How to use sell>build>sell to get customers

I’m a strong believer in SELL>BUILD>SELL as a product management framework.

In the early days of building your startup, it’s easy to focus on writing code (or developing your service).

You’re told that you need a functional MVP in order to go sell. So you index on this. You get design partners. You ask for feedback from friendlies in your network.

They tell you what they like, their opinion.

But the biggest problem with this approach?

They don’t have the problem you solve. Which means they’ll never give you money for your SaaS. Which means their feedback is worth almost nothing to you in terms of figuring out your business model.

I’ve seen this many times over with founders. They think they’ve built something that the market wants. They spent 6 months to upwards of a couple years validating the solution.

And then, they can’t sell it. Nobody wants to buy it. And they feel completely defeated.

Here’s the thing - when you get started, you have an idea. The first thing you need to do is figure out if there’s a market. Because if there’s no market, then you won’t build a business.

And the secret that nobody will tell you? You don’t need an MVP to figure out if there’s a market.

Which opens up the door to validating problem/solution from day one. Getting commitments from folks on paying for your MVP through a proof of concept. And then you figuring out what your product will be later.

That’s how most businesses are started. You might be one of the lucky few technical founders who get a lot of funding just for an idea. But that’s the minority.

The rest of you will need to build an “ol’-fashioned business.” Where you’re solving for a gap in the market. And customers will fund your growth.

So don’t delay selling - it’s part of the process of figuring out what product you’re building.

In this newsletter, I’ll dive into how I’ve used Sell>Build>Sell with SalesMVP Lab, my coaching membership business.

Table of Contents

• How I started SalesMVP Lab

  • My MVP (or lack of) - Coaching

• Product v2 - Coaching Bootcamp

• Product v3 - FOUNDER Framework

• Packaging the product

• SalesMVP Lab Product Vision Now

  • Product:

  • Product Areas:

  • Features

• Final thoughts

How I started SalesMVP Lab

For years, I had this vision of helping technical founders learn sales. I’ve seen in a few tech ecosystems now a ton of great product ideas, but very little growth.

Founders are generally good at starting something. But they’ve never really built a business. And businesses survive on sales, margins, and profit.

So many founders tend to spend their time figuring out product, which is important of course. But they spend very little time figuring out the business model and how they’ll make money.

Which is really the #1 thing that needs to be figured out, as soon as possible. It keeps the dream alive.

And so I’ve seen a lot of founders have to close shop, because 90% of their focus was spent on product instead of sales.

But why? Why, if founders know that sales are really important to running a business, are they staying away from it? Treating it like a plague?

Turns out it’s fear. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of having to change your identity to someone who does sales, when this whole time you were conditioned that the idea of selling is bad.

So without a system, without a way to do sales well, a lot of founders push it back to a point where it’s too late.

And I felt that this needed to be addressed.

My MVP (or lack of) - Coaching

So for years I said I’d do coaching for founders. And so I wrote a business plan, and idea of what this would be. I defined my service, my rates. I floated it with a founder friend of mine I had been advising for years. He thought it was good.

I got an intro to a founder who needed to learn sales, but was struggling with it. We signed a deal for a 3-month commitment. I would teach him the basics of running a sales process.

But I had 0 materials, except 12+ years of experience and knowledge. I had no structure to what that program would be. There were 25+ topics we could cover, but only 13 coaching sessions. Some of the topics likely needed more than one coaching session.

So I started anyways. And charged $15k for 3 months. Monthly payment terms, paid ahead of the first coaching session for the month.

So we started going through stuff. Was teaching the basics. Taught a few quick-win tactics. Did some deal coaching, call reviews. It was generally helpful.

Except 5 weeks in the founder asked me if there was anything else to learn and if we needed to keep going.

Oh boy, not what you want to hear.

So I established more structure. I created more of a curriculum. I had asked during the 5 coaching sessions what was most useful, and then used that feedback to create more focus on stuff that would be useful.

In week 7, the founder had an AHA moment about what we were doing. He realized that sales wasn’t sleazy, it actually helped the buyer. And he realized that sales wasn’t just a role, it was the core of the business. And that sales could help with product development, and operations, and a number of other things.

The last 5-6 sessions were INSANELY valuable. With consistent AHA moments.

That was Andrew Goldis, CEO at currents.dev. He was already getting good traction with his product before me. But he grew like crazy after we were done our coaching. And keeps growing. He’s now a better Enterprise Seller than most sales reps I’ve worked with in my career. And he was a technical founder, with an engineering background.

I really didn’t know what my product was when I first started selling it. I had a vague idea, but it wasn’t until I was working with a paying customer, giving me real feedback around what was valuable or not, that my product started taking shape.

Product v2 - Coaching Bootcamp

After working with Andrew at Currents, I ended up working with Kareem and Ryan at Savio. Kareem was the founder friend who encouraged me to start coaching.

They had experimented with a self-serve model for their SaaS, but realized that the buying process might be better suited for a sales-led or sales-assisted approach.

So we did a 3-month coaching program. This time it was way more defined. Weekly topics laid out ahead of time, in the correct order of what was most helpful, and what had dependencies.

The training content was all completed having recently done it with Andrew. The format for the coaching sessions were figured out.

The second time it went a lot smoother. And they got a 37% boost in MRR in 4 months by going sales-led.

So now I had a product shaped. It was a coaching bootcamp for founders, teaching them founder-led sales. 13-week program (3 months). Structured learning path.

Product v3 - FOUNDER Framework

I quit my full-time job as a sales leader to pursue coaching founders.

I went to market with a $5k/mth coaching offer, 3-month commitment, based on what I had done.

And I realized that it was incredibly hard to sell. I had 2 clients in 2023 as a side hustle. I didn’t need the income, so I didn’t really focus on selling it. And the first two clients were friendlies. But now that it was full-time, I couldn’t just survive on 2 clients a year, and ran out of friendlies. And I realized that the way I was approaching my coaching offer was the same as everyone else who’s doing sales coaching.

No real differentiator. Longer-term commitments without establishing the trust first.

So I went back through my notes. I went back through the feedback I had gotten over 26 coaching sessions. And realized something - the coaching was a “feature.” What founders wanted was a basic, reliable sales process they could execute on. And I didn’t need to do coaching to teach that.

And I had my first AHA moment there.

I was focused on building a coaching product. But there are 100s of options for a coaching product already.

The framework I was teaching/coaching to was the real product.

And that completely changed how I approached everything after that point.

I wrote down the entire coaching framework - all the topics that mattered to founders - in a playbook. With detailed examples. With a workbook companion. Basically teaching founders how to implement their first sales process, on their own.

And I gave it to my clients for feedback and review. They said they wished they had this when they first got started.

So I published it at a low price point (USD $36 for the ebook + workbook).

And they sent it in slack groups of other founders for me. And it sold, like hotcakes.

I got lots of great feedback. So I started chunking the content, posted on LinkedIn, in my newsletter. I started using it for speaking gigs with Microconf. It was getting great reactions. I’d promote the ebook at the end. And would get a ton of sales when I did it.

Packaging the product

So now that I figured out what product I was really selling, at a much bigger scale, I started working on packaging and price validation.

I still wanted to do coaching - that’s what I love doing the most, and where founders get the most value.

But coaching was treated as a feature of this product, instead of the main product.

So I started thinking about what are different ways for founders to learn the framework?

I could focus on selling more ebooks, but that requires a lot of scale. I’d rather keep that as a low-ticket offer for lead gen.

I could turn the ebook into a course, which I did.

I could offer group coaching and 1:1 coaching.

I could turn the course + coaching clientele into a small community.

I could sell community access to courses + webinars + AMAs + Office Hours.

The possibilities of how to package, sell, and scale became endless.

And through all of this Sell>Build>Sell approach, my product vision became clear. My sales strategy became clear. And my business model became clear.

I ended up packaging into 4 buckets:

• Course + community access, USD $17/mth

• Group coaching, USD $347/mth

• 1:1 coaching, USD $1,247/mth

• Scale coaching, USD $3,347/mth

They all have various levels of support and access to me. Each with different types of coaching. It took me a while to validate packages and pricing, but it got to a point where it’s close to being right, with wiggle room to experiment a bit more. And I decided to get rid of the 3-month minimum commitment. Coaching is a relationship, and sometimes it doesn’t vibe. Why be stuck in an agreement that’s not creating any value?

And now business is growing every month, with churn being low, with this package structure.

SalesMVP Lab Product Vision Now

So with all of this, I’m now in a place where I understand what I need to build, what my clients find valuable, and where my product gaps are.

I went from thinking I was starting a coaching business, to offering different learning memberships to a Founder-led sales framework.

I went from locking folks into a contract, to paying month-to-month for the support you need.

Here’s how I’m thinking about the product now, and where it’s heading.

Product:

SalesMVP Lab is a learning membership for founders who want to learn sales.

There are 3 core pillars of learning pulling the product together: Courses. Community. Coaching.

The product is built on the BPSM framework (behaviours, processes, skills, and mindset) so that founders are supported in every way through learning sales.

Product Areas:

There are currently 4 product areas that are either live, in development, or planned. There could be additional ones added later.

• Closing deals (Live)

• Prospecting/Outreach (In development)

• Marketing/Lead-gen (Planned)

• Hiring your first sales rep/team (Planned)

Features

There are different features offered for different tiers/packages. But here are the set of features I’m focused on developing for each product area:

• Ebooks/playbooks (all packages)

• Training content (all packages)

• Webinars (all packages)

• AMAs/Office Hours (all packages)

• Courses (all packages)

• Group Coaching sessions (group coaching package)

• 1:1 Coaching sessions (1:1 or scale coaching package)

• Call reviews (1:1 or scale coaching package)

• Forum/discussion/community groups (all packages)

• DM access/support (all packages)

Final thoughts

I would have never imagined the FOUNDER framework being the product when I first got started. The vision came as I worked with more clients. I took feedback from folks who paid me, on what they found the most valuable. Then I took that feedback to go build the next little bit. And then took that to go get more sales. Then used the feedback from these sales to build the next thing. Etc, etc, etc.

And this is the power of the Sell>Build>Sell framework.

Don’t go too far down building something without getting customers. They will give you feedback that comes from a point of value and usage, not an opinion. And that feedback is worth more than 100 design partners would give you.

You don’t need a full product, or a product vision from day 1. You need a feature that solves a big problem for someone who’s willing to pay money to get rid of that problem.

This is how you get started. This is how you find your first few customers. This is what will inform what you’re building.

*NOTE: I am building a service business, but I am very much treating it as building a SaaS product. I’ve worked in SaaS my entire career, from bootstrapped employee #1 to a few scale-ups and IPOs. SaaS business models, products, sales, and marketing is what I know. So even though coaching is a service, I’m still treating it as if it would be SaaS. So the lessons here apply no matter what kind of product you’re building.

For more practical early-stage sales tips, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for more hands-on help implementing your first sales process, reach out for coaching packages.

P.S. Starting the waitlist for next group coaching. Ping me if interested.

P.P.S I have capacity for 2-3 1:1 coaching clients right now. Fast-paced learning, meeting every week + review your sales call. For founders who are very serious about learning sales fast. LMK if interested.