Make the mindset shift

Your biggest risk in the early days is wasting valuable time and runway building the wrong thing.

A mistake many founders make is thinking that “sales” is categorically different from “customer research” or “user testing.”

Some mindset shifts

View sales as a fun puzzle

Recall.ai’s Amanda Zhu says she was so nervous to sell that she was visibly shaking on early calls. Now? “Whenever a prospect comes to me or comes to the team with a really hairy objection, it's really fun now to figure out how to get around it. It's like a puzzle.”

Your early sales calls will be more about reducing the puzzle pieces than putting together the puzzle. You’ll spend a lot of time learning and filtering out prospects who aren’t a good fit for your product.

Have strong opinions, loosely held.

To demo or not to demo? Product-led growth (PLG) or sales-led? Enterprise or SMB? Have an early hypothesis on the best way to close deals, then work to prove or disprove it. You will change your mind.

Equals initially had a freemium model, but new users weren’t engaging with the product. "The thing that kind of clicked was having everybody take an onboarding sales call with us. No exceptions,” says Bobby Pinero, co-founder of Equals. “You had to get on a call with us. We had to talk through use cases. We had to understand what you were trying to do with the product, why you wanted it."

Embrace being the “good enough” salesperson

You don’t have to be the best salesperson. You do have to learn the fastest. If you’ve founded a company, you are likely very good at some other part of the business. Get ready to be bad at first and be open-minded about developing your talents.

“The bits of the sales process I'd been involved in were the middling— the demoing, the talking about features, talking about the market,” says Steve Hind, co-founder of Lorikeet. "I would have rated myself as maybe a six out of 10 at sales.” (He eventually leveled up with a coach.)

This guide will help, but also consider hiring a coach, rewatching sales calls, and getting candid feedback from prospects.

Grit is a prerequisite

Every founder we’ve spoken with has a story of hustle on the road to building a repeatable sales motion. Yoodli’s Esha Joshi boarded a cross-country flight with a few hours' notice to try and get in front of the right VPs. Pylon’s Marty Kausas works so much that he was literally featured in the Wall Street Journal for it.

You don’t have to sleep in the office like Marty, but you do have to be prepared to do whatever it takes.

Selling is the job. Forever.

There is no person you can hire who will be able to sell better than you, the engaged and curious founder. Even today, our CEO, Patrick Thompson, takes just as many sales calls as our Account Executives (AEs), totaling more than 1,000 in the first two years of Clarify.