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In sales, it is important to have an entrepreneurial mindset and to do things that don't scale. In 2015, we were building an ed-tech platform and after visiting 400 colleges in person in India my founders and I were scratching our heads about growth. Thread 
Surprisingly one mid-night in November 2015 we got a lead from a Europe-based school.
My first rule in sales is to respond to any lead enquiry within 10-mins (the only exception being when I'm sleeping or doing a demo to another customer). I responded to the lead in less than 10mins. Looks like that is a rare practice in the industry we are serving.
Over the next 10 hours, I had 51 back and forth email conversations with the lead. Answered all the legal, security, and functionality questions. The prospect was convinced that ours could be a 10x better solution than the existing one.
During the email conversations, I asked enough leading questions to understand some core problems the prospect is trying to solve & started thinking of ideas on how I can keep this prospect engaged so that I can sleep(it was already 3am during my 16th email exchange)
I immediately built a beta instance using a 20-line code my co-founder taught me to write and execute. Set-up the beta instance with the prospect's branding and data (collected from their existing platform) and shared it with the prospect at 5am IST.
The prospect was surprised because the existing vendor took 1 month to set-up the platform. This was a new standard for the prospect and distorted the prospect's reality a bit.
The prospect was extremely delighted and pumped to explore the beta instance. I thought it's time to sleep for 4-5hours before the prospect comes back with questions after the exploration of the platform. Right when I was about to crash, I got an email from the prospect.
There was a stream of questions (something around 19). That's it! Back to typing and answering the prospect's questions. This activity went on for another 3 hours. It's 8am IST.
My sleep moment was gone & I was completely engaged in the conversation with the prospect.Replying to queries, sending screenshots on how to use the product,adding more data to make the beta better.I loved every bit of what I was doing.Little did I know I was building a playbook.
Then came the scariest part. The prospect dropped the pricing question bomb. "I'd like a price please."
This was my first interaction with a European lead and this was the first of money global leads for my start-up. I did not know what to quote.
This was my first interaction with a European lead and this was the first of money global leads for my start-up. I did not know what to quote.
After doing a lot of work and convincing the customer that we are the best solution, I did not want to mess up at pricing. We were selling at $1000 in the Indian market and did not know what would be a good price.
I did not want to quote $1000 because it felt too good to believe for a product like ours. I quickly looked at the competitor's pricing. It is around $3500. Still clueless on what to quote! I did not have anyone around to discuss.
An easy way was to match competitor pricing, but because I knew we broke all the standard industry practices and created a delightful customer experience I wanted to quote a higher number. I quoted $5000 (that's 5 times our standard price).
The prospect without blinking an eye said that's reasonable 7 signed the contract (yay!).This event marked the biggest pivot of my start-up and my life.We shifted our focus to the European market but in 3 months pivoted to U.S market due to a silly visa issue. That's serendipity!
We had No brand, No in-person presence. But doing things that don't scale helped us. @paulg refers to this a lot - http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
key takeaways:
- do things that don't scale
- when you do not have a brand, set new standards for the industry.
- reach out to as many people as you can and make them listen to your origin story (why you are doing what you are doing)
- next target is doing a trial or POC
- do things that don't scale
- when you do not have a brand, set new standards for the industry.
- reach out to as many people as you can and make them listen to your origin story (why you are doing what you are doing)
- next target is doing a trial or POC
[cont]
- next target is paying customer
- next target is turning the paying customer into a reference customer
- repeat the cycle -"reach->pitch the story->trial/POC->paying customer->reference/case study"
- next target is paying customer
- next target is turning the paying customer into a reference customer
- repeat the cycle -"reach->pitch the story->trial/POC->paying customer->reference/case study"
[cont]
- during the early-stage & growth stage sales team is no longer a sales team. The sales function is the centerpiece to make the product better and build a brand.
- Salesperson needs to educate, onboard, and make the customer successful.
- during the early-stage & growth stage sales team is no longer a sales team. The sales function is the centerpiece to make the product better and build a brand.
- Salesperson needs to educate, onboard, and make the customer successful.
For detailed sales tactics, you can subscribe to my newsletter - https://sesamint.substack.com/ . I talk about SaaS Sales and tactics to build a scalable/repeatable sales engine.
I bet you'll get at least $100,000 in sales applying the tactics I share.
I bet you'll get at least $100,000 in sales applying the tactics I share.
