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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.
As we discussed when we covered qualification in Early Prospecting, you want to be focused on potential customers that have all the characteristics required to have success with your solution—namely the business pain points that you solve and the staff who would use your solution. If they don’t meet those criteria, you don’t really want to spend your time talking to them. Even if they end up buying, they’re not going to have success and they’re not going to be happy—not with your solution, and not with you for selling it to them when you should have known better. Much better for you to instead funnel them away—giving them a good experience even when you’re saying, “We don’t make sense for you”—then spend your time giving relevant inbound leads a fantastic experience. Qualification is something you’ll want to keep in mind at every step, from how you set up your lead capture forms to the questions you ask once you get those leads on the phone.
First, you need a means by which to capture these inbound leads in a structured format. In the previous chapter, we talked about setting up a sales@yourcompanyname.com inbox as an early solution. And that can work to start—it’s definitely much better than nothing. But it also makes for a really difficult time of capturing the relevant demand signifiers in a helpful way. So as soon as you’re able, swap that email link out for a big fat Request Demo call to action on your homepage (ideally following the user down the page), and then point that button at some sort of form that lets you capture structured data. Don’t make it subtle. If someone shows up on your homepage and is eager to talk to you, make it damn easy.
Below are some examples of how to do this.