Getting Your First 100 Paying Customers
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This document provides an agenda and information for a Techstars Sales Workshop on getting a startup's first 100 paying customers. The summary is: The workshop covers sales fundamentals like defining sales, storytelling, and selling through curiosity. It emphasizes selling solutions to customers' pain points over optional features. Attendees are advised to start selling themselves before hiring others, track their sales funnel metrics, and use simple tactics like cold calls and emails while refining processes later. The goal is to execute quickly to gain traction rather than over-engineering sales systems initially.
Getting Your First 100 Paying Customers
- 1. Techstars Sales Workshop Getting your first 100 paying customers
- 2. AGENDA ● What is sales? ● Don’t over-engineer (in the beginning) ● Do it yourself first ● Sell painkillers not vitamins ● Why storytelling matters ● Selling through curiosity ● Track your funnel ● Tactics and tools
- 3. WHAT IS SALES? ● Lifeblood of any business ● Honorable when done properly ● Crucial if you want success in life
- 4. WHAT ARE SALESPEOPLE? ● Salespeople are experts ● Salespeople are consultants ● Salespeople are educators
- 5. WHAT IS SELLING? Selling is both an ACT and an ART. ACT of selling is the process - following the necessary steps and actions to get a customer to make a buying decision ART of selling is appealing to a person’s emotions - giving them enough logical reasons to feel comfortable buying
- 6. To be successful at sales, you must be good at both the ACT and the ART of selling.
- 7. SELL PAINKILLERS NOT VITAMINS ● Vitamins are "nice to have," but not "need to have." Often times these are features or functionalities, and not major platforms. And just like in a drug store, preventive vitamins are optional. They are usually priced at a major discount, compared to the expensive painkilling prescriptions behind the counter. ● Painkillers are typically helping their clients to materially drive more revenue or lower current costs out of their business. And, even better, they are doing so with established line item budgets, not requiring new budgets to be created, which can take time and slow down your sales closing process.
- 8. STORYTELLING ● Appeal To Both Logic And Emotion By Combining Facts With Narrative ● Stories resonate with people ● Use social proof ○ “This customer JUST LIKE YOU had the same issue and was able to solve it with our solution.” ● Be the middleman ○ tell them how other customers (just like them) are using your solution.
- 9. SELLING THROUGH CURIOSITY Layering & Probing Questions ● Tell me more about… ● What do you mean... ● How so... ● Why is that… ● What are your thoughts on… ● Elaborate more on… ● Say more about... Layering & Probing Questions - Give me some examples of… - What would be some examples of... Quantify Questions ● How would you quantify… ● How did you come up with… ● How would you measure… ● What was your thinking behind… ● What was their thinking behind… ● What’s the impact of… ● What’s the benefit of...
- 10. DON’T OVER ENGINEER ● There’s value in execution and speed ● Do whatever it takes to get traction initially ● Do things that don’t scale
- 11. FIRST, DO IT YOURSELF ● You know your product the best ● Figure out target audience ○ Where to build lead lists & how to find target prospects ● Script everything ○ Know what success looks like ○ Test new scripts: test - tune - scale ● Get enough data to determine if a campaign is “successful” ○ Spend 100% of your time on sales for x time ○ Get enough data that 3-5% conversion rate can actually be a sale
- 12. FIRST, DO IT YOURSELF (cont’d) ● Once you figure out something that “works”, hire someone to set demos for you. ○ This is called an SDR ○ This will help you get in more meaningful conversations ● Hire 2 at a time ○ Competition ○ Fire fast ○ Track their funnel based on what you were doing
- 13. TRACK YOUR FUNNEL ● Always know your numbers ● What you track grows ● Everything is a funnel Activity DM Reached Demo Set Demo Complete Sale
- 14. FUNNEL METRICS 1. Activity Top of funnel is driven by activity. That can be calls, emails, in-person visits, DMs, etc. Activity feeds the rest of the funnel. 2. DM Reached Track the number of decision makers you are able to reach from your activity metrics. If you make 100 calls and reach 0 decision makers you might have a problem with quality of your list. Activity DM Reached Demo Set Demo Complete Sale
- 15. FUNNEL METRICS Activity DM Reached Demo Set Demo Complete Sale 3. Demo Set How many appointments, product demos, or pitches are you setting for each decision maker you reach? 4. Demo Complete Of the demos you set, how many actually how up? 5. Sales What is your close rate?
- 16. OUR FUNNEL Total Average Dials 25,181 5,036 Demos Set 438 88 Demos Complete 294 59 Show Rate 67% 67% Sales 55 11 Close Rate 19% 19% MRR $4,491 $898 Total Average Demos Complete 432 43 Sales 133 13 Close Rate 30.8% 30.8% MRR $13,429 $1,343 Avg MRR $101 $101 SDRs: AE:
- 17. TACTICS ● Create a list of prospects ○ Find an industry directory ○ Search facebook for pages in a certain category ○ Google business listings ● Send outbound emails ○ Use a service like reply.io or outreach.io ● Cold call ○ Pick up the phone and call your prospects ● Facebook Message ● Upload lead list into FB as a custom audience ○ Supplement with a very tight lookalike audience ○ Drive to landing page designed to get you leads (goal is a phone call)
- 18. TACTICS (CONT’D) ● Get listed on review sites ○ Review sites rank high and usually have pay per lead or pay per click ● Reach out to influencers
- 19. TOOLS ● Building Lead Lists ○ Build manually using someone offshore from upwork.com ● CRM ○ salesforce, hubspot, pipedrive, google sheets (quick and dirty) ● Outbound Email ○ Reply.io, prospect.io, outreach.io ● Deep Social ○ Find relevant influencers Don’t overcomplicate. Just execute. Refine systems and scale later.