5/7 mindsets for B2B founders to make sales easy-peasy.

In this series of seven articles, I am going to break some preconceived notions that might be stopping you to excel at sales, hence responsible for slowing down your startup’s growth.

I will replace them with 7 mindsets that will make sales come naturally to you.

(You can click here for 4/7 Mindset: Interrupting is good.)

Jim Rohn once said you shouldn’t wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better.

Mindset 5: Less is more.

Be precise: do less, do good.

Simplicity and focus are the keys at this stage. Don’t scale up for the sake of it; instead, figure out what works so you can focus on scaling that up.

To put it another way: you need to think like a monk.

Monks believe that “less is more” — and I totally agree with them. The same goes for your marketing and lead generation.

Many people believe that you have to constantly do a lot and fine-tune a lot. Sure, if you’re a big business like a General Motors or a Tesla or an Apple, then you need to think like that.

But when you’re really small and just starting out, you don’t need to be thinking about and doing lots of things. You just need to do a few things and do them right.

In essence, less is more.

That’s why, at the start, I focus only on things that generate high-quality touchpoints to learn from your ideal customers and offer maximum chances of conversion with minimum effort.

I tell nearly all the companies I work with not to waste their focus on anything that isn’t cheap, doesn’t provide instant results or feedback, and isn’t hyper-targeted to their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

For example, in most cases for B2B startups:

• PR/News — too much effort, slow results, highly untargeted.
• Offline physical promotions — too costly, too limited, hard to measure results.
• Startup events and competitions — too much effort, highly untargeted, meeting potential “experts” who aren’t your target customers. If you’re bootstrapping and there’s a cash prize, by all means, go there to win. But it won’t help you generate good leads.
• Tradeshows — too expensive, too much work, not targeted enough.
• TV/Radio — too expensive, too much work, not targeted enough.
• Listing websites such as ProductHunt — too much work. You get signups from startup enthusiasts and generally curious people, rather than your ideal customers.

Last but not least, you can only scale what works. As Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, recommends to all his early-stage startups, “Do things that don’t scale.”

Don’t automate things unless you know what exactly is working.

A startup has reached product-market fit, has predictable sales and is ready to scale when it can fill in and prove the following statement:

If today you reach out to [x number] of [potential customers] with [a message], you’ll have [y sales] in [z days] with [a, b and c steps] in your sales funnel, for [a solution] that helps them achieve [success] by solving [a problem] they have, while having your [AARPU] more than [CAC].

(You can click here for 6/7 Mindset: Sales is Science.)

_______________________________________________________________

Hi there, I am Maddy. I help B2B & SaaS founders get first 1000 customers and scale fast!

Sales is a science. Just like you engineer your product into existence, I can help you build a sales and marketing machine to help people see how your product changes their lives for the better.

Do you want to scale your startup fast?

Start by getting The SaaS Scaling Game Plan and free training to build a predictable sales machine without wasting existing funds by clicking here.