From Tech to Sales
Documenting the start of my journey from building things to selling things.
For the last six or so months, I’ve worked on building a SaaS. It’s nothing big or groundbreaking: it’s an email sequence tool. Think Outreach, Salesloft, or HubSpot Sequences but for smaller businesses (and for 1/10th the price). It integrates with HubSpot’s CRM, so it’s a direct competitor to HubSpot Sequences. We’ve gotten the product to the point where it’s usable and solves a real problem that exists.
Now we just have to sell it.
For the past 10 years, I’ve worked at various tech startups in some form of a software engineering role. That may be tech lead, senior engineering manager, or just software engineer. I’ve joined security review calls, software demo calls, vendor calls (on the side of the buyer), and some prospective sales calls. I worked at a marketing technology company that was sales-oriented. I know the words, the terms, the tools in the space.
I have no idea how to sell.
Conventional startup wisdom says to:
- focus on a niche
- focus on a user’s pain point and solve for that
- validate that your solution solves the pain
- ask for money
However, we’ve validated that this is a pain that exists and our solution solves the problem (otherwise the established players wouldn’t exist).
So instead, we’ll start by focusing on specific people and users in a target segment. Let’s define them by their problems:
- budget constrained: they can’t afford HubSpot’s $500/mo price tag ($100/user/month with a 5 user minimum)
- time constrained: they have more contacts to reach out to than time or people to reach out to them. They deeply feel the pain of not automating their email outreach.
- routine, predictable script: they have an outbound process that works. It’s the same email(s) with some light customization to everybody that enters the funnel.
Based on these problems, we can get at some other attributes about potential customers that we could use as a proxy for a good customer fit:
- small business: once you have a large team, you likely have deep pockets. For this reason, you can probably afford Outreach or Salesloft and would not be interested in a cheaper solution.
- early stage business: once you’re established, you likely have a software vendor process that would eliminate us due to security requirements. We have built products with and understand SOC2 certification, but that doesn’t mean we have it (yet).
- somewhat technical: because we’re early, we’ll be iterating with our customers. We’ll benefit from customers who “get” software product development. They can look past some minor bugs and get excited when we launch features they’ve been asking for.
But I’ll say it again: we have no idea what we’re doing.
If you have any sales or prospecting advice (e.g. how do I get a warm intro? how do I get email addresses for prospects? etc.) I’d love to hear from you! Shoot me an email: (hello [at] ryanbaker [dot] dev)
