Youβre 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.
βimportantβThis book is written in stages, in that your sales efforts, like your product development efforts, will typically take a stepwise path where subsequent stages build on the prior stages.
You can read through the entire book if you wantβeach chapter has estimated reading times, and all in it shouldnβt take more than an hour or two per chapter. That said, usually you should only go as far as the stage that youβre atβin that worrying about things like, say, sales hiring, before you even have your sales narrative, slides, or outreach collateral in place, is going to be a premature optimization, and likely a distraction.
The goal of the book is to be a resource you can come back to frequently, like a textbook, when you need to refresh yourself on something or when youβre about to enter a new stage of your sales maturity process and need to see whatβs coming next.
While the entire early-stage sales transformation involves massive learnings, they will largely fall into two distinct buckets: first, figuring it out and then second, once figured out, scaling it. This is related to the notion of product-market fit, that Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Marc Andreessen have made common parlance in the software industry. Figuring it out comes before substantial product-market fit, mainly. Scaling it is after. Both require different sales approaches, and applying the approaches designed for the latter while youβre still in the first bucket can be disastrous.
In the first epoch, itβs a tight, iterative process where youβre evangelically selling (there may not even be money involved) your solution (or perhaps even would-be solution, before youβve even started building it) to would-be customers, and sorting out if indeed they have the pain that youβre looking to address, how big that pain is, and what theyβd be willing to pay to resolve it. This stage involves its own set of approaches, which largely wonβt be very scalable but will support those early learnings.
βimportantβThe second epoch comes only after youβve passed the first (for reasons weβll discuss more in depth later). This is when you know your solution is viable, it solves customer pain, they are willing to pay money, and now itβs simply a question of scaling the number of humans who are doing the selling and, by extension, scaling all inputs and outputs associated with that activity. This book will be split accordingly, with the foundations and materials for early sales coming first, followed by setting up customer success programs and then scaling your sales management and execution efforts.