Patrick Trümpi’s Post

I win 100% of sales. How? Because I focus less on what we will do for our clients and more on how to make their business successful. Getting a good sense of our company's differentiation has been challenging. I know what's in my brain, but it's been difficult to articulate what sets us apart. I don't want to be 1 OUT of a million engineering agencies; I want to be 1 IN a million. And recently I've discovered exactly what makes us different from our competitors. I start my sales calls asking completely different questions. I was on a call with a team doctor who had an idea for an app. And instead of jumping to solutions and explaining how we plan to get it done, I asked him a few critical questions: ➝ How big is this market? ➝ How will you raise capital? ➝ When you raise capital, how much do you want to spend? ➝ How do you want to extract wealth back from the company? So how does this win us 100% of sales? Because every other company is talking to them about how to build their app. But I'm talking to them about making their business successful. And it doesn't hurt when I share my story of a successful exit. It immediately grabs attention and people realize we've been through the process ourselves—they trust us. As I continue down this path, I'm learning that what makes us unique is our ability to offer startups much more than just tech services.

Don’t take a startup sales job if the founders weren’t the first salespeople. Founder-led sales is a necessary first step. I don’t mean selling a few accounts to their buddies. I mean founders crafting, perfecting, and proving a repeatable sales process. After they’ve proven it can be done, they need to prove it can be replicated. This is where “Founding AE’s” enter the chat. After the founders prove a repeatable sales process, they need to prove they can teach it and replicate it with a couple AE’s. Founding AE’s are a different breed. They don’t just follow a playbook. They take the founder-led playbook and make it work for non-founders. Yes, founder clout makes it easier and founding AE’s need to overcome that. It’s through this process that an achievable quota becomes established. It’s not easy. But it’s a lot easier when your founders somewhat comprehend the challenge. If the founders were too scared to sell it. You should be too. Ignoring this detail almost always results in a disconnect between founder expectations and the sales team’s reality. You’ve been warned.

Solid post from Collin Cadmus! A consistent early-stage founder mistake is hiring an expensive Sales Leader too early. Founders should be their own First Seller. Only after fully validating ICP and Market Fit should founders consider building a sales team. #startups, #founders, #scaleups, #gtm

Think you're the only one stumbling through the sales maze? Think again. In this video, Siddhanth Agrawal is pulling back the curtain on his journey: • Closing billion-dollar deals... mostly by accident • Decoding the SDR world (spoiler: it was tough!) • Turning his 4-month struggle into a business idea Here's the truth: Success often looks like a series of lucky breaks from the outside. But inside? It's all about persistence. His "Foot in the Door" moment? It came from months of confusion and hard work. So, if you're feeling lost in the sales shuffle, remember: Your struggle today could be your startup tomorrow. 🎬 - Siddhanth Agrawal 🖊 - Rishit Sharma 🎮 🖌 - Vidit Joshi 🎯

QC Growth’s Founding AE role of the week is a great opportunity to join the growing team at Aspect Build. Aspect, founded by Alex Eagle, Greg Magolan, and Jenny Magolan, aims to enhance the developer experience on top of Bazel, emphasizing open-source collaboration and direct engagement with engineers. They’re looking for a Founding Account Executive to: 🔹 Own the sales process end-to-end: from lead generation to closing deals. 🔹 Build relationships with technical decision-makers, understand their pain points, and align solutions. 🔹 Collaborate with product teams to provide valuable customer feedback that shapes the product roadmap. 🔹 Engage with highly technical customers on their preferred platforms—Slack, GitHub, and more. If this interests you, shoot me a DM or if you know of anyone feel free to comment! ...For startups looking to build your sales process and get more out of Founder-Led selling, feel free to reach out to see if our team can help you start driving revenue so you're ready for your next stage of growth. ...For all the Founding sales reps, QC Growth has other open roles across the startup landscape. Check them out at QCgrowth.com and be sure to sign up for our newsletter while you're at it to get all new postings in your inbox! #Hiring #FoundingSales #FoundingAE #SalesJobs #AccountExecutive #SaaSSales #DeveloperTooling #RemoteWork #TechSales

There’s a lot of talk about how founder-led sales is necessary for early stage startups. I 100% agree, but I’ll be honest. This was one of the harder parts of the transition from Growth to founder. At heart, I’m a product guy. So as a founder, it was easy to stay in my comfort zone: write specs, product teardowns, sprints, Linear tickets, etc. Asking for money was the hardest thing I have had to do in my professional career. In the beginning, it was flat-out awkward. I’ve never had to be a sales guy before. Compound this with the fact that at the beginning we were selling an idea, this made it 10x more awkward. So a lot of my time over the last six months has been spent learning the nuances of sales and putting them into practice slowly but surely. Here are a few resources & practices that worked for me (aside from sheer reps) to hone my selling skills. → I read Gap Selling by Keenan twice front-to-back. → I listened to 30 Minutes to President's Club weekly. → I built a network of founders who did 0 to 1 sales, and picked their brains on what worked. → I picked the brains of 10x sellers like Max Freeman, Ramp’s Head of MM Sales, Doug Landis, and Ian Feeney. I had to learn from the best people I knew who’d done it before. Fast forward a few months, and I’ve never felt more comfortable as a founder in sales calls. How are you honing your selling skills?

Having to grow a startup without a sales background is hard, but not complicated if you’re focused on the right things. Most non-sales founders however are too fixated on: → Realized Revenue → Deal Velocity → Cost of Sales Which I agree are important OUTPUTS, but not foundational inputs. The goal should be to build your repeatable, predictable process around inputs. That’s why I recommend that founding sales discussions need to center around: → Prospect Identification → Conversations had → Customer feedback → Closed-lost / Abandoned reasons → Key opportunities & next touches → Where you as a Founder can contribute meaningfully to each deal. That’s it. Listen to what the market is telling you to do better, do it, then measure the impact on deal success. & don’t rush it. Good sales come from agility & persistent feedback loops - not volume & aggressive efforts.

Founders: have more sales conversations. I’m spending a lot of time prepping sales materials for early stage startups, and appreciating just how deeply consultative an impactful sales pitch has to be. To get there, there’s significant buildup that founders need to account for. Here’s what I used to do when I was selling at GA… a real example: I was prospecting Heads of Product at large banks. I was reaching out to them with a hypothesis about their problem, but my early pitches really missed the mark. They went something like this: 1) Here’s a vague problem we solve that you might have 2) Here’s how we solve it 3) Here’s our approach & methodology 4) Here’s some (irrelevant) social proof I knew our extensive product catalog really well, but I didn’t understand my customers' real pain points until we actually talked, so the early outreach just fell flat. Knowing my customer enabled me to deliver a pitch that was about them and was mapped directly to their struggles. It was in my first sales conversations with PM teams at these banks that I learned PMs weren’t empowered product owners - their roles commonly devolved into project management and shipping mandated features. This was frustrating for them and for their leadership. As I had more conversations, I learned how to speak to the frustrations leaders and PMs were feeling day to day, and developed into a trusted advisor. The more conversations I had with that profile the more I nailed the context around the problem they desperately wanted to solve. Sales for early stage startups has to be about learning about your customer and iterating your pitch as you learn. There are no shortcuts.

You're not ready to hire your first Sales role unless you have done this first 👇 Oftentimes, Founders are told to delegate as many tasks as possible when it comes to startups, but there is one task that I feel founders should wait on and that is sales. Founder-led sales are essential in the early days. You're selling to early adopters, and only you can communicate your vision. Plus, you get real-time feedback from the market, which allows you to tweak your story and refine your process. This is your chance to shape a valuable buying experience, identifying friction points and figuring out how to remove them. But when do you pass the baton to professional salespeople? It’s all about recognizing patterns: 👉 When you know who you're going after - you know your customer profile and their pain points 👉 When your process becomes repeatable— can you write a playbook? Then you're ready. 👉 Revenue Is coming in and starting to be predictable - it's starting to be steady aka product-market fit. 👉 When you can't do it alone anymore - your bandwidth as a founder is stretched and you need coverage. Not because you don't enjoy it, but because you have the demand I've learned some of these the hard way and some from Peter Kazanjy - who literally wrote the book on founding sales >> https://lnkd.in/gHq9Zf8F Who has made the mistake of bringing their first sales hire on too early? 

Some ways founders can get the most out of an SDR hire (our most successful customers have all done these things): 1. Put in the work ahead of time. Make 200 cold calls, send 100 personalized emails, and test LI messaging before hiring a rep. This will ensure your SDR has something to go off of once they are in the seat (plus they'll respect the fact that you rolled up your sleeves and did the grunt work). 2. Organize your collateral. You should have both sales and product collateral for them to review. Sales collateral = demo + cold call recordings, screenshots of emails that have worked. Product collateral = recorded product walk-throughs, pitch materials, industry literature etc. 3. Have very clear input expectations and output goals. Input expectations = daily activity metrics (i.e make 40 dials, send 25 personalized emails). Output goals = number of demos booked/week. NOTE: output goals should be based on REAL NUMBERS. It's not productive to ask a rep to book 10 demos in a week if you have no evidence that that is possible. 4. Set time for mock calls and call review sessions. 5. Let the rep start. The best way for them to learn is to just get going. As John Steinbeck said "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." #sales #outbound #TopSDRs #sdr #coldcalling #startups #pipeline #topoffunnel