What do you ACTUALLY need to know about sales in the early days

When I’m working with founders, there’s usually one of two scenarios that happens:

1. They are new to sales, so they’re not sure what good looks like. This is the most common scenario - winging it strategy.

2. They’re working with a management consultant that’s teaching them something WAY too complicated for their stage. Stuff that large enterprises with large teams would deploy.

Both of these scenarios will eventually kill your business. You might get lucky a few times, but at some point, you need a basic sales process that gets you from 0-1M ARR.

Here’s exactly what you need to think about and focus on to get things going in the early days.

Table of Contents

• How to think about your sales process before $1m A …

• Minimum Viable Discovery Framework

• Minimum Viable Positioning

• Minimum Viable Sales Story

• Minimum Viable Demo

• Minimum Viable Call Structure

• Minimum Viable Sales Process

• Important Notes:

How to think about your sales process before $1m ARR

When working through the various pieces of your sales process in the early days, think in minimum viables.

Just like you’d launch a minimum viable product, everything in your sales process will be a rough v1 until you have enough deal velocity to make it better.

Here are the MVPs you’ll need:

• Minimum viable discovery framework

• Minimum viable positioning

• Minimum viable sales story

• Minimum viable demo

• Minimum viable call structure

• Minimum viable sales process

Minimum Viable Discovery Framework

This is an easy win for most founders. Right now, you’re likely asking a handful of qualification questions. Which are mostly about understanding if YOU would be a fit for them.

With discovery, you want to flip that around. You want to ask questions about them, their processes, the pains in those processes, and the impact on the business. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated at first. But what you’re trying to figure out is whether or not there’s a problem that’s worth paying for.

I teach FOUNDER for this:

• Facts: basics about their process, people, and tech

• Objectives and Pains: The problems within those workflows and where they want to get to. Basically creating a gap.

• Uncovering Impact: What’s the gap in those workflows costing the business. Revenue? Attrition? Higher servicing costs? Lawsuits?

• Negative Consequences: What happens if those problems go unsolved over time. Have to do layoffs? People get fired? Miss out on a huge market? Lose market share? Investors are pissed?

• Driving Events: Is there a timeline that they need to hit to avoid the negative consequences.

• Reaching a Decision: What process do they need to go through to make a purchase decision. Not your process, but theirs.

Get answers to a few of these questions throughout your calls + sales cycle. They don’t all need to happen in the first 10 minutes of the first call. You can always ask more questions over time.

Minimum Viable Positioning

Positioning is probably the thing that’s going to change the most in the early days. At first, it’s going to be an assumption on the market. Then it will change after your first 10-15 customers. Then it will likely change again for every 10-20 customers you add, until you’ve really found product market fit.

Product market fit definition in this case is that you’re selling the same use case, to the same personas, at the same ICPs, at full price, and able to attract more of those through various sales and marketing channels.

Your positioning should help you narrow down your initial use cases. You can always change them or add more later, but finding the one that sticks is what’s important in the early days.

Positioning needs to be specific too. Every product can theoretically help you make more money or save cost. I saw Calendly a few months ago had positioning around making more revenue. Like, really?? Calendly helps you schedule meetings. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

Basic positioning should make this clear:

• What are the alternatives that your prospects/customers would use if they didn’t use you? This includes direct competitors, but also includes anything else. Like hiring interns, using spreadsheets, outsourcing a process, or using some makeshift tooling that they already pay for. All of these scenarios are way more common than your direct competition.

• What are the unique features you have against each group of competitors. This will be easy against “do it yourself,” but pretty difficult exercise for direct competitors.

• What value does this bring. What problems do these unique features solve. What results do they drive.

• And who cares a lot about the value. Types of companies, job functions, people. Map out the characteristics.

Find the few compelling points that highlights your most unique use case that provides the most value. This will trickle through the rest of your sales process. Like building prospect lists, crafting your pitch, your demo, how you ask discovery questions, etc.

Minimum Viable Sales Story

You need a compelling way to explain why the problem you’re solving is worth solving. You can’t use your funding deck or pitch in sales, because that is too much of a future state. Prospects have problems that they need solved now, not 5-10 years from now.

You sales story can be delivered in a short pitch, could be a deck with 3-4 slides. Whatever your preference is, no hard and fast rules here.

What to include in your basic pitch:

• Polarizing insight: You need a bold strong statement to open on that really highlights your positioning. This should come from a combination of your experience, what’s going on in the market, what you’re hearing from prospects, and where you think the market is heading. It’s your point of view for why you’re doing this.

• The Market pros and cons: position the current alternatives in the market that are available to your prospects. What are they good at, where are they weak.

• The real problem: Highlight what’s the real root cause problem that everyone else hasn’t been able to solve yet, that you are well positioned to solve.

• The ideal world: What’s a future state of solving that problem. What does the idea solution have. This isn’t your stuff yet, but in general, how do vendors need to solve this problem.

• Your solution: Now it’s time to show the 2-3 things that you do differently that supports your POV and problem. This can be a light demo or a few slides.

Minimum Viable Demo

Your demo should be straightforward. Most of what I see is a training session or a walkthrough, which isn’t doing you any favors.

A demo is like a movie trailer. Highly edited to show exactly what workflows will solve their problems. There’s no need to show the login screen, we all know how to log into stuff.

Chop up your demo into 2-3 chapters. Each chapter should highlight a key point of your positioning. It should show a workflow that solves a specific problem.

Chapters follow this flow:

• Context: Set the competitive context. How are they doing the workflow today.

• Problem: Talk about the problem that their current workflow causes.

• Capabilities: What will they be able to do after deploying the new workflow.

• Show: Show the handful of features that demonstrates the workflow. Try not to show features in isolation, but what combination of features allow them to do the JTBD.

• Ask: Ask a dialogue question to get them to imagine using the workflow and allows you to do more discovery. Something like “How does this compare to what you’re doing now with X?”

Minimum Viable Call Structure

You need a plan for every call type. And a basic structure you can follow. Doesn’t need to be super rigid or scripted, but you need to know where you’re heading.

Blueprint a handful of calls. Usually some sort of intro/demo, team or technical demo, trial/POC set-up, pricing/implementation call, and/or go/no-go call. That covers most scenarios.

Each call has 5 components:

• The Start: try to find something business relevant to talk about to start the call. Check their LI profile or company news. Ask them something about what you’ve noticed.

• The Kickoff: Then pivot into setting the structure for the call. You’re there for a reason. The prospect’s there for a reason. Make that clear up front so there’s an outcome to the call. Do a quick time check and people check. State your purpose for the call and gain permission to ask questions. Ask them what their ideal outcome is for the call. Get permission to discuss next steps if the outcome is achieved.

• Information Gathering: This is where you ask questions to better understand their world. Their problems. Their workflows. Do a bit of this at the start before you head into a pitch or demo. But know that you will be doing some of this throughout the call, on every call. It’s not an event, it’s a process.

• Information Sharing: This is where you tell your sales story or do a demo, or answer objections/questions. You’ll start doing this about 30% into the call, and you will go in and out of this throughout every call in your cycle.

• Next Steps: Assuming the outcome of the call was achieved, you want to reserve 10-20% of the call time to discuss the appropriate next steps and get those booked on calendar. You need to align your sales process to how they make a buying decision.

Minimum Viable Sales Process

This is where you start pulling everything together into basic playbooks.

Define your CRM stages so you can get a quick glimpse of how your pipeline is running. For opportunity stages, I like

0. Identified

1. Qualified

2. Demos + Trials Completed

3. Procurement Started

4. Closed Won

Keep them simple. No more than 3-5 stages at first. I only add stages that happen in every cycle to my CRM stages. I also write them in past tense so I know the stage is completed.

Map each call type that you blueprinted to each stage.

Create a list of checkpoints or questions that need to be answered at each stage before moving a prospect to the next change. What action do they need to take? What action do you need to take?

Map out what next steps are (calls or follow-ups) for each of the stages.

Create a follow-up email template for each call type so you can accurately summarize the call notes. It should clearly articulate the problems you identified, highlight the key parts of your solution that solves those problems, and outline agreed upon next steps including dates and commitments on either side.

Add any additional resources to the different stages. Examples could be a pitch deck, a demo script, a proposal template, etc.

I like to organize all of this into a spreadsheet and build on it over time.

Important Notes:

Don’t take 8 weeks to do this. It’s going to change so much as you learn more about your market.

This whole exercise should be a brain dump of your first sales process. A few hours or days will get you there.

Then go into market and test out your assumptions. Validate that you have the right steps in your process. Validate that your demo resonates with the problems solved.

Build the plane while you’re flying.

None of this is McKinsey or Gartner type frameworks or consulting. You don’t need that in the early days, probably not until you’re well above $20M ARR.

Keep it simple so you know how to execute on it every time you have a deal in your pipeline.

Eventually, you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not. You’ll gain traction. And you’ll have a basic process you can teach to a sales rep.

If they’re good, they’ll take this to a whole other level. And then a VP Sales will come in and figure out how to scale it.

But early days, get rid of the complexity. You just don’t have the time.

Let me know what’s your biggest challenge right now in closing deals.

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.

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