All Founders Want to Scale to $1m… here are 3 ways to fix founder-led sales to reach there:
Founder-led sales is hard enough to start and it gets much harder when you’ve had the taste of success and know you still have a LONG way to go!
If you are a music fan, you will have heard of a phenomenon called ‘the difficult second album’.
That is, when a band has had an incredible debut, the expectations are so high to follow it up or even surpass it that no matter what they create it is held to an impossible standard by both fans and the record company.
For the band, do they do more of the same? Do they take a completely different artistic direction? Or if they were REALLY rock n roll they’d just stop there leaving the world to wonder ‘what if’.
If you’re Oasis, you’d do more of the same.
Why is this relevant to you founders?
Because the promised land VCs and all the guides tell you is $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue.
But this isn’t the first album.
When founders reach $20,000 a month, they rightfully get excited about where their business could go, they often rush to hire BDRs or a salesperson, perhaps borrowing money or drawing down funding in the process.
Then, they stagnate. They had their first album, initial success and excitement but both knowing the energy it took and time away from them and the rest of the business often clouds judgement on what to do for the best to grow the business.
Novabook, the accountant for startups, is hosting me for a webinar to help founders get beyond this first album feeling to take control of their revenue themselves and grow it to $100,000 mrr from the initial success whilst balancing all the other stuff you have to do.
In this blog I will present 3 practical and actionable things that help you get there.
1. Use your data to pre-qualify demand more
You need to prospect; you know that, I know that, I’m not going to hammer it home. But you need to prospect much smarter with your limited time: For those who have demand, not just who you think could benefit.
With existing revenue, assuming, of course, you are selling across multiple customers, you already have a rich amount of data on who bought, when and why, i.e what constituted the right person at the right time and the project they desperately needed to solve, more than any other research.
To grow further, you need to spend more of your time with better prospects. A better prospect is one who has an unavoidable project to complete, which your product helps them complete MUCH more pleasantly.
Take myself. My clients are in a situation where they have outgrown their relationship network and have a need to bring in more revenue, whether it is cash flow or future funding unlocked, within 3-6 months and don’t have the sales experience to know how to do this who want repeatable sales afterwards.
The ways to do it are via generic coaching, hiring someone on commission and hoping they work out or wasting a lot of time and emotions doing the wrong things.
Their trigger is usually recent funding or hiring their first jr hire.
I then take this and basically use Crunchbase to see who would fit!
This is what you need to do, it takes an afternoon and you may have a wider source of more accurate data that your agent can help you source:
1. Take all your wins and your customer conversations
2. Find the clear project that they all HAD to do where you helped
3. Why they didn’t like the alternatives or couldn’t do it themselves
4. What were the public signals or evidence
Add those all together and you should have a similar statement on the above that you can then apply to your research to pull together who you should approach.
The mistake founders make is to try and push their supply, i.e try to convince and educate rather than find their demand.
This way, you can start making lists (Claude, Clay etc all are fine) of who is really worth talking to and who is most likely to buy rather than who you’d like to buy.
This means your leads immediately increase in quality because they are largely pre-qualified, then, when you approach (more of that in my webinar) you have very clear value and timely intrusion into their world which increases your top of funnel and closing conversion rates.
Repeatability is the foundation of scaling.
2. Don’t underestimate partners
You know what is better than getting more sales yourself? Getting other people to sell for you!
One of the most cost-effective ways to increase revenue growth is to find a partner whose customers you share and can each sell into.
This very much depends on what you are doing of course. If you are a transactional B2B business, this may not be for you.
However, if you are say a business that tells people how they can perform better in AI searches then why not join forces with a consultancy that can resell you on a project-by-project basis?
It may be because it is difficult or Founders want to say they ‘hacked’ sales but there is an obsession with outbound being the only channel.
It is incredibly important, but when you are early and don’t have social credibility yet, the results of using someone else’s reputation and being resold have an outsized impact!
Plus, if a customer moves from a partner but likes what you do… you get to sign them again.
But jokes aside, when it comes to growing to a million, someone else handling the customer relationship, onboarding and sale is a huge boon.
You can use this time to put out other fires, or prospect more!
3. Spend much more time in Discovery
Whether you win a new customer or not, most of that is determined in the Discovery phase, the first two meetings with your customer. Not the POC or the negotiations.
Why? Well, the proof of concept really exists to de-risk the buyer’s decision, showing finance and their bosses that the technology really does work. I hope you know what works before doing the concept!
The Discovery phase comes in two stages: Qualification and Quantification.
Demand is discovered (see!) and qualified in the first stage. The second stage, Quantification, is where you and the customer determine the material impact based on their demand, this is where we get to justify our pricing and the real cost of doing nothing,
Your time is precious; the reasons why clients will chase you and organise steps rather than you cajoling them is based on urgency discovered here.
You often don’t get urgency in the first meeting, what you do often get is what you want to hear or ‘happy ears’.
Your prospect quotes a pain you solve, you then note down that this ‘should’ and ‘ought’ to be solved by them, ask if they would want to and they say yes (often because yeah they want to solve it, but do they need to?)
What you must, MUST do is dig deeper, asking why in the qualification stage far more.
The most obvious question no one ever asks is: Why do you want to solve this as opposed to staying as things are?
It is a really powerful question!
What we want to find as founders is a reason not to waste our time or not to work with someone and whether there is no demand rather than trying to force demand.
Once you uncover a reason why they wouldn’t want to keep things as they are, we go deeper, how does it affect them personally at work? What are the consequences if this isn’t met?
It is not your job to make people feel comfortable (within reason!) it is your job to see if they have reason to work with you.
Timeframe, an unavoidable event or project/opportunity/risk is where urgency lies and often for surprisingly selfish/personal reasons.
One founder I worked with said he wanted more revenue because investor updates were making him feel so sick with worry that he knew he needed to solve new business!
So spend as much time uncovering real urgency and demand as you need to, find where you can serve and quickly qualify out those who don’t have a reason to work with you.
In my webinar I will go into more detail on how to practically apply these things to grow your business along the million and one other things you have to do as a founder.
In the meantime, reach out to me on the button below or join Novabook and I here on the 7th October: Here
Also who exactly are they and why partner with them?
Well, Novabook is the accountant for startups. They give founders access to the best UK accountants to handle all your payroll, book-keeping, and accounting, and they have a team based in London that you can call anytime.
Alongside working with their wonderful team, they have built a software platform to automate all of the admin that they hated as founders (tell me about it). Think automatic invoice ingestion, receipt capture and the like. They aim to save founders time and money whilst providing the best accounting service to UK businesses.
Give them a call as you grow your business… I know I will
Happy selling!
Alex
Get in touch.