picking up the phone
I'm an introvert, so sales never came naturally to me. What did come naturally was the pull of picking up the phone and making the call towards a target. That clarity, the small thrill, the whole ring of emotions around it, is honestly a little addictive.
The thing I'm best at in GTM is messaging. After enough experiments you develop a knack for taking complex features, positioning, problem points and value props and distilling them into one sentence a person gets immediately. As a chief of staff I've sat with clients at every stage of using the product, which makes it much easier to speak their language. I think that's the single biggest factor in whether GTM works at all.
I've come at sales from a lot of angles, B2B and B2C (mostly B2B). At AIESEC I built the content and positioning our college-student field sales teams used to onboard B2B clients, defined the top international markets we'd pull students from, and ran the marketing to bring them to India, down to tracking each city and iterating on campaigns until they worked. At Samora I sat with the founders, talked to customers, built our first ICP and messaging, and did the cold outreach for our early clients. In the beginning it was brute force, a lot of volume at the top of the funnel. Over time that turned into proper workflows with defined signals, and some inbound. The biggest unlock, though, has been partnerships. Most of our repeatable revenue today comes through BPOs and organisations like EkStep.
a few things every sales effort should start with
- Reasonable goals. Work backwards from them to decide how many people you need to reach. If you've hit that number and the goals still aren't moving, the problem is something other than effort. Most products have rough industry conversion benchmarks; use them.
- A take on the market. Even if it's just an internal doc, you should have a map: who you're selling to, who else they could buy from, and why you're the better fit. None of it has to be said out loud, but you have to know it.
- Always pick up calls from unknown numbers.
- A way to capture why someone said yes, so you can quickly spin up the next experiment around that hypothesis. This is why I don't think early-stage startups need fancy decks and landing pages. What converts is messaging that lands, and people are genuinely happy to be your early champions.
The thing I keep coming back to is how tightly operations and GTM are tied together. Most of what I know about selling the product, I learned from running it for clients. These days that's most of my focus: making the two feed each other.
