🚀 What to do for early sales calls?

3 tactics for managing sales calls

🔍 Lead with curiosity, not features 

• Keep an open conversation and ask your contact about their struggles. Learn their top two or three priorities, and how you can improve their lives.

• Get deeper into their tech stack, their budget, and their buying process only in subsequent calls.

• Test if the market wants your product instead of your ability to sell it. 

🆎 A/B test constantly

• Don’t just learn how to sell your product. Learn how to tell a story.

• Test everything — messaging, demo flow, personas, and pricing. Learn what resonates, and which parts got the most engagement etc.

• Review what worked and what didn’t after each call. Have multiple cofounders join the call and challenge each other’s confirmation biases.

🔄 Implement a light sales process early on

• Don’t overcomplicate. Focus on recurring patterns and set up processes with clear and detailed instructions.

• Consider these key questions:

  • Who are we engaging in each meeting? 

  • What information are we sharing at each stage?

  • What are the next steps after each meeting? 

  • What are the criteria before engaging further?

  • How many meetings should we have? 

  • What are we saying yes and no to?

2 traps to avoid

🚨Hiring a full-time sales leader too early

• Lean on advisors instead of hires before you have real repeatability and product-market fit. 

• Get a sales advisor who can catch leaks in your funnel and walk you through best practices on everything from discovery, demos, negotiation to contracts.

🚨Narrowing your sales approach too quickly

• Take every call in the early days—even those without a clear end game.

• Form an educated guess about your ideal customer profile only after talking to many different types of potential customers.

1 tool to leverage

✉️ Best practice for nailing sales calls

• Aim for at least 20 calls a week for 3 months.

• You will then start to build an unfair advantage and know more about running sales calls than most new founders in your space.

• Check out tools like Dialpad to give you real-time feedback.