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Updated August 22, 2022Youโre 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.
Modern sales is not about trying to sell snake oil to a mark.
Rather, sales professionals are the grease of the market. They seek out inefficiencies in the world in the form of qualified prospects who have the business pain that the proposed solution resolves. Then they engage and consult with the prospect, and propose the implementation of the solution, to help fix that business pain.
As such, expertness in the vertical in which you are selling is an absolute requirement. You need to be a student of the game you are playing and, ideally, even more expert than the prospects to whom you are selling. This means absorbing as much information as possible about the field, the business processes that exist within it, the common organizational players, and the other solutions that already help with these business processes or compete with yours.
This expertness will make you fearless in your interactions. It will help with your activity orientation, removing your desire to over-prep for conversations and empowering you to just call, just email, just act. It will help with your ability to be direct, to operate from a position of inevitability, and to quickly establish rapport by demonstrating authority.
But even before you achieve that level of expertness, you can adopt a mindset of fearlessness, confident that you have enough expertise to engage in any conversation. Youโll find this manifesting in your real life, as it becomes easier and easier for you to strike up conversation with any random stranger on the bus or at the grocery store, knowing that youโll have no problem participating in whatever ensues. As with others of these mindsets, not only will you start seeing this one show up naturally, you can also push in that direction proactively. Compel yourself to talk to grocery store clerks, people in lines, or strangers at parties with no introductory context. Youโll be exercising your fearlessness muscles.
The level of transparency in a well-instrumented sales organization is a massive change for most people. From win and loss notes and closing ratios to leaderboards and error checking, everything is right there, available for everyone to see.
If youโre doing a good job, you will have all customer-facing interaction instrumented and recordedโevery single email, every presentation, and every callโeither in its entirety in the case of presentations and email, or in some partial capacity when it comes to calls and conversations. You should get comfortable with teammates jumping into those records and asking questions about why a call went this way or that way. Your creation of this transparent data is of paramount importance for the success of the organization, from both a go-to-market and a product-development standpoint.
Similarly, activity levels, or lack thereof, should be clearly documented and inescapable. If a rep spaced out today for some reason, the lack of calls and emails will be fully observable. And if your CRM is really well done, it will be observable down to the granularity of which hours of the day that rep was lagging.