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- 🚀 What to do for early sales calls?
🚀 What to do for early sales calls?
3 tactics, 2 traps and 1 tool to get started with founder led sales
Hello founders!
Welcome back to ‘Tactical Tips’ by Jerel and Shuo at DECODE, where we cover one new idea to help you build and grow your startup – every week in <5 minutes!
We’re excited to continue to support you—founders! So, our board members and network of operators will continue to tackle your most pressing questions.
Today, we’ll be answering the question, “What to do for early sales calls?”
If you’re aiming to sell to companies for bigger contracts, less churn, and more credibility, then today’s newsletter is for you.
🔥 Inside this issue:
✅ 3 tactics for managing sales calls
✅ 2 traps to avoid
✅ 1 tool to leverage
👇 Let’s dive in.
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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.
Dive deeper
Watch Marcel Santilli (CMO at Deepgram and former CMO at Scale AI) share frameworks of engaging with customers, pre- and post- product market fit, to scale.
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