August - 2008 issue > Entrepreneur 101

By Gunjan Sinha

Over the years, I have observed a number of startups – some successful and some not so successful. Some of the startups are small 1-2 person startups trying to build their product; others have gone past the funding stage and are now trying to sell their product or service. And some other startups are at a matured stage, and have to figure out how to scale their sales and revenues to hit the IPO Promised Land. As we all know, sales success plays a critical role in the very success of these startups. In all these cases, it boils down to how effectively one embarks on the right sales strategy for each phase in the startup’s lifecycle. In this article, I have tried to share how different stages of the startup might require different types of selling approaches. Sales managers, founders, and sales executives can do well to better understand what approach of selling might work in their specific environment.

Pre-Funding, Early Stage Startup
Chances are, in this early stage you have a very small team, mostly developers or technical founders with little or no prior sales skills. Your best bet at this stage is to focus on getting your early sales wins, which will provide the critical validation of your product or service for the VCs or angels. The most effective selling approach at this stage is to try the following:

Offer up your ’technical’ expertise to your prospects as if you were consulting for them. As a consultant, or small team of consultants, you can slowly introduce your product or service to the customer. Since, you would have already won their trust and are part of their team, this is a great way to establish your sales strategy at this phase.

Another proven approach is to team up with other startups who are a bit larger than you, and who need help accelerating their product to market. This approach will give you both credibility and a win in the marketplace. I recall, when I was in the early stages of whowhere (a web 1.0 company), we were able to partner with Infoseek (a leading search engine at that time, pre-google!). Infoseek needed to compete with Yahoo!, and was looking for white pages, yellow page service on their website, and whowhere was able to offer that to them. Such a partnership put us on the map of VCs and other players in the industry.

Post-Funding, Early Stage Growth

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