Introduction
Sales is your job
We created this guide to help.
When you’re a founder of an early-stage company, it can feel like your world is on fire. Everything depends on you. Your brain (and your calendar) are pulled in a dozen different directions.
With all those competing priorities, there are trade- offs. And one of the areas that I see founders avoid the most? Sales.
“I came with a lot of biases as a former product person,” says Enzo Avigo, co-founder of the customer success tool, June. “I didn't feel legit selling my product with a proper sales motion. So I escaped behind building a great product and promoting it so that people would experience it and hopefully find it superior."
Enzo is not alone. I’ve seen talented founders bury themselves in comfortable tasks like coding, product mockups, and social media—anything that feels productive without risking the acute pain of rejection.
Many founders have told themselves that sales was someone else’s problem. But selling your own product to the people you’re building for is the most efficient way to learn if you’re on the right path.
Founders who skip it inevitably end up building something no one wants.
That’s why you cannot delegate sales to someone else.
Probably like 99 % of people are going to be wrong in what they end up building. There's very few savants. There's very few Steve Jobs in the world who just have great product intuition.
Patrick Thompson
Co-founder, Clarify
You are your company’s first—and most important—seller
Although natural sellers exist, innate ability is not a requirement. There are timeless sales principles that people less talented and connected than you have used to build billion- dollar companies. There are also new dynamics and rules as we venture further into the age of AI.
We reflected on our own 10,000 hours of hard lessons from building an AI-native CRM to surface the story of what actually happened as we sold the earliest versions of the idea.
We then reached out to some of the smartest founders we knew. They represent a cross- section of verticals. Some are on their fourth company, others have recently burst onto the market. Some have had billion-dollar valuations, and others are at the bleeding edge of our AI era.
But all of them have been on the journey you are about to go on.
If you can't make them interested by email, what's the point of writing a line of code?
Des Traynor
Co-founder, Intercom
People love storytelling—not just what you're building but the story of how you built it.
Marty Kausas
Co-founder, Pylon
Sales is really about two things. Meeting the people. Trying to close them. That's it. You can make it as complex as you want.
Enzo Avigo
Co-founder, June
When you're selling [to your] first customers, focus on filtering, not convincing.
Amanda Zhu
Co-founder, Recall.ai
People aren't buying things from companies. They're buying things from other people.
Bobby Pinero
Co-founder, Equals
That human element when there's so much noise helps drive really high quality pipeline.
Riya Grover
Co-founder, Sequence
I'm relentless. I will follow up with you until you tell me to F off.
Elaine Zelby
Co-founder, Tofu
We have a rule of thumb—for a certain set of companies, we 'meet with the janitor.' We’ll talk to anyone.
Steve Hind
Co-founder, Lorikeet
The first sales rep is going to be meaningfully worse than the founder, even if the founder sucks at sales.
Mark Tanner
Co-founder, Qwilr
Those early sales were more user research. It was not trying to convince anyone. I was just trying to understand what reality was like for them.
Esha Joshi
Co-founder, Yoodli
We’ve laid out their lessons sequentially, organized by the key choices you need to make and the order you are likely to need to make them in. They range from choosing a methodology, to the right way to run a sales call, and much more. We sanded them down to their core so you can get to the good stuff fast.
You can follow the steps as is, or skip ahead to what you need now, depending on where you are on your sales journey.
The insights in this guide resulted in more than half a billion in investment rounds. There are two exits (so far). Between all founders, they’ve founded 15 companies.
Collectively, we wish you the same success.
— Patrick Thompson, Co-founder, Clarify