Sales strategy and the sales process in early-stage startups

Discusses sales strategies in the early stages of a startup, the importance of customer acquisition, and direct sales efforts to get early customers.

### Early days of a startup: How to get users and your first customers
* 🚀 Paul Graham's essay, "Do Things That Don't Scale," discusses **strategies for success in early-stage startups**.
* 💼 A good product is not enough to attract customers in the early stages of a startup, founders need to **recruit customers themselves**.
* 🔍 When founders learn sales, they can **understand their customers, understand their product, and take full control of their startup's destiny**.
* 💬 A good sales email is concise and clear, and should clearly identify the customer's **pain points** and prove that your product's solution is **effective**.
* 💲 The sales funnel consists of **listing customers**, **sending email outreach**, **scheduling demo meetings**, **negotiating pricing**, and **closing the sale after onboarding**.
* 📊 To get to the end goal in your sales funnel, you need to record the **achievement rate of each funnel** and work **backwards**.
* 📈 While finding scalable growth channels is important, early-stage startups need to find success through **"how not to scale."**

### How to acquire customers in the early startup phase
In the early days of a startup, no matter how big or small, you need to communicate directly with and attract customers. Learning sales tactics is important, but more importantly, the founders need to be directly involved in the success of the startup. Learn why sales should be the founders' job in the early stages, the need to track the success rate of your funnel to sales success, the importance of charging for your product, and how to work backwards in setting goals. In the early days of a startup, founders need to learn sales themselves because they make the difference between success and failure. Learning sales allows you to understand your customers, understand your product, and take full control of your startup's destiny. It's hard to hire a sales team or sell a product until you learn sales yourself. Successful founders have done well by taking on sales themselves, notably the founders of Brex, a corporate card solution for startups in the US, who recruited their first 10 customers themselves during their YC placement. They recruited customers by looking at other startups as potential customers and thinking about how they could build a minimum viable product that would be useful to other startups.

### Sales email writing and sales funnels
Sales emails should be concise, no more than six to eight sentences long. They should be written in clear language and address the prospect's problem in the right context. They should be written neatly in plain text, not in HTML format. It should include something that emphasizes your credibility as the founder of the company creating the product. A simple screenshot or link to your website to showcase your product is a good idea, but there should be key points that explain the product and its features. Finally, the email should contain a request for a conference or meeting. The sales funnel consists of listing up customers, sending email contact, scheduling a demo meeting, negotiating pricing and closing the sale after onboarding. Onboarding is important in the early stages, and it's helpful to keep this information organized. When looking for your initial customers, it's a good idea to start with the easiest ones. In the early days, it's important to focus your sales efforts on your most obvious customers.

### Advice on how to sell effectively
When you send an email to a large number of prospects and receive responses, prioritize the most likely customers. From the responses you get from your prospects, it's a good idea to figure out which customers are most likely to convert and prioritize them. Picking from within your network can also be an option, and it's easier to sell to startups than large companies. This is because startups have simpler organizations and shorter decision-making lines than large companies. 95% of people are not early adopters, and most of them don't want to try new products. To reach early adopters, you can increase your odds by sending more outbound, such as sending more messages. You should work backwards in the sales funnel to understand and track the drop-off rate at each stage. Tracking this data will give you a sense of how long it will take to reach 10 paying customers.

### Sales strategies and top mistakes of early-stage startups
The biggest mistake most founders make is not doing enough outreach and not working based on goals. To evaluate the performance of your sales efforts and get accurate feedback, you need to record the percentage that converts at each sales stage. Outbound sales is really a numbers game. It takes a lot of effort to get an initial customer, much more effort than to get 5 customers from 10 leads. Outsourcing sales is the wrong choice, the founders should do the outreach and sales in-house because they know the product best and understand the customer's pain. We recommend CRM tools like Apollo.io, close.com, pipedrive, and hunter.io, and in the early stages, you should pursue cheaper and more effective sales strategies rather than scalable growth channels. What's important for early sales is to find low-cost ways to acquire customers rather than jumping straight to scalable channels.

How to Get Your First Customers | Startup School

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