Sales Lessons Technical Founders Learn the Hard Way

Introduction

During their first startup, many technical founders learn some hard lessons when it comes to sales.

You often hear stories of technical founders spending 6 months or more building a perfect product only to find out that nobody is willing to pay for it. If you’re building the product for yourself or as a hobby, that’s perfectly fine, but if your goal is to create a successful B2B software product, you’re going to need a more strategic approach to avoid such costly mistakes. Every startup is different and every process is unique, but here are some of the most common mistakes we see new founders make.

• The sales process needs to begin before development starts.
• You’re not selling a product - you are selling a solution to your customer’s problem.
• Break your customer’s into small segments based on metadata

The sales process needs to begin before development starts.

This is a trap technical founders frequently fall into, but it is relevant for others as well. As a business, your goal is to generate revenue and we do that through sales. We can’t build a product and then try to sell it, we need to be selling during the entire development process. This ensures we are building a product customers want and gives us the ability to prioritize features customers are willing to pay for. Many products tend to “pivot” at this point as they realize their initial product idea doesn’t fully align with what the customers want.

You’re not selling a product - you are selling a solution to your customer’s problem.

Typically when we speak about sales we tend to talk about it in terms of a product, but look a little deeper, and what we are doing is selling a solution to a customer’s problem. Often times we see new founders try to sell features as opposed to solutions. Although features are important, this is the wrong way to look at it. If we instead think of our product as a solution to a problem, we start to see how we can quantify the value of our product and as we update our sales material to be more focused on this solution as opposed to features, we will start to see a better connection with customers during the sales process. Customers aren’t buying products for the sake of buying products - they are experiencing some form of pain, whether that’s financial, time, or something else, and they are paying you to relieve that pain for them.

Break your customer’s into small segments based on metadata

If you want your sales process to succeed, you need to identify your most valuable customers. When we separate our customer pool into segments based on properties like, industry, size, number of employees, region, job titles, etc… we can start to recognize how each one of these customers differ as we go through the sales process. You may find one segment that buys quickly, but at a low price point, while another has a slower sales process, but the higher ticket price makes it worth it. It is easy when you first start selling to go for a scattershot approach, but it is important to stay focused. We need to be identifying our ideal customers and we do that by tracking their metadata.

These tips alone won’t guarantee success, but hopefully they help steer new founders in the right direction.