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The Top 5 Things You Need to Do After You Hire Your First #Salesperson at Your #Startup

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Sales Person

After the initial 5 or so customers and exhausting your personal network, and having product market fit, you are likely to look outside and hire your first sales person. Here are the top 5 things you need to do before, during and after you hire that individual.

1. Ensure you have set the right expectations for yourself, cofounders and the new sales person. If the sales process is long, dont expect the sales person to make it any faster initially. If you have no leads to start them off, dont expect them to bring a pipeline and if your customers are expecting a POC and trial before they are willing to consider purchase, dont expect the sales person to be able to close a sale before they experiment.

You should also have the expectation that the sales person will take 2 times your average sales cycle to build their sales pipeline. So if your average deal takes 3 months, expect them to take 6 months to get their pipeline “filled“.

I am often surprised at how much entrepreneurs and cofounders expect from a new sales person, if they have not been able to close an opportunity themselves. They often assume that since the sales person is a “professional” they will make magic happen. That’s highly unlikely.

2. Document and help the new person understand the sales process as well as you can. A blow-by-blow account of every activity in the sales process is better than a top level set of steps.

This step is very useful to also understand what you need to provide in terms of sales tools, marketing materials and collateral, to the sales person to make them successful during the sales process. If the 2nd meeting requires a demo, have it ready. If the best way a customer is convinced is to do a POC (Proof Of Concept), then have a checklist of things the customer needs to have ready for a POC.

3. Help your sales person fill up their pipeline in the first 30-60 days. Remove all distractions that your new sales person has by ensuring that they are not responsible for “strategy”, “blogging”, “SEO”, “fund raising”, or any other thing that makes them less productive. Their sole aim should be to sell and to do that they need to build their pipeline.

The last thing you need to do is to have the sales person’s time filled with non-selling activities. They will likely want to help and get excited with all the other value added activity, but that’s the thing you dont need from them. A not so great sales person will likely bring up all these items towards the end of the quarter when they did not make their quota as excuses.

4. Go on the first 5-10 sales calls yourself to help them learn the ropes. If you have hired an inside sales person, make them a “listener” in the first 3 calls, then be an active listener in the next 3 and finally a passive listener in the next 3 calls.

It is important for you to understand if the sales process is different if a founder goes to meet prospects versus a sales person. It is also important to gauge the sales person’s ability to handle objections, prospect questions and also understand the politics of the customers’ organization. It also helps for them to hear you pitch your product, or vision or benefits.

5. Segment the right prospects based on your current customers to ensure they dont chase the difficult or slow to convert prospects. Until the first few deals happen, the sales person will be on edge and they will get frustrated if they make no progress. If they are good, they will likely leave on their own, and you will have to start all over again.

Give them hard qualification criteria on who makes the ideal customer – if that is an early adopter, then you need to define their budget, behavior, title, size, industry, and be as clear as possible.

There are not too many early adopters, so I highly recommend you only give them less than 10-25 prospects (cold or warm) to start with to give them confidence and help you build conviction that they can sell this.

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Creating Artificial Constraints as a Means to Innovation

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Artificial Constraints

Many of the entrepreneurs I know have created new innovative startups thanks to real constraints they had. For example, I was hearing AirBnB’s Brian Chesky, on the Corner Office podcast and he mentioned that when he and his cofounder were trying to get some money to get started and the only way to keep afloat was to “rent” their air bed they had in their room. That, then led to Air Bed and Breakfast, which is now AirBnB.

This was a real constraint they had – no money to “eat” so they had to make it happen somehow.

I have heard of many stories of innovation where in the protagonists had real constraints of either financial, technology, supply, demand, economic, social or any number of other characteristics.

The interesting story that I have also recently heard of how Facebook has “pivoted” from being a desktop offering to getting a significant part of their revenue from mobile is how they were given the arbitrary constraint of only accessing Facebook via the mobile phone.

So there are ways that you can create “artificial” constraints to force innovation to happen.

Most larger companies and some smaller ones as well, have to constantly find ways to create artificial constraints – to find a way to innovate and be more be a pioneer.

While some constraints are good – lack of funds at the early stage for example and lack of resources, there are entrepreneurs that are stymied by these constraints and those that will find  a way to seek a path to go forward.

I think this is a great way for you to think about innovating in a new space. If you have constraints, find a way to use it to your advantage.

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The Great Mobile App Migration of March 2020

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Mobile App Migration

Over the last few weeks as many in the world have been in lockdown, there has been a temporary “mobile app migration” happening. There are new apps downloaded and they replaced existing apps on the “home screen”.

While some of these apps are likely temporary use, for e.g. I have 6 “conferencing apps” – Zoom, Uber Conference, Webex, Google Hangouts, Blue Jeans and Goto Meeting. That is because of the many people I have conference calls with – each company seems to have chosen a different web conference solution.

Other apps seem like they will have staying power – Houseparty, for e.g. which has games, networking and video conferencing all built into one app to keep in touch with friends and relatives.

Houseparty

The apps that have moved away from my “home” screen, which I expect will come back once the crisis will be behind us include – Uber, Lyft and all the airline apps from Delta, Alaska and United.

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Perseverance with the Ability to Pivot on Data: 21 Traits We Look for in Entrepreneurs

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Perseverance with the Ability to Pivot

There are 5 key inflection points I have noticed which makes founders question their startup, to either make a call to continue working on their startup, pivot to a new problem or quit their startup altogether.

It is at these points that you really get to know the startup founder and their hunger and drive to be successful. I don’t think I can characterize those that choose to quit as “losers” or “quitters” because of many extraneous circumstances, but there is a lot of value that most investors see in entrepreneurs who face an uphill part of their journey to come out on the other side more confident and stronger.

These five inflection points are:

  1. When you have to get the first customers to use and pay for the product you have built after you have “shipped” an alpha / beta / first version. Entrepreneurs quit because they have not found the product-market-fit – because the customer don’t care about the product, there is no market need, or the product is really poorly built, or a host of other reasons.
  2. When you have to start to raise the first external round of financing from people you are not familiar with at all. Entrepreneurs quit because while it is hard to get customers and hire people, it is much more harder to get a smaller set of investors to part with their money, if you do not have “traction”, or “the right management team” or a “killer product”.
  3. When you have to push to break even (financially) and sustain the company to path of being self sufficient. Entrepreneurs quit at this stage because they have now the ability to do multiple things at the same time – grow revenues and manage costs, and many of them like to do one but realize it is hard to do that without affecting the other. So, rather than feel stuck they decide to quit.
  4. When you have to scale and grow faster that the competition – which might mean to hire faster, to get more customers, to drive more sales, or to completely rethink their problem statement and devise new ways to grow faster. Entrepreneurs quit at this point because they are consumed by the magnitude of the problem. They overassess the impact the competition will have on their company, give them too much credit or focus way too much on the competitors, thereby driving their company to the ground.
  5. At any point in the journey, when the founders lose the passion, vision or the drive to succeed. Entrepreneurs quit a these points because they have challenges with their co founder, they don’t agree with the direction they have to take, or encounter the “grass is greener on the other side” syndrome.

While I have observed many entrepreneurs at these stages at  discrete points in time, I have also had the opportunity to observe some entrepreneurs in the continuum, and I am going to give you my observations on 3 of the many folks I have known, who, have quit.

Perseverance separates great entrepreneurs from good ones
Perseverance separates great entrepreneurs from good ones

One went back to college to finish his MBA after getting a running business to a point of near breakeven, another found the business much harder than he originally thought he would and got a job at a larger company and the third was just unable to have the drive to go past 11 “no’s”‘ from angel investors.

Over the last 8 years, if I look at my deeper interactions with over 90 entrepreneurs, who I would have spent at least 100+ hours each, I would say that of the 24 people that are not longer in their startup, the one thing that stands out among the ones that persevere is that it is not “passion” or “vision” at all.

It is the inherent belief that they are solving a problem that they believe is their “calling”. They also don’t believe that there is any other problem that’s worth solving as much, even though there may be easier ways to make money.

So most of my questions of entrepreneurs to test whether they will pivot or quit are around why they want to solve this problem (which I am looking to see if they know enough about in the first place) versus any other one.

The answer to that question is the best indicator I have found to be the difference between the pivots, the leavers and the rest.

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