For many startup founders, sales are the worst part.
Technical people often shy away from exposing their ego by having sales conversations and taking the risk of rejection.
Builders like to put their heads down and build things, not get out there and doing gross interpersonal things like talking to users or converting users to clients.
I think it's important we embrace rejection, request it, accept it, and get over it.
Easier said than done.
It takes a lot of courage and resilience to not only accept rejection but to seek it out time and again until you can finally get it "right" and get acceptance.
But just how much rejection we have to face has a lot to do with how we're approaching the problem, too. Approaching the "ask" in the wrong way is going to maximize rejection, which maximizes our ego pain and aversion.
Lots of startups embody this reluctance to experience direct rejection through product-driven sales with self-onboarding and automated payment funnels. These allow them to avoid the awful reality of talking to people and getting feedback.
You can shield your ego, but in doing so, it's harder to learn what works.
Ugh, aren't people the worst? All the worst experiences I've ever had have been driven by interacting with people.
But the best experiences I've ever had have also been from interacting with people!
B2B and B2C Have Different Approaches
Business-to-business sales can have much higher expectations than business-to-consumer sales. Pretty much everything I've read about go-to-market approaches focuses on B2C, and that stuff just doesn't matter for B2B.
Most B2C advice is along the lines of, build a landing page, optimize it for SEO, when you get strong organic traffic then buy a few related keywords, and build a sign up list that you can market to later.
I could be wrong (I often am) but I don't believe that works for B2B.
With B2B, you can build a strong leads list, but that doesn't mean the person signing up is the right client for you. Maybe they're in the right industry, maybe they do have a keen interest in your product, but do they have the purchasing authority for their organization? Can they champion implementation? Can they ensure product engagement and use?
With B2C, the buyer is the user. They subscribe to your service, or buy your product, then they use it (or don't).
With B2B, the buyer, the implementer, and the user may all be different people. Or the same person. Depends — is this SMB, middle market, enterprise? Is it a product implemented by IT and used by sales?
I just don't believe it's as straightforward as building a landing page and leads list for a technical B2B product. I think you have to understand your product and client a lot better than you have to when launching a B2C product.
You Can't Sell What You Don't Know How to Sell
The painful reality is that for most B2B startups, product-driven hands-off sales pipelines aren't realistic. At least not at first, when the startup is still working to discover product-market fit (PMF) with its ideal client profile (ICP).
With rare exceptions, for B2B the "zero to one" liftoff from no clients to a client to many clients requires dealing with people. Crazy idea, huh?
Show's Over, Everyone! Or Has It Just Begun?
Oh, no, my friends. On the contrary. This isn't the end, this is barely table stakes.
You can build a self-onboarding automation and start an ad campaign, but that requires that you know who your ideal client is, how to optimize your website to rank organically, then how to build your ad campaign to maximize your reach beyond organic clients and into that ICP.
Or, you have to have a lot of money to burn to find out the hard way, but it's hard to get that money if you don't already have clients, or prior success elsewhere. And either clients or success elsewhere probably taught you how to get through the 0→1 sales process, so you don't need to be reading this anyway.
Which brings us back to having to talk to people and understand how to convert them into clients.
Sales Before Product in B2B Might Not Work
When I was first organizing PaynPoint, a lot of the feedback I got was "get sales before you have a product!" Which sounds great, sure. For specific products.
I started calling and emailing clients that matched our original ICP. I got through to a few of them, and the general feedback was "I love your idea, build it and show it to me and maybe we'll adopt it".
It was quickly clear that pre-selling a website management tool to enterprise B2B clients was a non-starter. The maturity and validation level they needed to adopt was beyond our reach. Unlike with B2C, the person we were talking to may not have even had the authority to drive adoption, implementation, or use anyway.
But we'd had enough conversations with the ICP to know that the market demand was in place, even if it was a little raw and unformed. That in hand, we spent 3 months building an MVP, knowing that it was inadequate for our ICP.
Find a Beachhead to Land On
We reoriented to find a beachhead client profile — someone who had a lower demand for maturity and validation than a huge enterprise client, and a lower price point to match the lower expectation. That market is actually a lot larger than our original ICP, though more fragmented.
After a few conversations with this new beachhead profile, it was apparent that they preferred a channel partnership resale model. I just had several cold outbound calls today with this new beachhead profile who almost immediately asked if there was a resale opportunity for them. Which, frankly, that's better for us anyway.
"Help me help you help your clients," is the way I think of it.
When we made this adjustment in our initial client adoption target, I did some Google searches and tried to email them. I started getting "550 5.4.1 Recipient address rejected: Access denied", which means people are marking your email as spam, which signals death for your email address.
People said "well set up rotating email addresses outside of your main one!"
Minimize Annoying People
Well, how about instead I just figure out how to approach this so that people aren't annoyed with me? Sure it's more work up front, but avoiding generating negative sentiment in others creates better long-term outcomes, doesn't it?
Let's take another shot.
I went on Google Maps and narrowed my search area to local to where I lived. That way, at least I can bond on the fact that we live in the same area — it's weak, but better than nothing. I made a spreadsheet with results from my Google searches and scoured their websites to get the names of possible candidates.
I then looked up those specific people on LinkedIn and connected with them. Once they connected, I sent a brief LI message asking for a meeting. That got me a lot of new connections in the market, but only a few meetings. Not progress.
People Respond Best to People
When I did get meetings, and actually spoke to people, the response was generally very positive. The hard part wasn't getting them interested when we were actually talking, it was getting that conversation started.
Ready, fire, aim again!
Maybe I could get more of those warm, human conversations if I increased the rate of outreach?
Ok! We just need to work faster!
I set up an AI-driven sales automation tool that promised to avoid 550 5.4.1 responses, put in our ICP, and it spat out dozens of… very poor… email solicitations that got us one actual human response, asking to be removed from the solicitation list. That means dozens of potential future contacts burned or converted from cold to frozen.
Not good. Too early for sales automation. Doing a bad job quickly doesn't produce results. No cold emails, even using an automation tool that avoids 550 responses.
Don't Sell (Yet), Ask for Opinions
Most people don't want sales emails. They don't want sales messages on LinkedIn. They don't want to be sold to at all.
But there's something to keep in mind — people are very sympathetic to other people they're actually talking to, right now. We're wired to have empathy. Most of us.
We don't have empathy for sending messages to through the ether, where it's cost-free to be mean or rude, but most of us have empathy when talking to an actual human voice with inflection and emotion speaking to them right now.
Beyond that, you can disarm the buying reluctance by not asking them to buy. Ask them for their opinions. A trial close can come later, once you know what they think.
I went back to the drawing board and started doing what was my least favorite thing to do — put on my big-boy pants, dialing phone numbers, and having authentic, honest, open conversations with real people.
Find What Works Best and Improve From There
As of right now, we're at a 20% break-through rate on cold outbound phone calls, with a 10% "book a meeting" conversion rate, and a 10% "send me more info and follow up later" conversion rate.
Is it an overwhelming success? No, because we don't have it all figured out yet. But a 20% response rate with a 50% commitment to take a demo is far better than the response rate I was getting from email, LinkedIn messages, or automation.
We'll keep going and keep learning more, but right now, this is what is working:
- A narrow, well-targeted beachhead ICP.
- A local search for businesses meeting that profile.
- A phone call to the main business line for that business.
- A warm, honest, authentic conversation with whoever answers.
Remember That We're All People
Remember, be nice, be human, be honest, and tell people authentically who you are and what you're trying to do. Don't posture, don't fake-it-til-you-make-it. Just be yourself, an actual person, and remember that there's a person on the other side, too.
Our approach will keep evolving over time, but that's the slow, impossible-to-scale approach that is working right now that will take us from zero to one.
Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. We'll do it manually, learn it the hard way, get good at it in a way that doesn't scale, then transform those lessons into a scalable, automated method once we know that it works.
Stay tuned, we'll see how far this takes us, and how much we have to learn to start automating the process.