Let’s talk sales

The ability to sell something, the capacity to provoke a positive behaviour on a people or a person of interest.

This is how the crusades happened, this is how the Cristopher Columbus got funded for the discovery of America. This is how Augustus kickstarted the expansion of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

You sell or else.

It’s the one thing that keeps startups from dying, to keep mediocre products afloat, it’s the one thing that can turn you into a one man superpower if you surround yourself with good products and good services.

I’ve been focusing on “Founder” led sales for the past couple of weeks. It’s an interesting concept, since the founders are the most capable people to talk about their own products and services; their own vision. And vision casting is a key part of sales, it’s a key part of closing enterprise clients, it’s a key part of fundraising.

This means:

• where will your company and offerings be in the next couple of years?
• how does your vision affect the success of your clients?
• will you surround yourself with great products and a team of A players?

Answering these three questions truthfully will point you towards whether a sale will close or not.

Previous Newsletter

Trials and Tribulations

I’ve reduced the use of the word “try”

Oh yeah I’m “trying out” a new GTM strategy, oh yeah I really “tried my best” to close that client, oh yeah we “tried fixing” the bug. Nobody cares.

People don’t recall when you have tried. They look at results, most times cold hard metrics and you’re supposed to be having a gazillion of them.

If at any stage of your life you think or God forbid “feel” like people should appreciate you for “trying”, two things:

• Nobody cares about you trying
• Nobody cares about your feelings

This is the tribulation of life. Don’t ask why or why not. It just is.

The people who climbed their way to the top rarely talked about “trying” they talked about their achievements, what the people they have led have accomplished, their titles which were granted after years of more tribulations. Not once “trying” it’s execution. It’s action.

Napoléon was among the bottom third of his class, he had to graduate in advance so he can afford military school after his father passed away. That is a good example of tribulations.

Alexander was compared to his father from birth, every single achievement he had to overachieve just so he could be seen as a person. He had to conquer every landmass until his own army refused to walk another mile to surpass his father. He was the son of a king, he had to transform from prince to Alexander the Great. This is another good example of tribulations.

You get the point.

You do hard things, you get tested and you surpass the obstacles to become great, you don’t “try”, you do.

How to close and how to find closers

There is a big issue when the founder is too technical and cannot sell to save their lives. This calls for a good sales oriented co founder.

They will act as the account executive for the company, they will keep relationships good with other businesses that can use your services and make it so deals keep flowing. Which again, means that you need to build your own pipeline from ground up.

Who to reach out to, how to reach out to them, why? Where do you get the data, where do you keep these accounts. This is all pipeline building. When you’re doing it for the first time it gets frustrating, once you have a few reps in, it gets easier.

Let none survive

Funny thing about startups and investment is that people often either forget about competitors completely or hyper fixate on their competitors. I find talking about your competitors is quite inefficient, unless you make it personal and public; this is what Oracle did, this is what Microsoft did.

But when you do focus on competition, you need to clear out your competition, most of the time with some amounts of corporate intrigue but not too much. You need to beat them in sales, you need to make it so you seem unbelievably ahead.

People, media, they focus on the optics the most. They focus on the narrative, you need to put the narrative under your own control as best you can.

Takeaways

So just to repeat;

• Pick an enemy
• Burn the boats
• Beat them in sales
• Control the narrative (DON’T lie here, facts can be exaggerated sure but lying isn’t recommended)

After you do these, you will most likely win, and with that you will have left no one alive.

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Stay intense, it’s the best moat to have,