33 Quotes on Startup Sales & Marketing and How to Talk to Investors

From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 19

From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 19

The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.

Sales and Marketing, from Tyler Bosmeny

1. “Prospecting is the process of figuring out who will even take your call.”
2. “When only 2.5% of companies will even take your call or consider using your product, you realize what a numbers game this becomes.”
3. “In the first 2 months of YC, I reached out to over 400 companies, trying to get them to take a call and talk to us about we were building.”
4. 1/“So we’d go to conferences like these, we’d get the attendee list in advance, we’d email every single person in advance and try…”
5. 2/”and setup meetings so that when we’d get there every single minute of that trip was well spent.”
6. 3/”And this was huge in Clever’s early days. This is where we met all of our earliest customers.”
7. “The #1 thing you should remember is, when you get them on the phone, remember to shut up.”
8. “You really have to have this kind of unhuman, unreasonable willingness to follow up and drive things to closure.”
9. “Your goal should be to get to a Yes or No as quickly as you can, where you die if you have a thousand maybes.”
10. “In some ways a no is even better than a maybe, because it allows you to move on and focus on somebody who might be a yes.”
11. 1/“Your goal is to sign some deals, and get some reference customers, and get some validation and get some revenue.”
12. 2/“If you don’t do that, you’re startup is toast.”
13. “If somebody is telling you they want to use your product, but it’s just missing this one feature…I would almost map that to a pass.”

How to Talk to Investors, from Michael Seibel

1. “A lot of ppl practice 10, 30 min pitches, hour pitches..I think that’s all garbage. I think you can get everything you need done in 2 mins”
2. “The more you talk, the more the opportunity for you to say something that people don’t like. So just talk less.”
3. “30 second pitch. It’s so simple, it’s 3 sentences. You can take your time, you can breath when you do this.”
4. “The first is one sentence on what does your company do.”
5. “Second sentence: how big is your market.”
6. “Third sentence: how much traction do you have.”
7. “When I think about unique insight, what I think about is here’s your opportunity to tell me something that I don’t know.”
8. “Here’s your oppty to tell me something that the biggest players in the market you’re trying to enter don’t understand or don’t do well.”
9. “If you guys have done something that has made investors money, then say that.”
10. “Investors like to invest based on traction, so it’s always better to raise money when you’ve got more traction than less.”
11. “How do you create a scenario where you are strong and they are weak? Right? That’s where you want to be fundraising.”
12. “Never put the investor in the ultimate position of power.”
13. 1/“If you need money early, always plan for needing less money.”
14. 2/”And always be able to show that you’ve got a fully committed team that’s working fast.”
15. 3/”That’s going to be how you gain an advantage when you can’t show traction.”
16. “If someone who’s passed on your company as an investor offers you to make introductions, that’s kryptonite. Don’t touch that.”
17. “When you’re fundraising, you’re on. It’s a sprint, it’s not a marathon. So you want to schedule all of your meetings in the same week.”
18. “One team member should be invested in fundraising full time. It shouldn’t be something that takes over the whole company.”

How to Talk to Investors, from Dalton Caldwell

1. “Fundraising does not equal success. Just because you fundraised does not mean you succeeded and nobody realizes that.”

How to Talk to Investors, from Qasar Younis

1. “The best way to you can make your pitch better is to improve your company.”

You can watch the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec19/

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Image Credit: Screenshot taken from Stanford CS183B Lecture 19 Video

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