Every Finish Line is a Starting Line

It's been quite a journey the last eight months. (Actually I can throw that back across practically any timeframe and it's still true. But let's try to focus here.)

In the last eight months, I've:

Wow! I always tell people, measure your progress from where you're started, not where you're going, because the horizon moves with you, but your starting point stays fixed. And boy, have we come a long way in a short time.

So that's that, right? Job done! Time to roll up the sidewalks. Dust off our hands and move on?

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.

Now our friend here Emerson may have been a brilliant man in his own right, but he seems to have suffered from two afflictions — the flaw of overwhelming self-importance, and a life lived before Edward Bernays infected everyone with brain-rot through the implementation of vast propaganda networks that we now refer to as marketing and advertising.

(Let's not treat Bernays too harshly here, if he didn't realize these things, someone else would have come by before long and realized it. Ideas are waves, not particles.)

The Worst Version of S&M

Now, finally, we get to the part that actually matters — sales and marketing! Yay! In my opinion, sales & marketing is just another form of sadomasochism, but far less fun.

It seems like entrepreneurs break cleanly into two groups — those who revel in sales and marketing, and those who hate it and would rather do anything else.

🤮 ← Me when I have to sell something.

See, personally, I hate sales & marketing. That's because I suffer, like Emerson seems to have, from the typical entrepreneur's flaw of overwhelming self-importance — the idea that I'm just so damned brilliant and capable that it's obvious to everyone.

Perversely (like most S&M), I'm actually good at it, I just don't enjoy it, and my not enjoying the process bleeds through. It takes a lot of mental effort for me to stay focused and project the right energy. This is called "emotional labor". Any job that requires managing your emotional state and projected persona is emotional labor.

And boy, entrepreneurs do a lot of emotional labor.

You see, I joked about entrepreneurial self-importance, but it's not a joke. It really does take a lot of belief in the self to force reality to change to accommodate you.

Entrepreneurship requires egoism, but it also requires ego-death, or at least, the ability to temporarily and selectively put aside one's ego, accepting a continuous flood of rejection, refutation, denial, and criticism.

As an entrepreneur, you're going to be turned down constantly, over and over. And you can't get defensive, reflexively assuming that the counterparty is wrong. You have to accept their feedback like a riverbed accepts the water, remaining mostly still while it flows across you, while only a little bit soaks in.

You have to absorb that stream, choosing what to listen to and what to let go, centered on your vision but malleable enough to change when it's clear you need to.

Sales is the most challenging part of that journey, because you're reaching out to ask people to reject you, over and over. (Fundraising is no different, it's just a different type of sales, where you're selling equity instead of product.)

Sales isn't about getting a yes, as much as it is about getting a no as quickly as possible so you can refine the mountains of worthless rubble to get to the ore.

Same As It Ever Was

The question is how.

By now, hopefully you've built an ideal client profile, and built at least a fragment of an audience from your launch preparations. (Oh no, you didn't forget to build an audience, did you? It's okay, most people do.)

Now you have to collect actual person identities that match that ICP…

No, not that ICP! Anyway!

You build an ICP and collect personal identities that correspond to the ICP. Then you begin the grinding, monotonous work of talking to those real persons and accepting that you'll be rejected most of the time.

The initial rejection is that most people just don't respond. Emails, phone calls, everyone ignores those now. So you try LinkedIn messages, and people ignore those too. You reach out on Twitter, Blue Sky. You find groups they communicate in, and craft posts that you think may interest them.

You bleed your heart across the world without shame. And get nothing back! C'est la vie.

Focus on warm leads. Intros from people who know the person you want to know. That works better. Lots of people you already know agree to help, and some of them actually follow through with an introduction.

You're finally talking to people, and most of them just aren't the right match. Remember the user adoption curve from a few posts ago? Most people aren't innovators. You can really only expect to sell a brand-spankin' new product to that 2.5% at the very start of the slope.

The great thing is, if you keep talking to those rare few that will have a conversation, you'll get people who get excited about what you're doing — innovators. And since "birds of a feather flock together", innovators know innovators. Close the meeting with, "who else should I talk to about this?" and get one or two more connections.

"Awesome, can you introduce me?" And the conversations continue.

Sometimes, rarely, lightning will strike, and you'll hit on the perfect product market fit, talking to exactly the right people about the right problem at the right time, and it'll set off a chain reaction where "the world beats a path to your door."

We've already established how things are notable for their rarity. That almost never happens, but if you keep working at it, it might happen eventually. And that's ok, because most of us aren't magicians, we're laborers who grind out progress inch by inch.

If your hit rate is 2.5%, and your close rate is 20%, that means that you are only closing 0.5% of the conversations you have.

That's 200 conversations to get one sale. If you get a 10% response on cold outreach — which is a great response rate — that's 2000 leads to get to a conversion.

That's where targeting comes in. If you refine the identities in that ICP to innovators by asking for referrals from other innovators more of your sales pipeline leads to other innovators, and your response rate improves dramatically.

How does this work?

1. Create an ICP.
2. Find people that match the ICP that know people you already know.
3. Get warm intros to those people and figure out ASAP if they're innovators.
4. If they're innovators and they like your innovation, ask them for warm intros.
5. Continue until you get people saying yes.

But I Don't Want To!

Well I don't want to either, but that's just the way life works, missy!

"I'll make a ginormous leads list and call them all!"

You're wasting your time, and time is your most precious resource.

"I'll hire a sales person!"

They can't sell your product if you don't know how to sell your product.

"I'll use a sales automation tool!"

Incompetently selling to a large number of people who don't care won't fix it.

The problem is you don't know how to sell your product, or who to sell it to.

You have to do the work that doesn't scale, so that you understand how to do it.

Once you understand how to sell your product and to whom you get a few yesses, and there's your first clients.

Those yesses validate your product, which cracks open the next tier of adopters, and now your audience is 15%. That's six times easier!

Then you get more clients on board to provide social proof your product is desirable, and now your audience is 40% of market. And then you become standard, and now your product is 75% of market. And so it goes.

Do the hard work yourself, talk to as many people as you need to, to understand how to get a "yes".

And if none of that works? You talked to a million people yourself, and everyone thinks you're a joke and your product is stupid?

You're in good company. That happens a lot. Anakin again has good advice for us.

That's it for now. Hope this helps!