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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.
You don’t have to take these constituent parts and write them into a page-long meditation, put it on a shelf, and never touch it again or have a holistic messaging document that you deliver verbatim. But it’s good to have a concept of what the narrative looks like, summed up, all together. Again, the narrative actually exists separate from whatever medium you end up collateralizing it in, whether slides, video, messaging, and so on. Whatever collateral you use, though, you need to be able to tell a coherent story.
Test yourself by experimenting with an elevator pitch, or how you might explain your story to someone you met at a cocktail party who has intimacy with the space you’re working in. This won’t be a full treatise, but rather the first skeleton of your story. Then, based on your interaction with the listener, as they ask more questions here or there, you can expand—because you’re deeply familiar with the details that underlie the cursory overview.
Another great exercise is to try writing it down to see if you can incorporate all of the pieces we’ve covered. So what would this look like? Let’s consider a couple approaches.
What’s the problem? Technical recruiting is really hard! Finding software-engineering talent that has the skills that your organization requires, and then engaging with them to get them to consider your organization, is a tough problem.
Who has the problem? What’s the cost of not solving the problem? It’s something that makes the lives of technical sourcers, recruiters, and recruiting managers rough, particularly because if they don’t solve the problem, they may have to pay large sums of money to recruiting agencies—25% of a first-year salary of ~$125K or more. Otherwise they don’t hire on schedule, and that impacts the ability of their organizations to ship software on time and make revenue!
How is this currently solved? Why doesn’t that work? Yes, you can use things like job boards or LinkedIn, but the problem is that unemployment is so low in software engineering that very few engineers are actively looking for jobs. And because most people don’t really pay attention to LinkedIn or update their profiles, software-engineering profiles have a tendency not to exist or to be missing the skill information that indicates whether the engineer in question would be a good fit. Not to mention the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of recruiters on LinkedIn messaging every engineer they can find, and that creates tons of noise to cut through.
What has changed? But the good news is, the internet has undergone some amazing changes of late to help make finding and engaging with these potential hires much easier and more effective. Because people are spending so much more time online, day in and out, on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Meetup and professional networks like GitHub and Stack Overflow—and because of the general move toward the digitization of work materials—there are reams and reams of information available. If properly leveraged, that material can help recruiters find talented individuals based on the activity they engage in online—tweeting about iOS development, being a member of an Android Meetup, participating in email lists about Java, and so on. (How does it work?) TalentBin scoops up all the information that individuals leave as digital fingerprints of their professional selves, analyzes it, and turns it into profiles for these individuals, with skill details and contact information. Then we let recruiters search and review the profiles and reach out to folks.
How do you know it’s better? Because TalentBin makes use of these mountains of implicit professional activity, it solves the problem of finding individuals who are not searching for jobs, not present in job board resume databases, and undiscoverable on LinkedIn due to their thin profiles. For a typical search like “Ruby on Rails” in the San Francisco Bay Area, TalentBin returns 5x the number of results compared to LinkedIn Recruiter. Moreover, 60% of these profiles have personal email addresses, which are so, so much better for engaging candidates. Recruiter open, click, and response rates using TalentBin- provided personal email addresses are 3–5x better than generic InMail outreach. And while the raw statistics tell the story, the hundreds of customers TalentBin has amassed—who have hired thousands of technical staff with the solution—tell the story even better. Not to mention the awards, press, and analyst accolades TalentBin has won since entering the market.
And all of this is available to you for ~$6K per user, per year. That includes unlimited requisitions, searches, and profile views, and unlimited email sends. Compare this to ~$8K for a LinkedIn Recruiter account with inferior technical candidate search recall, capped at a hundred InMails a month. It’s a total steal!
What is the problem? Who has it? Being a B2B sales rep is tough! You have to manage dozens of concurrent conversations, follow up at the right time, and not drop any balls. So too with being a sales manager. You have to make sure that your team is engaging in high activity—but also the right activity—and keep track of potential issues, while forecasting how your revenue achievement will end up for the quarter.
What is the cost of the issue? And this is serious business. If a rep drops a ball, forgetting to follow up with a prospect at the right time or neglecting to send a proposal as promised, it can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue. Moreover, from an efficiency standpoint, if reps aren’t sufficiently productive, they’re missing out on potential deals and conversations. And for sales managers, not being able to manage the activity levels of staff, identify weaknesses, and forecast accurately could mean leaving problems unaddressed, which can turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars in target shortfalls. And that could mean missed quarters and stock impacts. It’s no joke.
How is this currently solved? For how important customer-relationship tracking and management is, it’s amazing how poorly it’s generally done. You have reps either living out of their email and calendars or using ancient, clunky contact managers like Act! or GoldMine, or last-generation CRMs made by Siebel that look like something out of Tron.
Why don’t current solutions work? The problem with these approaches is that email and calendars are not designed for tracking customer relationships and make it more likely for very costly balls to be dropped. Last-generation CRM systems require reps to be in front of their computers, dialed into a VPN. And even if they are, those systems are extremely clunky and hard to use—creating more time and bookkeeping overhead rather than actually enabling reps to sell more, faster.
What has changed? However, with the rise of the Internet, now the power of modern, usable, always-accessible CRM can be available to reps wherever they are, whenever.
How does it work? Salesforce provides a modern, next-generation CRM that is accessed through the browser, connecting reps to their important deal information quickly and easily. And because it’s software delivered as a service, the latest and greatest innovations in rep-efficiency features are available to all users, all at once, rather than requiring IT to upgrade the on-premise CRM system. And because web technologies make for easy interoperability, Salesforce has a massive partner ecosystem of amazing add-on tools that offer all manner of efficiency benefits.
How do you know it’s better? Because the software is available to reps wherever and whenever via a browser and is much more usable—you get reps who are logging in and updating opportunities and pipelines as much as 3–10x as often as on traditional systems. That not only reduces the potential for dropped balls—as you can see by the 20–50% increase in win rates for reps who adopt Salesforce—but also makes for more accurate forecasts on a rep and sales manager basis. We’ve seen a 30–50% reduction in missed forecasts for managers whose teams use Salesforce. All of this has resulted in Salesforce being the most lauded CRM solution on the market, consistently in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM, and gaining tens of thousands of customers.
Once you’ve formed your narrative, you’re going to be taking this core story and distributing it in different formats for easy consumption by interested parties. Generally this will take the form of sales collateral for prospects, but the same narrative will get recast for other interested parties too: press, analysts, partners, and even investors and acquirers.
But if you don’t have that narrative nailed—if it’s not coherent and persuasive—all the collateral in the world won’t do you a bit of good. It’ll just be shiny nonsense. Nail your narrative first.
Great, now you do it:
What is the problem?
Who has the problem?
What are the costs associated with the problem?
How do people currently solve this problem, and how do those solutions fall down?
What has changed, enabling a new solution?
How does the new solution work?
How do you know it’s better? (Quantitative, Qualitative)
Put that all together, then be sure you’re armed with qualitative and quantitative proof that yours is a better solution. Finally, give some thought to your initial pricing structure, and you’ll be ready to take your narrative out into the world.