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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.
When people think about what is needed for sales success, they jump to a lot of what people consider to be right brain activities. Storytelling, persuasion, rapport building, and such. Socialization, drinking, and dinner. Shooting from the hip and making it up as you go. They often don’t consider, or at least not as much, that sales is something that involves lots of metrics, math, and reporting. Guess what? You can’t escape math in sales either—especially if you want to have success at any amount of scale greater than a single rep.
All that instrumentation and recording that we talked about needs monitoring and analysis. Want to know how many emails to how many prospects are generally needed to get a demo on the board? You’re going to need the relevant Salesforce reports for that. Or want to know how many opportunities are required to close a deal, and what each of those opportunities is worth? Better have your win rates instrumented and reported on. Did you want to understand if you can afford to hire a sales development rep to feed your calendar? You’re going to need to know your average contract value. Did you want to know which of your sales reps are most efficient at converting opportunities into wins? You’ll need to split those win rates by rep, and probably add a revenue component to your calculation too. The sales leader who struggles with Salesforce reporting and Excel pivot tables is going to have a rough time in a high-velocity, high-scale sales environment.
Sales in the movies may be about dinners, suits, and booze, and there’s certainly still an expense-account-dinner component to it. But all of that activity is underpinned by a healthy helping of metrical excellence. You won’t be able to avoid it, so you might as well start getting cozy with it.
These certainly aren’t the only mindset changes that you’ll notice starting to take hold. However, they are the ones that are initially the most crucial for your transition from founder to sales professional. Moreover, as you may have seen as you read, these first mindset shifts have a complementary, multiplicative impact on each other. Success begets success.
If you record everything, you can be direct and non-scarcity-minded, quickly identifying opportunities to spend your time on now. You’ll be free to move on from imperfect opportunities, knowing that you can come back later to get them because you did a great job of recording the customer interaction and creating backstops for future engagement—all of which will raise your activity levels and efficiency.
Or if you expect to win, are unfazed by loss, and have adopted the mindset of expertise, it’s easier to adopt a stance of inevitability. That, in turn, will help you be fearless and authoritative in your interactions, and more consultative, which will lead to higher close rates.