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Y Combinator Sales Summer School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-K2DHi99oI&list=PLb1c0oEEXWIZiWzd… This is basically Sales 101. Lecture by Steli Efti, YC founder of the close.io CRM. Insanely valuable. --- Y Combinator "How To Start A Startup" Sales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHAh6WKBgiE This is held by one of the founder of YC startup Clever, with an emphasis on the earliest stages of sales in a startup. --- Tons of specific sales advice on http://blog.close.io , you can find the best by googling "site:blog.close.io" and follow through the links. There is a ton of things I learned from Steli Efti (the guy behind www.close.io CRM and the Sales Summer School), be sure to attend their webinars as well if you're curious.

I suppose it would be backwards from what you typically experience. Let me try again: You're looking for a piece of software, you need it, and are ready to buy. Let's call it a CRM and the feature you're looking for the ability to add a new contact from the main screen. (It could be anything and any feature, but just as an example) During the demo, you love the software, the people instill confidence, and you can see yourself using this everyday. If it takes three extra button clicks to add a new contact (giving you a workaround) would this make you happy? Or you're really happy with everything, and the choice is to sign the contract and we would have the button before install date (written in the contract.) Would that be a better option? I'm interested in how you as the person listening to the demo, would take those two options (giving only one option would be presented during the demo) Does this make more sense? As a reference, The guys at Close.io use the first option ( http://blog.close.io/) patio11 (who is kicking around here) uses the second option (http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

The best hand on experience I have ever read about firing people due to lack of funding is Steli Efti from Close.io in this blog post : http://blog.close.io/i-fired-half-my-team I have fired people recently and wished I had read that blog post first!

http://blog.close.io/follow-up TLDR: Dude followed up with an investor 48 times and got the funding. You can do the same ;)

One concrete suggestion I would make is to watch Steli Efti's presentation on sales made to YC. It's filled with great info about how to qualify, follow up, pitch and in general, close sales. Steli is a master at that and maybe watching this will help you understand where things fell apart in your case. It's hard to say where it went wrong but I'm guessing with this info, you may be able to identify it better: http://blog.close.io/y-combinator-sales-school

From the software vendors' perspective, it makes good business sense to call you asap, see: http://blog.close.io/why-you-need-to-call-every-signup-user-within-5 From a customer perspective, ideally that call will help you to save time by: a) figuring out faster if this software is right for you or not b) helping you to learn how to use it the best way possible c) setting this up so you make the most out of your trial. I'd rather take objection with bad sales calls, not with the fact that they call on the same day.

I always like to ask "What will it take for you to become a customer of ours?" The key is to keep following up with questions until you arrive at a point when they say "and yes, then we'd buy" See more about it here if interested: http://blog.close.io/sales-hacking-kung-fu-how-to-virtually-close-ever…

I suspect that Lemkin would disagree with the order here, FYI. Lemkin clearly states on sasstr.com and quora that he thinks you essentially hire 2 sales reps, then a great VP of sales. He also states that on their blog. http://blog.close.io/how-to-hire-your-first-vp-sales-and-not-screw-it-…

Very much so, in fact Close.io <http://close.io/> was built out of our own sales team's need for better sales software / we hated all the CRMs we tried. Then it turned into its own product. We would have never known how to make Close.io better than existing legacy CRMs except for seeing the pain our sales teams actually had while doing sales. Now the entire focus of the company is on this internal-project-turned-product and now we get to use Close.io to sell Close.io, which is great. We get to solve our own problems (usually) and others benefit from it (and our product gets better). Wrote more about it here: http://blog.close.io/coworkers-as-your-first-customers-your-office-as-…

Yeah Flask is great, check http://blog.close.io/post/45202900854/the-tech-stack-behind-close-io-s…

Steli Efti published a bunch of practical articles online (free!) that I found really easy to understand: http://blog.close.io/b2b-cold-calling-tips http://blog.close.io/5-cold-email-templates-that-will-generate-warm-le… http://blog.close.io/follow-up-emails http://blog.close.io/how-to-give-product-demos-that-sell http://blog.close.io/how-to-do-referral-sales This net of articles (a bit of a rabbit hole!) is sprinkled with videos of Steli, so you can gauge the energy level and sales delivery too. I found this to be useful as well, something hard to pick up from a book.

re the cold call/mail outreach - 1. You need to be contacting individuals not generic addresses or gatekeepers ('people buy from people') 2. You need to be explaining the value to them or people like them that they can identify with in terms of shared problems (i.e. in the same line of work), not how it helped you. So for example, if you can get the first customer in any way (maybe a friend or freebie), you can make a case study to send to similar people. 3. You need to contact people with a mix of phone and personalised email 8-10 times until you get a meaningful conversation, which should be in person if possible. Everybody is firefighting and you will be astonished how many come back to you on the 6th time thanking you for persisting and reminding them. You will need to learn about objection handling as well (loads of articles here - http://blog.close.io/manage-any-sales-objection-successfully). Sales is very hard work, but getting results is very rewarding.