Things I Wish I Knew About Sales
As I embarked on my first true sales journey with Dori, I really wish someone would’ve told me to get a CRM set up and automate as much of the sales process as you can. Without a CRM you can’t really track anything in the sales process. Well, you can, but good luck building and maintaining excel sheets. Also, it’s just too easy to get set up on a CRM. HubSpot has a HubSpot for Startups program that gets you the basic version for free and a discount on future packages. Fair warning that you’ll need to upgrade to HubSpot Professional (at least for Sales) quickly if you want access to the full suite of automation for high volume sales outreach, but I can honestly say it’s been immensely helpful for our 2-person sales team (3 including the CEO).
Having a CRM is especially important for founders that are not familiar with sales or have no experience doing sales. The reality is that for most pre-seed and seed stage companies, sales are founder led sales. This is often because the product is only an MVP, likely super buggy and if someone’s going to take a bet on you at this stage, they need to believe that the product will eventually be a super useful tool for them, but they also need to believe in you and your vision for both the product and the Company.
Some Unsolicited Sales Advice
This leads more to my second piece of advice: founders should be on every sales call in the early days. We got this advice from an informal advisor early on and it’s been a game changer in terms of both customer response and conversion. I am a SME, and I am very good at helping founders bring their visions to life, but I’m not the one who had the vision for Dori. Customers, partners, current and future employees and essentially everyone in the ecosystem wants to hear about the vision in the founder’s own words in the early days. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing a real opportunity to drive up conversion on customer calls. Eventually, this will no longer be sustainable, but as the company scales, be sure to continue to share your vision with the world, either through updates, podcasts or blogs. The ecosystem wants to hear from you.
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Disclaimer: I am not being compensated by HubSpot or anyone else for this post, I just really like their product.
