual building. The loop between articulation, presentation, listening, and building needs to be a tight one. If it can be the same person (no abstraction), then all the better, within the bounds of time constraints.

In the case of TalentBin, Jason, my co-founder, led our product efforts and engineering management as we were building TalentBin, but as he and I are largely symbiotically attached at the brain, it was very easy for me to come back to the office and discuss where our product hypotheses were good, where we should double down, and where we were wasting engineering investment. One might argue that we could have done a better job of getting outside the building, by me pulling Jason along more often, but we were able to get by with this approach, as long as one product-minded founder (me) was involved in the early sales processes.

Second, in addition to doing the actual work yourself, a lot of that work will be activity that doesn’t scale. Like doing on-site sales visits for a product that will end up selling for less than ~$1K a year. The economics of that would never work at scale. Or manual implementation and professional services for early customers. Or manual lead generation via mindless copying and pasting from one tab of your browser to a spreadsheet in the other. Things like these are not scalable, but at this stage, it doesn’t matter. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham has popularized this notion with regards to consumer products, and it applies here as well. At this stage, this is largely an exercise in information gathering and, as such, is an investment exercise as much as a revenue-generating exercise.

And while we’ve spoken above to the benefits of founder-led early sales, and non-scalable activities, I want to take a second to speak specifically to the perils of premature professionalization and scale-mindedness of your sales apparatus.

Those who think they can just sprinkle some sales on it are going to be in for a big surprise. You will likely hire that first Account Executive or VP of Sales, probably from an organization that builds something competitive to your offering, maybe even the incumbent. Had we embarked on this ill-advised path, we would have likely hired an Account Executive or Sales Manager from LinkedIn. Once you hire that person, they will then call on some of their existing accounts and secure some early pilots, or worse, maybe even bounce off the purchasing decision-maker and not be able to tell you why. They’ll tell you what the customer said, but likely not what the customer meant. You won’t be able to tell between pure sales failure and product failure. And all sorts of other unpleasant things.

This is because, with exceptions, sales professionals are not product managers or product marketers. They are in the business of taking a known-good solution, and taking it to market, in a repeatable scalable way. They’re good at finding prospects that match a known-good persona. They’re good at persuasively presenting a known-good solution that fits a known problem. They’re good at having many concurrent customer conversations related to that known-good offering. They’re good at enlarging deal size, sniffing out deal influencers, and handling objections. But you don’t need that yet.

You need evangelical sales, which is a mix of product management and product marketing. So hiring one of those folks from a mature organization with a known-good, scalably solid solution won’t get you what you need. Save her resume for when you get to the second act and are ready to scale, because she’ll be awesome then. For now, you need someone who can take that partially baked product, formulate a coherent narrative around it, present it, and then iterate. You need evangelical sales, which is a mix of product management and product marketing. You need you.

Moreover, if you are unwilling to do these unscalable things to start, instead by assuming that because Reference Organization ABC doesn’t do those things, you can’t and shouldn’t, you will encounter all manner of bad things. Instead of having information-rich transfer with your would-be customers, you’ll be too focused on executing via telesales and miss critical insights. You’ll be trying to intuit what customers mean based on their activity on your website. Or by buying lists of prospects that are poorly targeted, rather than prospecting your own lists, you’ll waste your time having bad conversations with irrelevant targets.

Another common anti-pattern founders in early stage go-to-markets fall into is simply not selling, full stop. They falsely believe you can simply hang a shingle out for your offering, and magically customers will come and find you. And moreover, they’ll simply buy without you having to talk to them. Even better! The myth of the sales rep-less go-to-market plan is a persistent, seductive, and nefarious myth in the technology industry that trips up many founders, especially those who hear stories of how Dropbox or Twilio or whatever large successful company has no sales staff. Of course, when you search on LinkedIn in those organizations for sales staff, they are indeed crawling with them. But don’t tell that to the founders who would love to tell themselves the story that they don’t have to learn how to sell!

A lot of this bad behavior is driven by misconceptions and misplaced expectations on the part of founders. They think they can’t do sales because they’ve never done it before. Or that they’re “not salesy.” This is absolute nonsense. Sales acumen is not inborn. It’s just another skill to be learned. And if you can’t roll up your sleeves and learn a new skill set, then woe betide your startup, because startups are just one long chain of learning new things and solving new problems. Sales is no different—just another problem to be solved. And if and when you make it to scaling mode, knowing the ins and outs of the contributing role of the sales individual will make you a better recruiter, manager, and auditor of your growing sales force.

At the earliest stage of your go-to-market, your success will depend on an evangelical sales mindset, focused on rich, customer interaction and information gathering, and not being overly concerned about scale thinking, and professionalization.

So roll up your sleeves, because this is your job now.