To sell or not to sell

I used to hate sales.

Every sales person I talked to felt slimy, and pushy.

Every sales call I joined felt like a waste of time.

Every sales process felt arduous and full of beauracracy.

And then I found myself in sales….

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Resend recently started incorporating a SLG motion into our existing PLG strategy. As we began thinking of hiring our first sales rep, we had an idea: bring me on as the first AE.

Seriously, I was given an onboarding doc with a 30-60-90 day plan, lists of resources, and onboarding call, the whole works. My new title was "The Closer".

From that point, I've been joining all of our sales calls and listening to nonstop podcasts and audiobooks on how to sell and build sales organizations.

It’s what I love. Learning and building, not selling (yet 😉).

So while I am grossly under-qualified to tell you “how to do sales at your startup”, let just share two things I learned from the process.

Sales is mainly helping: I used think selling was promoting your stuff and convincing people to buy it. I thought sales calls were just long demos of your product and services. I was terribly wrong. What I’m realizing is that selling is mainly helping. The more I moved our product into the background and rolled up my sleeves to figure out the best way to solve their problem, things started to click.

Failure is part of learning: You can’t learn without failing. By definition, to gain new knowledge means you were wrong or ignorant of something. You failed, and that’s great! Embrace it, hug it, make a second cup of coffee for it in the morning, give it a room in your house. Failure is the path to growth.

Not scaling is a strategy: Grow! Scale! Expand! we are told that more is better, but more comes with complexity and unknowns. There is a magic to the Founder Led Sales season of your company, that you will never get back once you scale. We can use the early days to learn about customers, mature the product based on that feedback, pivot the sales flow based on your conversations. Appreciate each stage!

For the Society

I've been learning a lot from The Challenger Sale.

Reply with your favorite sales book, podcast, or training on your list?