3 Things Selling does for Founders

Or how to walk out with a win every single time

If you’re like me, you’d be searching for opportunities to help your sales organisation close those difficult deals. I was not born a sales guy (who is?) neither grew up in a sales role. The earliest memory I have is of my father telling me about how he convinced folks from distant towns to buy building materials from his shop. Those are powerful memories, just like indelible ink on the raw paper of my childhood.

Most founders are typically technologists. Geeks. They don’t understand sales, yet, as a founder, you can’t get close enough to your customer. Selling is the ultimate test of how passionate you are about your product and your vision. I’d even risk saying that keeping a customer happy is not half as tough as making a prospect happy to sign up.

The 3 things :

Measuring your attractiveness index: If you’ve met enough prospective customers you know whether you’re able to meet customer needs or falling behind on the ‘attractiveness index’. We learnt this the hard way several years ago when we were selling large enterprise software. We were so enamoured with existing customers and a few large deals that we failed to see where the market was moving. No amount of benchmarking competition’s positioning or product capabilities will do as much good to you, as constantly being out there, and selling.

Discovery: When selling as a founder you sometimes need to carry a ‘designation-free’ business card (I do that often, a CEO card and a nobody card). The nobody card allows you to keep your options open and discover creative solutions around product positioning, pricing and new other selling opportunities while pitching your case. You can do that without carrying the burden of sitting there as CEO. Most important, it allows you to experiment with new types of customers and new types of pricing and positioning.

A Roadmap in Pencil: Now, you probably know what I mean by this. Pencils are fabulous. You can erase what you wrote and write it all over again, without looking at ugly scratches and feeling guilty. By all means, prepare a detailed product roadmap for the next one year, broken up into quarters of course. Only to keep re-writing it every quarter. Edit, change priorities, and do it often. Use inputs from sales and customers to drive this. Leverage your roadmap while selling, if you have the conviction to pull it off. And don’t over-promise for God’s sake — selling your roadmap vision is not a crowd-funding project that will take off only if the money comes in.

These are simple things but we founders tend to forget the importance of these very things that we once did out of little choice. Don’t lose it. These 3 simple tactics can help you keep re-inventing yourself to stay relevant. After all, there’ll be a half-a-dozen other folks copying your product once you get successful and the only way to survive, is to stay ahead of the pack.