The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (co-founder of JJELLYFISH)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I've always wanted to create a very tactical episode on how to do sales, especially with a focus on founder led sales.

**Jen Abel** (0:06)
A lot of early stage founders get tripped up as they're taking late stage sales advice. The founder is the product. You have studied, you have experienced something that most of the market hasn't even had a chance to maybe see or visualize yet.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:19)
A billion SaaS tools emailing me constantly about their product. How do you get someone to even want to talk to you and be open to learning about what you're doing?

**Jen Abel** (0:25)
So if you can focus the messaging in a way that speaks to something that is a bit of shock value or is counterintuitive, you'll get them to continue reading. When a problem is truly being felt by the market, people will get on a call. People will respond.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
The next step I imagine is you're on the phone with them trying to convince them to actually care. What do you do there? How do you get them to engage further?

**Jen Abel** (0:45)
You need to be vulnerable. I would be very open and honest with where you are. Hey, I'm an early stage startup. We have a lot to learn. Can we gain your insight into how this problem is manifesting on your side? Founder led sales is not about revenue on day one. It is about learning as fast as humanly possible to get to that pulse so that you can earn the right to sell.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:12)
Today, my guest is Jen Abel. Jen is the co-founder of Jjellyfish, where her and her team help early stage founders learn how to sell, do early customer discovery, and set up a repeatable sales motion. Prior to Jjellyfish, Jen was an enterprise sales director at The Muse and at General Assembly, and she's obsessed with helping founders in the zero to one stage of their journey. In our conversation, we get extremely tactical and in the weeds on how to actually do sales as a founder. We talk through each step of the sales process, and Jen shares what you should be doing and saying at every step. We go through how to find your first set of leads, how to reach out to them, what to say in your message, how to structure your first sales call, how to get through procurement, and how to get that final signature. She shares actual words you should be using and phrases and structures and pitfalls that most people run into at each of these steps. I've never heard a podcast episode with this much advice that you can put into practice tomorrow and I am very excited to hear how it goes for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Jen Abel.
Jen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Jen Abel** (2:27)
Thanks Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:28)
What I've always wanted to do is to create a very tactical episode on how to do sales, like how to actually have sales conversations, how to find leads, how to close deals, especially with the focus on founder led sales, where founders are doing the early sales versus hiring salesperson, which one, I know you're a huge advocate of and we'll talk about this, and two, you basically spent all your time working with founders and founding teams, helping them learn how to do sales, how to set up their go-to-market motions, how to scale sales teams, how to hire salespeople. I'm very excited to have you here to create a very in the weeds, hands-on episode on how to do sales. How does that sound broadly?

**Jen Abel** (3:07)
That sounds awesome and thank you so much for having me Lenny. I mean, it's a true pleasure to be here with you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:12)
It's my pleasure. Many people have recommended you come on this podcast. I'm excited we're doing this. Let me start with just this kind of question about founder-led sales. Maybe just briefly explain what that term means and then talk about why this is so important, why this is the way you recommend companies start doing sales.

**Jen Abel** (3:28)
Founder-led sales is really that first milestone that a startup goes through on the commercial side, which is how do I go out and get my first few customers? Some people might say zero to one, which is how do I get my first million? Others might say, how do I go out and get my first 10 customers? It's all in the same vein. Founder-led sales is really, really, really important because in the very, very, very early days when there is no brand equity, when there is no marketing engine running, when there is limited to no reference ability, the founder is the product, right? Because the product is still could be abstract, could be an MVP or really, really early and it's really early formation. So the founder is the product. When people say, well, what does that even mean? It means that you are a subject matter expert on something highly specific. You have studied, you have experienced something that most of the market hasn't even had a chance to maybe see or visualize yet. So you have this like novel insight that you are building a business around. And it's that novel insight and the way you see the world that gets the market excited, right? In absence of a product. And that's actually happens even before you even show the product. So founder led sales is how do you bring the founder's vision into the world and have the market and understand what part of the market accepts it. And then what part of that vision are they accepting? So it's aligning the founder's vision with the market reality.