You’ve poured time, money and resources into developing your product or service, and now you’re ready to find customers. What’s your first move? For many, the instinctual answer is to hire a salesperson or even build an entire sales team. It’s a classic move and a massive mistake.
3 Reasons Founders Should Sell Their Product Themselves
- You created the product, so you’re the best person to sell it.
- You can save money by delaying the high cost of hiring and maintaining a sales team.
- You can create a strong foundation for your future sales team.
Hiring salespeople at this early stage is akin to buying a helicopter before you’ve taken a single flying lesson. Sales teams are the highest cost burden with the most unpredictability and highest likelihood of failure. Before you even develop your customer funnel, you’re already risking bad margins, unattainable earning potential for your sellers, high employee churn and potential reputational harm.
Instead of rushing into sales hires, consider a go-to-market waterfall, a strategic approach that builds a sustainable path toward your first sales hire. This strategy isn’t just about delaying expenses; it’s about creating a foundation strong enough to support a sales team when the time is right. Here’s what you need to do to build a go-to-market waterfall.
Get Your Sales Messaging Straight
Before you even think about sales, get your messaging straight. It might sound and be easy, but it is key.
Start With a Landing Page
Start by building a landing page for your company and product — yes, just a landing page, not a full website. Tools like Instapage can get you started for less than $100 a month. If design isn’t your strong suit, hire someone for basic layout and design elements. This landing page will serve as the initial touchpoint for potential customers to learn about your offering.
Test It All
Once you have a landing page, it’s time to test your messaging. Use a market research tool like Wynter to get feedback from your ideal customer profile (ICP). It might sting to hear that your messaging doesn’t resonate, but this feedback is crucial. Tweak your landing page until your message is clear and compelling.
Create Your Content
Start creating content about the problem you’re solving. Your professional social media profile is a good, and free, place to start building awareness about your business.
Ghostwriters can help, but doing the work yourself will deepen your understanding of your product. Always link back to your landing page wherever you talk about your product or service.
Lead Marketing Yourself
As the founder of the business, you’re the best person to lead marketing. Here are some ideas for doing so.
Send Outbound Emails
With refined messaging and market research in hand, start sending outbound emails yourself. Use tools like Hunter.io to source email addresses. Craft these emails with a personal touch — you have the time to make meaningful connections with these early potential customers.
Build Social Media Ads
Create a company page on LinkedIn and use the ICP data to target specific audiences. You can start with small budgets for ads to drive traffic to your landing page. Catalog titles, companies and feedback from respondents to refine your approach.
Develop a Playbook
As you gather insights from these activities, begin to compile a playbook. This should include common objections, pain points, competitor mentions, how your product/service work and why prospects are interested. Your playbook should be clear enough that someone unfamiliar with your company could use it to understand and pitch your product.
Start Selling
Who, you? Yes, you. As said above, this is your company and your product and you’re the best person to sell it initially.
Create a V1 Pitch Deck
Develop a basic pitch deck and test it with live prospects. Ask them to critique it. One approach could be conducting several customer information interviews on the phone, not email. Ask specific questions early on:
- Is the problem we’ve identified a real problem for you?
- How big of a problem?
- Would you pay to solve it?
- What are the existing options to solve it? Have you tried them? How do they fall short for you?
- What do you think of our proposed solution?
- Does it strike you as a great solution to the problem?
Set Daily Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Set daily KPIs like sending 15 introduction emails, securing one meeting or engaging in one LinkedIn conversation. Track your ability to meet these KPIs and the conversion rates.
Following this go-to-market waterfall provides the qualitative and quantitative baselines necessary before considering your first sales hire. In fact, many products priced under $1,000 can often be sold purely through effective marketing, without needing a live sales team. Of course, factors like product complexity and implementation requirements might still necessitate a sales team.
Delaying that first sales hire saves on costs and helps you gain a deeper understanding of what will make a future sales team successful. This approach leads to earlier profitability and a more sustainable business model.
So, resist the urge to jump into hiring a sales team. Your startup’s future success may depend on it.
