The Two Main Stages of Your Sales Efforts

You’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.

While the entire early-stage sales transformation involves massive learnings, they will largely fall into two distinct buckets: first, figuring it out and then second, once figured out, scaling it. This is related to the notion of product-market fit, that Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Marc Andreessen have made common parlance in the software industry. Figuring it out comes before substantial product-market fit, mainly. Scaling it is after. Both require different sales approaches, and applying the approaches designed for the latter while you’re still in the first bucket can be disastrous.

In the first epoch, it’s a tight, iterative process where you’re evangelically selling (there may not even be money involved) your solution (or perhaps even would-be solution, before you’ve even started building it) to would-be customers, and sorting out if indeed they have the pain that you’re looking to address, how big that pain is, and what they’d be willing to pay to resolve it. This stage involves its own set of approaches, which largely won’t be very scalable but will support those early learnings.

​important​The second epoch comes only after you’ve passed the first (for reasons we’ll discuss more in depth later). This is when you know your solution is viable, it solves customer pain, they are willing to pay money, and now it’s simply a question of scaling the number of humans who are doing the selling and, by extension, scaling all inputs and outputs associated with that activity. This book will be split accordingly, with the foundations and materials for early sales coming first, followed by setting up customer success programs and then scaling your sales management and execution efforts.

And while much of what will be discussed in the coming pages will be largely prescriptive in nature, the goal will be to present the sections in a way to provide a framework for understanding and thought, to aid you in your own solutions. Yes, taking what has worked before and adopting it wholesale will shorten your learning curve, but if you don’t understand the underpinnings, there’s always the risk of engaging in “cargo cult” sales activities—where you don’t quite know why you’re doing the thing you’re doing, but it worked over there, so it must work over here, right? Lastly, by no means is what follows the be-all, end-all, be all of early-stage direct sales. So if you can, adopt an engineering mindset as regards your sales approach and consider yourself the product manager of your go-to-market strategy, stealing best practices where they make sense, rejecting that which is no longer applicable or doesn’t fit, and building anew where needed.