Pick a methodology

Your exact sales process is important. But most important is that you have a process at all. First, you’ll need to choose a methodology. Second, supplement with books or a coach.

Most founders end up doing both. Let’s go step by step.

Choose a methodology

You won't know whether a methodology is the "best" until you run it a few times. So, take your best guess, pick one, and verify with results.

There is a wide variety of approaches. (The sales consulting market is a big one!) But there are a few that tend to come up often in tech and software:

Regardless of the method you choose, keep a few things in mind:

• Whatever you choose, pursue with vigor. Don’t half-ass it. You can’t assess gaps if you don't run the same process and methodology every time.
• Ensure the process aligns with your market. Some are more tailored to enterprise sales.
• Don’t over-engineer this. Keep it simple.
• Having a process allows you to modify the process to suit you. It’s like modifying a recipe: When you know what you’re doing, you can swap the pecorino for parmesan.

"If you have a process, you can intentionally iterate on it. If you never have a process, it's hard to incorporate learnings and improve," says Steve Hind, co-founder of Lorikeet.

The methodology leads to your sales framework, which leads to your sales process. There are some subtle but important differences here:

• Methodology
  How you approach the sale and the information you need from the prospect. It’s how you qualify who is worth talking to.
• Framework
  How do you implement that, i.e., when do you ask those questions?
• Process
  How this comes together on individual calls and how you capture it (both your tech stack and how you run a call).

Supplement with books

While not a replacement for an end-to-end methodology, books can help you with mindset or specific aspects of the sales process, or be more of a general primer. Some books we’ve seen mentioned repeatedly:

• To Sell Is Human: For getting over feeling “salesy”
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiation lessons from the FBI
• Getting to Yes: Research-backed negotiation lessons
• $100M Offers: More on the marketing side, helpful pre-sale
• Grit: Mindsets for pushing through roadblocks

“There's probably a dozen well-known books on sales. Fundamentally, if you've read four of them, you've gotten 90% of the insights. It's meaningfully more challenging to learn marketing or product or engineering,” says Mark Tanner, co-founder of Qwilr.

Hire a coach

If you’re consistently getting meetings but struggling to close, it’s worth considering hiring a sales coach. There are coaches that specialize in founder-led sales and can help you quickly iterate your process.

Two ways most founders find coaches:

1. Ask the founders in your network who are a few stages ahead.
2. Think of the pleasant buying experiences you’ve had. Ask the salesperson how they were trained.

"I had a vendor pitch me, and afterward I thought, ‘Wow, this was a really tight call!’ And I emailed him afterward and asked, ‘I don't think we need your product, but how did you learn to sell?’ And he introduced me to a group of folks called Rampd,” says Steve Hind, co-founder of Lorikeet. “I realized once I started working with them that I was not a six out of 10 salesperson. I was a two out of 10, at best."

Many founders we spoke to swore by hiring a coach so they could continue improving at sales and focus their creative energy on their product.

“If it's your first time ever doing sales, I would recommend you invest in a sales coach,” says Amanda Zhu, co-founder of Recall.ai. “You're going to skip a lot of the pains, and you can remove the variable of sales by working with the sales coach, leaving only the variable of: Is the product what's holding us back? Or is it the sales process?”

Treat sales like any other skill: approach it with humility and a learner's mindset. You will one day build your own sales playbook. But for now, you don’t have the corpus of information you need.

You haven’t done this and aren’t an expert.

Yet.