Founder-Led Sales in B2B Startups

In B2B startups, founders need to lead the early sales efforts. Hiring someone to do this instead almost never works. Founders' should actively sell to prospects in order to identify what they will pay for. This doesn't look much like traditional sales, where the goal is to generate revenue. Instead, founder-selling involves deep curiosity, creative thinking, and continuous iterations. The goal is to probe until you find the pain and then creatively looking for ways to align the entire company strategy to solve it. All while selling a broader vision.

In B2B environments, what customers value and will pay for sets the direction for everything else. My experiences at Sense360 and Thinknear have reinforced this belief.

Learning from Sense360: Responding to Market Needs

At Sense360, early sales efforts revealed a significant insight. While clients appreciated the quality, speed, and size of our data, their main challenge was not better or more data. In their words, they had "too much data" and their big issue was how much work it was to get any value from it. This feedback was instrumental in shifting our strategy and product development.

We realized that rather than specialize in location data, we needed to provide them with a single source for all their data needs, all while productizing the data so that the different data sources worked together to easily answer specific business questions. As a result we integrated spend data, survey data, and other relevant datasets. More importantly, we built dashboards that brought all this data together to make it really easy for clients to answer key questions with this data. This strategic direction was born out of sales conversations. Customers told us what they needed to pay for and we evolved to build it.

Thinknear's Approach: Building Confidence Through Collaboration

The scenario at Thinknear was a bit different. Our agency prospects knew that mobile advertising was important, but they didn't really know how to think about it. They knew they had to buy it, but were stuck on how they should explain it to their brands. Our sales strategy had to evolve from selling mobile ads, to helping agencies develop a POV around mobile.

As a result, we dedicated most of the time during the sales process to collaboratively developing campaign ideas with clients, demonstrating how our targeting was uniquely mobile. We spent a lot of time bringing our ideas to live visually and creating materials for the agencies to use in their meetings with customers. Our product was very good, but that wasn't enough. In order for customers to buy mobile ads, we needed to help them understand and sell our vision. This approach helped us secure early customers. It was a clear example that success in early-stage B2B sales is very different from traditional sales.

Conclusion: The Essential Role of Founders in B2B Sales

These experiences underline a key principle: in B2B startups, the founder's involvement in sales is indispensable. This is not something you can hire for. It goes beyond selling a solution; it's about aligning the product and the entire company strategy to meet the customers needs. This process requires a founder's insight and direct engagement. This approach is challenging but crucial, often becoming the linchpin of success for B2B startups.