Startup founders,
how and where did you learn to do sales properly? What are the early indicators of a good salesperson? Any good sales 101 books, which aren’t a complete hoax, that you recommend reading?
If you’re completely clueless then hire a great sales rep immediately.
Good sales reps have a process. They don’t make excuses and they keep a healthy dose of realism while staying positive.
These sound like unicorn traits to some but they aren’t. A great sales rep will know early on if a deal is qualified, and will only inform you of the ones that can realistically close.
As for learning sales. As a founder you are already a sales person wether you like it or not. You would do well to hire a good sales director and shadow them on calls. Specifically spend time on discovery and understand why it’s critical to a sales process. Maybe you can even send some cold emails on behalf of your sales director to get a feel for with SDRs go through.
The more empathy you can build for the sales process the better off you will be in hiring and developing such an org.
