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- The FOUNDER Operating System
This week’s newsletter is the intro + chapter 1 of the FOUNDER Operating System playbook.
The playbook has helped 144 founders so far create structure in their sales process. It covers:
Understanding the basics of sales
Positioning your product
Developing a sales story
Doing effective discovery
Managing meetings effectively
Demoing your product
Coming up with a minimum viable sales process
One of the key things for closing more deals is understanding how to run an effective sales cycle from first meeting to contract signed. This playbook addresses everything you need - including examples, sample scripts, frameworks, and templates - to help you win more of your pipeline.
Currently 50% off for Black Friday using coupon code BFRIDAY24.
Offer valid until December 4.
You can purchase the ebook + workbook here.
Below you’ll read a snippet of what to expect from the ebook.
Table of Contents
The FOUNDER Operating System™
Building a Minimum Viable Sales Process™ for Founder-led Sales
Welcome to "The FOUNDER Operating System for Sales," a comprehensive guide designed exclusively for technical founders and innovators in the startup world. As a technical founder, you’re great at developing products. But the journey from a brilliant idea to a successful market presence often hinges on one crucial skill: sales.
This book is your key to unlocking the potential of founder-led sales. With the FOUNDER framework, you'll learn to leverage your technical expertise and transform it into sales success. We'll explore each aspect of the FOUNDER acronym — Facts, Objectives & Pain, Uncovering Impact, Negative Consequences, Driving Events, and Reaching a Decision — providing you with a clear, actionable approach to sales.
Whether you're grappling with your first sales pitch or looking to refine your existing sales process, this guide offers valuable insights, practical tips, and real-world examples to empower you.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
How to apply a sales methodology to everything you do, which will help you uncover deeper problems and close bigger deals.
How to create a basic positioning canvas for your startup, which will help you craft your sales pitch and demo.
How to craft a sales pitch that positions you as the best solution on the market.
How to structure your demo so you’re showing your product in the context of the prospect’s pains.
How to use a framework for every sales call so you always leave with a next step.
How to pull everything together into a Minimum Viable Sales Process.
How to read this book:
This book will dig deep into implementing a selling system for your startup. There’s three ways I recommend you read this:
Do a full read through so you know exactly what the book is about. You’ll have a full understanding of how to implement the system, and know exactly what to expect.
Read one chapter a week, then complete the action item at the end of each chapter.
Jump to the chapters that you need most help with today. **Note that if you skip ahead without reading the previous chapters, you might not fully grasp the concepts as it recalls previous information throughout.
I also recommend you take notes while you’re reading. And think through how the specific sections of the book are applicable to activities or deals that you have today.
Let’s do this.
A little about me
Before we dive into the operating system and how to build it for your startup, let’s set a bit of context.
I’ve been working in SaaS startups for a dozen years. Reported directly to founders. Held leadership roles in GTM functions in both Sales and Marketing. Was often the first hire outside the founders or engineers. Been part of many accelerators and incubators. Coached founders on building their first sales process.
Some of the companies I worked with were between $0-20k MRR when I joined. We were building sales and marketing from the ground up.
I grew sales processes, hired and built teams, and saw the journey from $0-10M ARR in different stages at different companies. Even spent time with a company post-IPO.
I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly.
What I realized is that there are tons of technical founders out there who are great at launching ideas. They come up with great products, they have the ability to code, and put something out there in the wild.
Very few know how to sell in the early days. And this is where a ton of amazing startups fail.
How many technical founders out there focus on building their revenue model? How many give it the same thought and attention as their product? How many actually go out and sell?
Are you a technical founder struggling with sales?
You’re an early-stage startup that has some level of a sales process (not self-serve).
You have a bit of revenue in place, but most if it came from small inbound deals.
You might be trying to go up-market and sell to larger customers.
You know your product can solve a real problem for your potential customers, but you’re struggling to get it in front of the right prospects.
You’ve read countless articles and online resources, but you still feel lost and disorganized. You don’t have a framework or a reference for how to do sales well, and you’re not sure what to delegate.
You’re scared by the sales process, and you don’t know if you’re getting the best outcome.
Is this you?
Imagine…
…being totally in control on sales calls.
…having a proven framework for getting from qualification to close.
…always knowing what to say.
…and no longer being scared of sales.
This is why I founded SalesMVP Lab. Technical founders needed a way to relate to sales. To simplify the concepts. To create a system. To make it repeatable.
If you’re above $4k MRR, have a few deals in the pipeline, demo requests, trials, etc., this is for you. If you need to get to $40k+ MRR in founder sales before you can raise money or hire sales reps, this is for you. If you’re at the point where you need to hire sales reps, but haven’t productized a sales process yet to teach them, this is for you.
You need a sales process to scale. Early on, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Really an MVP will work, or Minimum Viable Sales Process™. You’ll get plenty of chances to learn and change it over time. But you need something.
Let’s say your deals are worth about $5k annual. And you’re winning 20% of your demos. In order to get to $500k ARR, where raising and hiring makes more sense, you’ll need to close 100 deals yourself. This means you’ll need to run 500 sales cycles.
You need a system that’s repeatable, and a way to document what you learn.
In this book, you’ll learn everything you need to know to turn your leads into paying customers through a simple to execute sales process. I’ll teach you where to start, how to define your process, and how to run specific plays that increase your MRR.
Sales Methodologies
Most sales methodologies out there, or selling systems, are designed for sales professionals. This one is designed specifically for busy founders.
In sales, like anything else, you need an operating system. A common language that trickles throughout everything you do. A way to connect steps and build upon it.
Usually, you do this through some sort of sales methodology or selling system.
I’ve used a few in my career, and seen many deployed. Usually it’s whatever the VP Sales likes the most, or is most familiar with. Sandler, SPIN, Challenger, etc.
These all have their pros and cons.
Sandler has great tools to help probe for pain once you’ve uncovered it. The problem with Sandler is that they don’t tell you how to implement the system in a SaaS environment. How do you run your meetings? How do you demo? How do you set-up your CRM?
Challenger is great if you’re a disruptive product. The whole point is to make people think differently. Their commercial teaching and insights process is something I’ve used a lot in Marketing. The problem is it’s really hard to execute well, and often you’ll piss off your prospects and customers if you’re not tactful in your delivery.
We could spend a ton of time going through the pros and cons of all of them, but the reality is that most sales methodologies out there designed for sales professionals. Folks who dedicate their careers to sales.
Folks who do the job, day in and day out. Who want to improve upon an already established set of skills. Who have peers they can brainstorm with. Who have leaders and enablement teams that can coach them, train them.
These folks don’t wear many hats like you. They don’t have to code, run a business, do marketing, pay the bills, handle support, and somehow find time for selling on top of that.
These systems are complicated by design. They take months to learn, years to master. They’re done this way so that companies continue investing in the training every month, quarter, year.
The problem is you don’t have that much time. You have a limited runway. You have limited hours throughout the day. Sales needs to be a priority, but there’s always one more bug to fix, or one more feature to ship.
The FOUNDER Operating System™ was created specifically for technical founders like you. With these constraints in mind.
Everything in here will take minutes to hours to execute. The foundation is brought down to basics so you don’t have to remember 10,000 things in order to close deals. You can basically have a Minimum Viable Sales Process™ ready to test out, with live deals, within a week. Something quick and dirty that you can iterate on. Same way as you would with agile development.
Let’s dig into it.
The FOUNDER Operating System™
In this chapter, you will learn about the FOUNDER framework. It will be a foundation for the rest of the book, so you will need to understand it and apply in future chapters.
The FOUNDER framework is a systematic approach to collecting and sharing information while communicating with a prospect.
Before every sales interaction, you’ll be thinking about the different components of the framework. What information will help you understand the prospect better? What information will uncover their problems? How will you help them make a buying decision?
Some of this might happen sequentially in a sales call, but it doesn’t need to. With every interaction, you’ll collect more information that continues to build. The more you talk to the prospect, the more you’ll understand.
It’s also a way to classify the information that you’ve collected. You’ll uncover challenges that are painful. Some have pretty bad consequences on the business. You’ll uncover other folks who need to be involved in the deal. Saving information in these different buckets helps you better communicate with your prospects across many calls, or a sales cycle.
Another benefit of using the FOUNDER framework is that you’ll have structured notes across many deals. The more deals you win or lose, the more information you’ll understand about your market. You’ll be able to start noticing trends across deals, which will help you with sales, marketing, CS, and product.
When you’re doing sales, you want to have a common language that connects everything together. As we go through the different parts of the sales process, we’ll come back to the acronym FOUNDER.
FOUNDER stands for Facts, Objectives and Pain, Uncovering Impact, Negative Consequences, Driving Events, and Reaching a Decision.
Often founders will perceive sales as being manipulative. You’re trying to convince someone to buy your stuff. You need a mindset shift.
Sales is about helping a prospect solve a problem. Your role as a founder is to be a consultant. Not every lead is a customer. And not every customer is ideal. It’s OK to say no to someone, that you can’t help them. The FOUNDER framework really helps a lot of technical founders connect with sales in a different way.
It’s really about collecting information you need to understand throughout the sales cycle. First, it will help you qualify whether or not you can help the prospect solve a problem. Second, it will give you the right information you need to help the prospect make a buying decision. The problems you uncover, and the impact it has on their business, is something you’re going to reiterate over and over again through the sales process. In demos. In follow-up emails. In proposals.
And, the information you collect during sales calls will help you drive product decisions, CS, pricing, and other aspects of your business.
Let’s unpack what each of these mean.
Facts
These are simple facts about the prospect. In software sales, you mostly want to understand the lay of the land. What tools or systems they use. What workflows they deploy. How their teams are structured. Different roles. Current metrics. Etc. You only need enough to quickly qualify the situation.
For example, when I was working in go-to-market at LevelJump Software, a sales enablement platform for SaaS companies, we were built on top of Salesforce. There wasn’t a separate app. If you didn’t use Salesforce, you couldn’t use LevelJump. Understanding that the prospect used Salesforce was an important fact to understand.
Our main use case was sales onboarding. So we’d often ask about their hiring plans, number of headcount, turnover rates, etc. We knew that if prospects weren’t hiring more than 20 people annually, the value wasn’t there.
This is the type of information that helps you understand the context of their environment. You won’t get pain and objectives directly from this, so don’t spend too much time here. You’ll collect more facts along the way.
This will depend on who you sell to and what problem you solve, but here are some examples of facts that could be important:
Company headcount
Industry
Location
Team size (for number of seats)
Headcount growth
Are they hiring? By how much?
What other tools do they use (for integrations)
Workflows, processes, people
You might also have niche facts to collect, like do they use proposals as part of their sales process? How many tests do they run every month? How many times do they post on social media every week? This would all be dependent on what kind of company you operate, but can be really important information to collect.
Objectives and Pain
What problem is your prospect trying to solve? This is what the majority of sales is about. You have to understand that buyers make a decision on behalf of a company. Unless you’re selling directly to founders, the person making the decision is responsible for someone else’s money. Their decision is a tough one, it’s hard to be a buyer. If they don’t have profound pain, then they will likely choose not to deploy the capital.
Your main job in sales is to understand, as deep as possible, what problem they're trying to solve. When you describe their problem better than they do, they’ll automatically see you as the best solution.
You also want to understand their ideal state, or their objectives. Where do they want to go?
Your product bridges the gap between their current painful state and ideal state. Understand what that gap is.
No pain? No sale. It’s that simple.
Uncovering Impact
Once you’ve discovered the objectives and pains, you need to understand whether or not these have a material impact on the business. You can uncover personal or emotional impact as well, but business impact is the most important.
Personal impact is related to the individual. Stressed about losing their job. Worried about not getting promoted. Upset they’re working too many hours and not spending enough time with family. Business impact is typically related to revenue, cost, risk, or compliance.
How are the problems impacting what’s going on in other departments? How is it impacting their ability to hit goals?
This is where you try to quantify the value of the pain. Find a $million dollar problem. The more expensive the problem, the more motivated the buyer will be to solve it.
Negative Consequences
Unlike what you might think, you won’t be losing the majority of your deals to your direct competition. You’ll likely lose to “do nothing.”
This is where you connect the pain and business impact to the cost of inaction.
Think of it this way. Your arm hurts. It’s stopping you from driving places. If you leave it and don’t dig deeper into negative consequences, you might just think “I’ll suck it up and wait for the pain to go away.” But what if the pain doesn’t go away? What if you can’t drive anymore? What are the negative consequences of not being able to drive in your life?
This is where you need to get to. Once the prospect acknowledges the negative consequences of the pains and business impact, it would be negligent for them as an agent of their business to not attempt solving the problem.
Driving Events
Without something driving the decision now, the prospect won’t have any urgency to get anything done. There’s two types of driving events, critical events and compelling events.
Let’s use an example to illustrate the two. When I was VP Sales at Proposify, a proposal management and e-signature software, we often came across both compelling events and critical events. The majority of the time it was a compelling event. For us, this would be something like “hey, we’re doing a sales kickoff in the new year and we’d like to train our sales reps on how to use the software then.” We’d ask “what happens if you don’t hit that date?” The majority of the time, nothing happened. They just picked a new date.
But a critical event was something like “we are off targets for the year. If we don’t implement something like this in the next month, and improve our margins in the next two quarters, then we’ll have to do layoffs.” In this example, there’s a negative consequence of missing a date. This would be a critical event.
Reaching a Decision
Once it’s established that there’s in fact a big enough problem to solve, and some driving event dictates a timeline, then you need to help the prospect reach a decision.
There’s typically four areas you need to understand: 1. Decision Criteria, 2. Decision Process, 3. Financial Decision Making, and 4. People involved
1. Decision Criteria
This is “what” they consider to make a decision. Often founders will think of features and price as being the most important. But there are other areas to consider as well. Level of support, implementation process, integrations, security, ease of admin, etc. Some of these might be must-haves for clients, or deal breakers if you can’t fulfill them. Some of these might be nice to have, or won’t be as important to making the decision.
2. Decision Process
This is “how” they’ll make the decision. The specific steps they will take. Often this includes demoing different vendors, sometimes doing a trial or proof of concept, executive demos, going through a security review, procurement process, evaluation scorecards, etc.
3. Financial Decision Making
This is the process for how funds get released. Their budgeting process, their approval process, how they request funds, who can sign off, how much they can sign off on, etc.
4. People Involved
These are the various stakeholders involved in the entire decision making process. Some have authority to approve deals. Some have influence. Some are just extra eyeballs. It’s important to understand everyone who’s involved, who you spoke to, who you haven’t, and who’s important to get on board. Pay special attention to any detractors in your deals - they’re often the ones that you need to spend the most amount of time with.
Your Programming Language
The FOUNDER Operating System™ is basically your programming language. It determines how you code your entire sales process.
When you do discovery in an intro call, you’ll deploy the FOUNDER Operating System™. When you script your demo, you’ll deploy the FOUNDER Operating System™. When you send follow-up emails, you’ll deploy the FOUNDER Operating System™.
It flows through everything you do. How you take notes. How you ask questions. How you present information. How you qualify deals. How you disqualify deals.
Remember the acronym. Print it out, write it down somewhere you can see it while you’re on calls.
Throughout the rest of the book, I’ll be referencing what parts of FOUNDER apply to the different pieces of your sales process so you can see how it all comes together. We’ll go over how to apply these principles in your positioning, your sales pitch, how you run calls, and how you follow-up.
Chapter Insights:
The FOUNDER framework is integral for a comprehensive understanding of the sales cycle.
Each element of FOUNDER addresses a critical aspect of the sales process, from gathering facts to reaching a decision.
The framework emphasizes the importance of understanding the client's pain points, the impact of these issues, and the consequences of inaction.
Questions for Founders:
How can you apply the FOUNDER framework to understand your client's specific needs and challenges better?
In what ways can you uncover the real impact of your client’s problems on their business?
How can you use the FOUNDER framework to create urgency and drive the sales process forward?
This Week’s Action Step:
This week, focus on applying at least one element of the FOUNDER framework in your sales conversations. Pay special attention to uncovering the client's pain points and the impact of these issues on their business. This will help you to better understand their needs and tailor your sales approach accordingly.
Let me know what you think of the newsletter! Always want to cover topics that you care about.
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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.