SELL SELL SELL

On 21 March 2023 we were joined by 3 founders who together could write the book on getting started with selling as a startup founder.  They are Charlene Armour of Armour AI, Jenni Timony of FitPink and Melis Dural of EKOS.AI.  Watch our video if you want the full lowdown or read on if you just want the highlights and advice without the chat.

AwakenHub host Clare McGee asked all three at the end of the call what their top tips for newbies to sales were and this is what they said:

Jenni “Your biggest challenge will be inertia; start off by building relationships early doors and these will eventually result in sales”

Charlene “Build trust”

Melis “Spend less time with people who don’t get it; don’t waste your time trying to convert people who say no”.

There’s a definite theme running through those comments above.  Much of the conversation on the evening was about the importance of really pinpointing who you are selling to, collecting data and acting upon it, creating a network effect via relationship building, the importance of keeping learning and leveraging your existing customers for future sales as you go along and getting over the fear and just getting started.  Intrigued?  Here are the highlights from our three speakers.

On getting over the fear of selling:

“Think of it as data collection, nothing more, nothing less.  If you collect and measure the data, you'll get another step closer to the sweet spot of where your sales come from” (Charlene).

“Just see sales as a conversation with another business owner who has similar challenges to yourself and think about how your product or service is able to help them.  As a founder you are already selling every day.  You sell to the bank manager, an angel investor, your team …” (Jenni)

“You must begin by putting the time into defining and understanding your personas.  The trick is to position your product or service so that it does the work for itself.  People want to use products or services that their friends or colleagues are talking about” (Melis)

On whether to sell as a founder or hire in a salesperson early doors:

“As a founder, if you can’t sell your product no-one can.  Don’t hire in until you reach the £30k MRR mark and then bring in someone who understands strategic channels and relationship building and who is as passionate about your product or service as you are” (Melis)

“As a general rule of thumb, we reach out to a particular persona three times and if there’s no response the third time, that's it.  Selling SaaS products is a numbers game” (Charlene)

“I couldn't overstate the importance of doing your own sales and not getting hung up on it.  As a startup, most of us are going into potential customers with zero credibility. We think we're great and our products are brilliant, but they're thinking, yeah, another startup.   Hiring someone early doors to do sales, in my experience gained over the course of different businesses, can result in you paying salary and expenses for a year and getting little to no value out of that person.  They often move jobs after a few months and then you’re back to square one” (Jenni)

On where to start:

“The first thing is to identify your user personas, and you have to get seriously specific with this because if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no-one.   I started by identifying the personas who had the biggest problem.  Then I thought, where do these people hang out? And how do I access and engage with them?  And that’s where the marketing comes in” (Charlene)

“We used Figma before we even started writing code and in tandem identified and built relationships with partners who touched multiple communities and organisations in order to create a ripple effect and to save us time and money on marketing by stimulating inbound requests as soon as the product was live.  It’s very powerful when you’re raising investment if you can demonstrate to potential investors that customers are coming to you” (Melis)

“At FitPink 90% of our sales happen through our website, although we also sell into a number of retail stores.   For the retail stores it’s all very much about margin.  They're very tough in terms of what they need to get out of that.  Selling B2C is all about ecommerce, digital marketing and email campaigns.  But it’s also an element of word of mouth and that’s very hard to measure.  But my instinct is that word of mouth is a huge part of our growth” (Jenni)

On selling a technical product without being technical yourself:

“In my opinion there's often far too much emphasis on the features of the product including the tech that’s in it instead of the value the product brings.  The best person to sell the product is the person that knows the market and knows the value and knows the industry and is able to emphasise the benefits and not the features.  The reason my product exists is because of my knowledge of the market.  That in turn brings comfort to my customers, because they know when they ask me a question, they're getting a truthful, honest answer, and not just a sales pitch” (Charlene)

On engaging with retailers as a new supplier:

“I collected loads of feedback, I would take photos and really get to know the store owners or managers.  Learn their names, take the photos.  I put a lot of that into a PowerPoint presentation that I presented to head office.  They were blown away by how much I learned about their stores because I found there can often be a disconnect between what head office thinks and what's actually going on at store level.  I learned a lot about their business including things they didn't know themselves.  For me that was probably one of my most defining sales experiences – the importance of learning about your customers’ business and learning about the challenges and issues with their incumbent suppliers or even just in their business and how your product or solution can help with that?

And really trying to see things from their perspective and not yours” (Jenni)

Tips on how to turn a no into a yes?

“It depends on what kind of “No” it is.  If it's a hard No, chances are your persona is wrong and you're reaching out to the wrong people.  If it's a “not too sure No”, you have to find out what their specific objections are?  When you do find out, those objections should then feed into your marketing material.  For example, one of the objections we get is we want to implement ISO standards, we know we have to, it's just not at the top of our pile right now.  I take that information and write a blog post about why ISO standards should be at the top of your pile and I send it to them.  And in that way, you build the relationship and move the lead along the pipeline and warm it up” (Charlene)

Any difference between selling products and selling services?

“There are differences in B2C and B2B but marketing should do the groundwork for sales.  You need to grow brand awareness for your products before a sales team goes in and then on an ongoing basis after that” (Jenni) 

“At least 6 – 10 touch points are needed for a new brand.  People rarely buy from an unknown or untrusted brand” (Melis)

Is there a place for social influencers?

“You should choose social influencers as carefully as you choose team members or advisors.  They must be in tune with your brand and closely matched to your mission and values.  The right social influencer will create their own network effect for you … but in order for this to work, you must have done the ground work on your personas” (Melis)

Thoughts on tools and processes:

“As a minimum you must collect all the comms info and data and go over it as a team once a week to generate the learnings.  We used an Excel sheet at first to capture all of this and these days we use HubSpot” (Melis)

“As the founder it’s important that you know the sales processes yourself and the challenges the team will have so that you can help them through them.  You need to measure everything so that you know what works and what doesn’t” (Jenni)

“I started by doing little bits and pieces here and there and everywhere, and there was no structure to it.  I restructured my effort so that I now spend mornings on sales and marketing.  I’ve outsourced all the admin to allow me to do that, because it’s so important to spend this focused time on sales and marketing” (Charlene)

Last question for our panel was … Do you enjoy selling?  This is what they said

“At the very beginning, I absolutely hated it. I avoided it like the plague.  I took every no personally.  Then I realised there is no point in building a wonderful product if nobody knows about.  So now I enjoy sales but I look at it from a very different perspective.  I think of it as data collection and solving problems”  (Charlene)

“Selling isn’t easy.  You have to sell first to yourself, second to your team and third to your customer.  I’ve learned to spend less time with those people who don’t get it” (Melis)

“Yes – if I’m selling something of value to the customer.  If you’ve made it this far and you’ve founded something, you’re already a sales person” (Jenni)