As an engineer turned founder, your instinct to jump in and start doing it is correct. It’s hard to learn from books. I never did, neither did the successful engineers turned sales people that I know. The key is learning to read each situation so you can apply the right approach. You also seem self aware which will help you learn faster.
My biggest advice is get a coach/mentor/consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional sales people learn in practice (eg from a sales manager). This will accelerate you learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise it’s easy to flounder on the wrong ones.
RE metrics- closed business is the only one that matters! Do whatever gets you that as fast as possible.
I wasted a year when I first founded Amplitude trying to brute force it myself and closed a grand total of two contracts for $36k. After that I ended up working with a guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year. He cost me $5k a month and increased our market cap by $20M, it was well worth the investment. I’m happy to make an intro if you’d like.
Good luck on the journey ahead and I’m excited for you!
"guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year"
I am very curious as a bootstrapped founder myself. Would you be willing to tell us more on some of the high level things Mitch Morando helped with ? What bottlenecks did he solve that you didn't/couldn't know ?
I'm also a YC founder (Py) and worked with Mitch. He's been an invaluable mentor to me not just in sales but also in general COO advice. Could not recommend working with him enough. It is a Privilege to get to work with him. He has a wealth of experience that make his monthly rate easy easy ROI.
We went from literally $0k ARR to high 6-figure ARR in 8 months before getting acquired. He taught me everything I know about SaaS sales.
Mitch was recommended to me originally by Peter, CEO/Co-founder at Segment.
The short version is we saw a big gap in the product analytics market when we were building a consumer app. We were going to work on building a company no matter what and it was the best opportunity we found. B2B was much easier than consumer for us. All you have to do is build what your customers ask and then they’ll pay you money!
Awesome, will check out the podcast, thanks! Congrats on the success btw! Just picked up Mitch’s book on Amazon, as I’m always keen to add to the sales toolbox.
My biggest advice is get a coach/mentor/consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional sales people learn in practice (eg from a sales manager). This will accelerate you learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise it’s easy to flounder on the wrong ones.
RE metrics- closed business is the only one that matters! Do whatever gets you that as fast as possible.
I wasted a year when I first founded Amplitude trying to brute force it myself and closed a grand total of two contracts for $36k. After that I ended up working with a guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year. He cost me $5k a month and increased our market cap by $20M, it was well worth the investment. I’m happy to make an intro if you’d like.
Good luck on the journey ahead and I’m excited for you!