Founder-led Sales: the essential guide for your 0→1 and beyond

Day 0

Have you ever faced a problem so pressing that even after trying all solutions, popular and fringe, you saw no meaningful value add? Do your friends share problems they're living with even after trying and failing at finding reasonable solutions?

Those who thrive on tackling challenges head-on and refuse to settle for half-baked solutions, this starts a journey that spans years or even decades. It's the journey of not just solving the problem but also building a business, a community, sometimes even a movement around it — most commonly called starting a startup.

The problem as your starting point

You’ve been thinking about the problem hard and long, and you can’t live without a solution, so you start building ideas inside your head, discuss with a lot of people who face the same or similar problems and scrabble together a Minimum Viable Product or an MVP. This MVP won't be a polished, user-friendly product. 

More often than not, it won't even allow the public to sign up and use it. Instead, it serves as a rough conceptualization of how you envision the ideal solution. 

How you create this product is up to you. Some use Figma to prototype; others opt for no-code tools like Clay Research for quick and easy construction, and those with coding prowess dive headfirst into the nitty-gritty of development.

I can’t stress this enough – spend very less time building your MVP and spend the most time diving deep into the hardest problem for your users. Perfection is the enemy here, rough products that are capable of showing the light at the end of the tunnel is more than enough for you to pick a path and start moving forward. Because, till you find the hardest problem and first signals of solving them in the right way, you should be iterating as fast as possible and that’s possible only at the MVP phase, never that fast or easy to do when you have something that looks like a professional software.

What do you do with your MVP? 

You take this unpolished rough MVP and run as many demos as you can. At this stage, your goal is to test the waters by presenting a simple message: "We understand your pain (X), and here's what we believe can help (Y)." The clarity of X and the effectiveness of Y decide what steps you take next. Higher the clarity of the problem X, the better chances of you building an ideal solution Y and easier it will be to find people with the problem. If the market is large enough, or is growing, this is usually a good sign of a potentially viable and scalable business.

Demos and founder-led sales is the secret sauce of achieving PMF fast and right

A more detailed guide is coming soon on finding your design partners, and initial customers, but here's a quick tip: reach out to anyone you know facing the same problem. Just be mindful not to offer milk products to someone who's lactose intolerant; it might not sit well with them (iykwim).

Demos are your secret weapons for iterating your way to a product that can achieve PMF and scale. Conducting these demos yourself and gathering first hand feedback is the winning strategy. Why? Because you're intimately familiar with the problem, the solution, and the product. This reduces the chances of misinterpreting customer feedback when you rely on passed on notes from your sales reps.

Also, founder calls differ from sales rep calls in some very key areas — they are more focused on gathering feedback and building a community rather than selling a product. Founders get far more calls booked by way of feedback calls than sales reps trying to book demos. This means, as a founder, you can schedule numerous feedback calls and have candid exchanges. Plus, people enjoy talking to founders, so you'll get more calls and valuable insights.

Pro tip: avoid sounding too salesy in these feedback calls; try to ask tough questions, especially the questions you might not like the answers to, and collect genuine feedback opinions. This feedback you collect becomes critical data points that empower you to refine and enhance the product for better market reception. Run this exercise in as critical and analytical a way as possible by collecting many data points, from the feedback about your MVP to geography, persona, buying power, etc of the people you’re talking to. All these help you avoid overly niching down to a small audience that might not help you sell globally, or sell to a saturated market or a small value market.  

Furthermore, these calls help you gather a detailed list of features. Use this list to build out your roadmap and chuck the ones that  don't align with your product or vision.

These conversations also serve as valuable research sessions — exploring alternatives and the market landscape, how users currently address their problems and needs, user personas, and buyer paradigms. These data points help you do more than refine your product, they help you discover your path to PMF and design a successful GTM strategy after. 

What’s more? 

Feedback calls help you build your internal knowledge base

Taking note of the small details matters a lot more than you’d imagine. Watch how people react to your words and phrases during feedback calls. Keep a document of what works and what doesn't – like a guide to understanding customers. 

These data points are what you need to build and perfect a pitch deck that provides the right and enough information to help your sales reps close deals faster, better, and in large numbers later on. 

// notion screenshot of these docs in directory + table of contents

Remember to share this guide with your team so everyone knows how to talk to customers effectively and aren’t siloed into doing, saying, or creating the wrong or useless things. This slowly built but highly effective from day 0 shared document space will help propagate critical knowledge effectively and be a key reason for your teams to progress quickly together. I'm yet to see any team succeed by working in silos — it creates gaps that make it easy for your competition to edge you over.

Feedback calls help you build the right processes and critical documents

Crucial part about scaling is having the right set of processes and documents in place to help your team make the right moves. These processes come from you, the founder, running feedback calls and establishing the best practices that worked very well for you, the audience, and the category you’re selling to.

Documents, in addition to the ones discussed in the previous section, also include the handy tools and note taking methods you used in your conversations with design partners and first customers. 

For example, you might have used small forms to gather data right before calls, have a shared meeting agenda, take notes in a templatized manner to ensure no critical data point is missed, and finally, the post call follow-up activities. All these are a result of you finding clarity through iteration and your understanding of the process, target audience, and product you’re building being the founder who leads sales from the forefront.

Feedback calls help you build and maintain your source of truth

CRM is the place where a lot of those important data points we discussed before are stored. CRMs in today’s teams have become a multi-team platform where almost all the growth teams use and rely on to execute their duties effectively. 

This is because data points like conversations with customers, meetings, notes, deals, tickets, and more are all tracked very closely in a CRM with a lot of single views and dashboards. 

Creating and adhering to processes around CRMs ensures no information becomes siloed in random tools, and brings about a transparent and collaborative working style where everyone works with each other with a single objective rather than just to meet their targets and KPIs.

CRMs aren’t all that effective without the process and adherence to the processes – so keeping your finger on the pulse will be required for the initial few months until all kinks are ironed out. Later on, you can delegate the sanity and sanctity of the CRM to someone reliable.

// crm screenshot of timeline of activities and deals pipeline

Feedback calls help you build a successful GTM strategy

ICP definition, a clear understanding of buyer vs user dynamic, and the company dictionary all play a massive role and help you not do a botched job with your GTM. These are among the most critical data points you’ll need to build a successful GTM and are gathered right from day 1 of your feedback calls.

Closing your first few deals 

Turning a feedback call into a sales call is a handy skill — it's not too tricky, but it's super useful. 

A clear sign that your product is in demand is when these feedback calls turn into people wanting to have commercial discussions.

When a founder handles the sales part, it shows they believe in their product and are serious about the company's success. It's not passing the money to someone else.

Offering early adopter discounts is a tried and true way to turn that feedback call into a closing call, and tons of founders swear by this to this day!

Additionally, having buying conversations on feedback calls will help you either transition the feedback call into a sales call or give you valuable insights that help you run the future calls with more focus on closing a deal rather than just sheer feedback.

The end of founder-led sales, or is it 👀?! 

MVP, PMF, and Growth are three broad stages for any startup, and founder-led sales, as we saw earlier in this guide, help you refine everything from the product to the messaging, establish processes and documents, and iterate your product to achieve PMF.

There are many formal ways of assessing whether you’ve hit PMF or not, but a general rule of thumb is to see rapid product and messaging iterations slow down, receive positive reviews, and start closing more deals without having to customize, change, or iterate on the product.

With all the processes and documents in place, and having formally declared you’ve hit PMF, founders tend think founder-led sales phase is complete and they tend to move on to building and leading teams, raising money, etc

While many think hitting PMF and building teams to scale growth and product is when founder-led sales ends, I’m here to tell you that founder-led sales only transforms, never truly does – it merely transforms from feedback calls into its next avatar.

Pichu to Pikachu to Raichu

Just as Pokémon evolve, your role as a founder keeps evolving, while staying true to their nature. Just like the electric-type nature of Pichu staying constant all the way till Raichu, your nature of being the loudest salesman of your company stays constant as your role goes from doing feedback calls, to sales calls, to the best storyteller who drives highly relevant and high-intent leads. 

Feedback calls show you what’s valuable and give you a deep understanding of who’s buying your product. You collect these data-points and iterate your way to PMF and start scaling. This is your cue to become the best storyteller your audience has ever seen and surely your company will ever see. Your role now evolves from one that collects feedback to one that starts driving the narrative.

Successful story telling doesn’t take the shape of a list of the best features of your product, but rather it speaks to your customer directly around a very personal matter that’s close to their heart. 

I realize how this could sound vague and devoid of tangible value, but bear with me. The goal with founder-led sales now is to drive the narrative which translates into demand by way of association. People should now want to use your product because of a story you told, the narrative you drove, that resonates deeply with them. This type of storytelling drives demand to your business and sees far higher conversion rates.

Look at Apple, Steve Jobs drove the narrative of devices that could be bicycles for your mind, not the cool graphics or the 1MB RAM the Mac came with in the 80s. People who bought into the narrative that computers could unleash their potential, helped them do things that weren’t possible before the Mac. Same is the story with Nike running ads using the best runners and ball players.

Another well-known example is the Michelin guidebook (thank you Gordon Ramsey). In an effort to drive more tyre sales, they encouraged their customers to take long trips to visit some of the best restaurants and experience great food. Tyres naturally wear off and guess what branding is staring right in their faces when they’re munching down on that tasty risotto and sea bass? That’s right, the cute fluffy tyre man.

This type of storytelling is called soft power. You drive the narrative, the story, with the purest of the hearts, by sheer passion for it, and sales that come via this is merely coincidental. On observing this, you realize a few fundamental truths: people want to be sold stories, not features or a product, and the best stories you can tell are the ones that your customers resonate with deeply.

This storytelling isn’t one-sided either, your customers who buy into this story often benefit from the narrative in addition to the benefits of your product. Case in point, the Michelin guidebook is perhaps one of the best ways to experience some of the finest cuisines in the entire world and has been since its inception. 

Founders driving the narrative, soft-power, when done right, will come off as thought leaders and visionaries. This is one of the final forms of founder-led sales, and in my opinion, a very hard yet fulfilling one because of its potential to affect and influence your audience in the most effective and natural way that has ever existed.

Here's an infamous video of Steve Jobs talking about marketing values that illustrates the value of soft power:

As we wrap up this journey through the intricacies of startups, let's circle back to where it all begins – with you, the founder. In the early hustle, those feedback calls aren't just calls; they're the lifeblood of your product's evolution. You, the captain of the ship, steering through uncharted waters, testing the winds, and adjusting the sails.Fast forward to the later stages, where your startup isn't just a product; it's a story. Founder-led sales transform into crafting narratives and building soft power. It's not about selling features anymore; it's about weaving tales that resonate with your audience. And who better to craft these tales than the founder, the OG  artisan, who lived it?

So, what's the common thread? You. Founder involvement isn't a phase; it's the rhythm of your startup's heartbeat. As we dig into the chronicles of founders, their roles, struggles, and victories, consider this your backstage pass to the fascinating, most exciting world of startups.

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