So, do you just play a demo video? An intern asked me this on his third day. I had closed $250K in ARR that week.
The question made me realise, perhaps it’s not well understood what it actually means to sell, but more importantly, what it means to sell, as a founder, not a salesperson.
Founder-led sales are a rite of passage. And not because of the pain it takes to get rejected, but for the fact that the business literally is not a business without those early sales.
The opposite is also true. If you can sell but you don’t have a product? You’re basically a consultant. Obviously, you need to have both.
Whether you are a technical founder or a non-technical founder I believe you actually have the same basic responsibility. You’re trying to create something from nothing. Whether that be on the product side, or the business side, it’s still zero to one.
I can’t speak for what this means for the technical founders out there building, but I can share my perspective of what this looks like selling.
In the space we operate, trades and field services, I sell to managing directors of mid-sized plumbing and electrical businesses.
I started sales with no connections, no warm leads, no “friends in the space”, no sales playbook, and no product.
It’s both terrifying and also quite liberating to realise that no one was coming to save us, revenue doesn’t just appear, and customers don’t find you in the early days. The reality of starting from zero is exactly that: you have to do the whole thing from scratch.
And this is exactly why we (Elyos AI) are able to build products our customers actually want.
Because we had no option to take shortcuts, I had to learn how the hard way:
- How to talk to our customers (and more importantly how to listen)
- How to spot real problems not just surface problems
- How to pitch with clarity on how we can solve this
- How to create trust with my customers early on
- How to build conviction on a product direction that was just forming
- How to guide a team of builders with customer feedback while still searching for market pull
The reality is, customers don’t care whether you started with advantages or not. They only care if you can solve their problem better than anyone else. The best way to do this is by building products guided by incredibly deep care and understanding of customer problems.
This is what a day in the life of founder sales looks like:
Looking at our revenue chart, before I’m even fully awake every morning
Having a pinned note to myself in WhatsApp with my pipeline number, so I always know our forecast for the month
Learning the questions to ask to move a deal along
Learning the questions to ask to move product along
Setting my own targets and then getting frustrated at how high my targets are
Learning the hard way that a customer is not a customer until $$$ hits the bank
Learning that if you can make someone smile in the first five minutes of a pitch, the next 40 mins will be way easier
Thinking growth is good, and then thinking, but is it the best it could be?
Anxiety for the week before month end
Anxiety every other day too
The main reason as a founder, you cannot delegate sales early on is:
If you can’t sell your product, you probably don’t even really know what it is you should be building
If you can’t sell your product, you don’t know your customers well enough
Overall, if you can’t get someone to buy your product, you should probably just stop building it
Articulating your product to potential customers is how you know what messaging works. This isn’t just about the messaging though, this is learning product.
This takes time, it takes trial and error and that trial and error needs to be done by the founder (with authority to make such product decisions) and with real prospective customers.
If you lean on product features but can’t describe product benefits, then do you really know your product?
We’ve gotten to the stage at Elyos AI where, before I’ve finished the introduction, well before I’ve demo’d anything, the customers are nodding their heads and agreeing with me.
This comes from a deep understanding of who our customers are, what problems they have and how I know, with conviction, how we can help.
Finding your ICP, understanding their real pain points, building relationships with your customers and working on these relationships takes effort, takes authenticity and takes time.
If you can’t (or won’t) do this yourself, then how do you build a team that can? How do you scale beyond a million-dollar business to a billion-dollar one?
Assuming you manage to be relatively successful in the first stage of growth (not many start-ups are so you’ve already done pretty well to get here), you reach the next milestone, and you say okay now grow. Great. If you have never tried to do something yourself then how could you possibly try to teach someone else?
A business is not a business without revenue. Hard decisions get made based on your rate of growth. I learned this lesson in our first business, nearly one year of founder-led sales, and revenue that didn’t match that effort.
If you don’t have a Founder leading sales in the early stage of the business, who else is going to make this call?
Who else can say, with conviction and authority: it’s not working
Founder-led sales take you from 0 to 1(million or more), but it won’t get you much further than that. Founders leading sales can get you off the ground and navigate the business to PMF (if you’re lucky), but it doesn’t scale to the nth customer.
The next stage needs to be repeatable, scalable. And once you hit this trajectory, founders who sell should then move on to the next biggest problem to solve - which could be figuring out how to scale product and operations to meet customer demand, or leading the expansion into new markets and territories.
Comforted by the thought that if I can navigate from $0 to $Xm ARR, the next stage of growth is just a new challenge, not a harder one.