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Enterprise founders need to build the muscle to get their startups from 0-2m ARR on their own without a "VP" of anything. Why? And how? (1/n):
2/ early sales are vision driven, not product driven. Your customers are clueless why they want you, why what they have is limited, why using your product will improve their lives and how. You are the best person to paint this vision, not salespeople.
3/ doing (2) will get you feedback on your thesis, on your product and most critically, on your pitch. You will need to talk to 30-40 customers to get there. Yes, 30-40. Once you do that, you'll start to see patterns on need. Then you build to it. Then you get paid.
4/ sales is coin operated. You need a playbook that works first, you need battle cards, you need org chart understanding, you need budget lines/controllers, etc. Once you have it scripted to a T, you hire a VP to build a team under him/her. VPs hired too early transition out.
5/ hire 2-3 SDRs (1 may get fired), get them to qualify leads, sit on every phone call, hear every objection, pushback, every Intel on competitor offering. Once a deal is hot, CLOSE IT YOURSELF. Your early SDR quotas might be more about SQLs than $$s.
6/ once you get to quota stage, find out what benchmarks work for your region, industry. Core ent in US is 1.5m quota and & 300k fully loaded, so 5x. SaaS will be a higher ratio. India SDR may be a higher ratio if selling into the US. 3-5 mos to get SDRs ready. 20% SDR churn/yr.
7/ what about marketing? Keep it light. You are the best marketer for your product or market that doesn't yet exist. Hire a consultant to do the grunt work of creating collateral, getting into PR and AR cycles, etc.
8/ Measure everything! SDR quota attainment ratios broken down by region/product. Funnel conversion from marketing to sales to contracts. New ARR per new S&M spend (>1.2-1.5 good), CaC trends, ACV trends, etc. Long list here.
9/ finally, back to founder-led sales: you need to spend 30-50% of your time selling & rest hiring. That's why a product-CTO co-founder is key in enterprise. What you bring to the table is deep intuition on what to build, but then you focus on getting the mkts ready for it. /End
Thanks to @amansk for an insightful chat on this that triggered this post! 🙏
