2. • Know your customer
• Your First Sales
• Hiring your first Salespeople (Culture vs Relationship)
• Compensation
• Building & Training Teams
• Using your Salesforce to lead Product Development
• Churn
4. • Who is your customer – their vertical, their size etc.
Where will they spend money?
• Who is your customer within the customer – CEO, CIO,
CTO or distributed teams (Slack)
• What are their hopes, dreams, fears? Greed or fear?
5. Your First Sales
• Should be founder-led
• Need to know what it’s like to sell your product/vision
• Founder should have direct interaction with customers
• Cold contacting – InMail vs Cold email vs Cold Call
7. Hiring your first Salespeople
• Knowing when you need to hire
• Interpreting past success (Salesperson vs company).
Can they do early stage?
• Culture vs Relationships
8. Creating a compensation plan
• Early stage: Focus on activity based management –
calls, meetings, demo’s, prototypes.
• Create the plan that works for your company and size
• Base/Bonus/Accelerator
• Reward the winners, penalize the losers
10. Building & Training Teams
• Demand Generation – inbound vs outbound
• Inside Sales, Outside sales or both
• SME, Corporate, Enterprise
• Channels: AWS Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Resellers
• Invest in training and CRM systems
12. Most companies write the software, they
get it all working, and then they throw it
over the wall to the marketing department,
saying ‘here is what we built, go write the
press release.’ That process is the one
that’s actually backwards.”
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.