Enterprise Sales with Pete Koomen | Startup School

**Pete Koomen** (0:09)
My name is Pete Koomen. I'm a group partner at YC and a YC alum. I was co-founder and CTO of Optimizely in the Winter 2010 batch. In this talk, I'm going to walk step by step through the process of closing your first enterprise customers. I'm gonna do that by focusing on successive steps in the sales funnel, prospecting, outreach, qualification, pricing, closing, and implementation. I'll do my best to include lots of tactical advice and counterintuitive lessons I picked up while I was learning how to sell at Optimizely. I'm going to focus on enterprise sales for software startups. But this talk should still be broadly useful to any founder getting started with sales, regardless of the size of your customers or what you're selling. Why am I giving this talk? Well, first, I know there's demand for this. Sales is the number one concern during the batch for most of the founders that I work with at YC.
Second, I know from experience that sales is a learnable skill. My co-founder, Dana, and I both had technical backgrounds. We knew how to build a product, but we didn't know how to get people to use it. We figured it out through trial and error. And that's the first big lesson I want to impart today. If you're the founder of an early-stage start-up and you're building a product that you're hoping other businesses will buy, you are capable of selling it. That's the good news. The bad news is that you're probably the only person capable of selling your product. That is, if you aren't able to sell your product yourself at first, chances are you're not going to be able to hire somebody else to do it for you. Now, if you're anything like we were, you're probably thinking there are lots of talented salespeople out there. Wouldn't it be faster to hire one of them than try to do it ourselves? After all, that's what you'd probably do with any other role like designers or lawyers or accountants. The problem is that sales before you find product market fit is very different from sales after you find product market fit. Sales pre-PMF is fundamentally entrepreneurial. It requires vision and credibility with customers and lots of experimentation and a tight feedback loop with the people building the product. This is a role for founders. So does that mean if you're a team of technical founders building a product, you should go find a business co-founder to do sales? Well, you probably don't need a business co-founder to sell either. I've worked with many technical founders who turned out to be great at selling. In some cases, very much to their surprise. So why is that? Well, if you're a technical founder building a product, you have several advantages that will give you a big leg up in selling. First, you're an expert both in the problem you're solving and the product you're building. And second, you have conviction.
You sincerely believe that your product will solve your customer's problem. Expertise and conviction are surprisingly important in sales. This is especially surprising to people who mistakenly think that selling is a dark art full of psychological tricks. Sales isn't about tricking people, it's fundamentally about helping people solve their problems, and engineers are great at doing that. Anyway, now that I've hopefully convinced you that you're capable of selling your product, let's talk about how to do that. Like I said, we're going to go through the step in a typical sales funnel together. Let's start with prospecting. Prospecting means finding potential customers. The output of this step is a list of companies you think might need your product, and the specific humans at those companies you think might buy it. There are lots of tools you can use for prospecting, but before you start, you need a hypothesis. A sales hypothesis goes something like this.
Customer X has problem Y, and our product will help them solve it. A good hypothesis makes prospecting easy by clarifying who you should be talking to. For example, at Optimizely, our initial hypothesis was something like this. Marketers at small and medium tech, media, and e-commerce companies want to run A-B tests on their websites, but they can't because off-the-shelf experimentation tools require users to write code. Optimizely will enable them to run A-B tests without writing code. And once you have a clear hypothesis like that, you can get to work on prospecting. Start by identifying companies that are likely to suffer from the problem you're solving. One way to do this is to buy industry lists of all of the companies in a given sector, and then use some filtering criteria to qualify those companies and narrow your target list. For example, at Optimizely, we used a tool called Built With to figure out whether prospects were using analytics tools and JavaScript frameworks, because those were signals that a company was relatively sophisticated and cared about their website. Once you have a list of companies, you'll need to find the right humans at those companies and their contact information. There are tools that make this easier. This video was recorded during the Winter 24 batch, and many founders in the current batch are using Apollo and LinkedIn sales navigator for that. Now that you have a list of leads, that is, specific humans that are likely to buy at the companies you're selling to, you'll need to get their attention. This step is called outreach. The goal of outreach is usually to schedule a meeting with your prospect. Most founders think of cold outreach as the primary mechanism for doing this, but the easiest way to get a meeting with a prospect is to get them to reach out to you. Even if you're planning on using a sales-led approach, you should still do everything you can to generate inbound demand.