Getting Started
These are good resources to help with your first few enterprise sales.
- đź“™ The Enterprise Sales Playbook
- đź“ť Nate Nasralla’s LinkedIn
- đź“ť A Guide to Enterprise Sales for Early-stage Founders
Founder-Led Sales
In early markets, founder-led sales is not optional. If the founder cannot sell the product, nobody else will be able to sell it reliably.
This is especially true when:
- The category is new
- The buyer does not know how to budget for the product
- The product needs technical explanation
- The value proposition is still changing
- The sales motion is not repeatable yet
Early sales hires can help with qualification, buyer navigation, procurement, pricing, and follow-up. They should not replace the founder as the person who creates belief.
For technical products, the founder often needs to bring the customer to technical close. Account executives are useful for commercial close. Sales engineers can be a good bridge because they keep engineering close to customer reality.
Market Annealing
Some markets do not pull the product out of your hands. You have to shape the company and the market together.
This is different from product-market fit. PMF assumes there is a product and market combination to find. In very early markets, the market may not yet know how to buy, how to evaluate, or how to describe the problem.
In these markets:
- Do not lock in a sales motion too early.
- Do not assume bottom-up will work because it is cheaper.
- Do not hire a sales leader before the motion is settling.
- Keep founders in sales longer than feels comfortable.
- Run weekly meetings where founders, sales, product, and marketing share what they are learning from the market.
It’s very tempting to try and impose a certain GTM motion on a market. Many technical founders, for example, default to bottom-up because they think it’s less expensive than hiring an enterprise sales team, or it just feels more comfortable. But the most expensive sales model is one that does not work.
đź“ť Market Annealing: Getting to $10M ARR in Very Early Markets
When To Hire A Sales Leader
Hire a sales leader after the primary GTM motion is becoming clear, not when you are hoping someone else will discover it for you.
Before hiring a sales leader, you should have evidence that:
- Founders can sell the product.
- A small number of senior reps can sell with founder support.
- The buyer, use case, pricing, and procurement path are increasingly understood.
- Reps are getting close to productive quota levels.
- Sales meetings produce repeatable learning, not just anecdotes.
If a senior rep working directly with the founder cannot sell it, a sales leader probably cannot build a team to sell it.
Early Marketing
The first marketing hire should often be a product marketing generalist. They need to be comfortable with positioning, pricing, sales enablement, events, content, and field learning.
Early pipeline usually comes from:
- Community
- Open source usage
- Investor networks
- Founder networks
- Events
- Strong technical or educational content
Paid marketing and outsourced demand generation usually work only after the market understands the problem and is already searching for a solution.
Core messaging still needs to come from the founders. Marketing can help sharpen and distribute it, but cannot invent the company’s belief system from the outside.
Category Creation
Many of the most iconic companies we know created entirely new categories of business, or entirely new ways of doing things. Creating a new category and dominating it is one of the best paths to enduring success.
Key questions for defining what category you’re in:
- Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problem you’re trying to solve?
- If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in?
- If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?
đź“™ Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
Pricing
Pricing is hard and many companies need multiple attempts to get it right. Many founders also don’t spend a lot of thought on it, but it’s incredibly important because it is one of the variables that determine your growth trajectory. Higher prices means higher growth, not just because customers pay you more money for the same product, but also because you can re-invest more money into making your product even better. Below are some pointers on how to determine pricing for your product.
The acceptable price
Based on working with hundreds of companies, here’s what we’ve learned: An acceptable price is the price that people are super comfortable paying. No friction, they just love your pricing because it’s a steal. If you’re pricing for growth, maybe you can price in the acceptable area.
The expensive price
Expensive is the price that they would actually pay you, but they don’t like it. Neither do they hate it, but it’s the price usually that’s aligned with value.
The prohibitive price
The prohibitively expensive is the price that they’ll pretty much be laughing you out of the room. Asking that question gives you some sense of where you can actually be someday, but not at the moment
📝 It’s Price Before Product. Period.
Enablement
Enablement on current product differentiation
- What problem does this solve?
- Why is that worth solving? - business value
- Why solve it in this way? - vs. the old way or a competing approach
- Why solve it with us? - our differentiators as a company
- Why solve it now? - what’s the compelling event? Aren’t competitors doing it too?
SaaS Website Content
For B2B SaaS, the website should answer the questions buyers already search for when they are considering a purchase.
Useful pages or sections:
- Pricing
- Demo
- Alternatives
- Comparisons
- Reviews
- Customer stories
- Integrations
- Security
- SSO
- API docs
- Support
- Reporting and analytics
Do not let comparison sites, competitors, or random blog posts define your positioning. If buyers are going to search for alternatives and comparisons anyway, publish your own clear version of the tradeoffs.