What up? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast.
On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I tried
to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today?
How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here, as always,
is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own
profitable, successful internet businesses. Today, I'm talking to Steli Efti.
Steli, welcome back to the Andy Hackers podcast.
So awesome to be back. Thank you.
It's awesome to have you back. You are the founder of a company called Clothes.
You know more about sales and pretty much anybody that I know.
And so today's episode is going to be all about sales.
What should early stage founders know about how to sell?
The thing about Andy Hackers is that most of us are developers,
and we're not exactly a group known for being enthusiastic about sales.
In fact, most of us would prefer it if we had nothing to do with sales whatsoever.
However, most of the successful founders, including developer founders that I've spoken to,
have had sales play a very large role in their business.
So it's crucial to learn how to sell.
I will defer to you, Steli. You're the expert here.
Where do we even start on this topic?
Yeah, where do we start? I think first and foremost,
let's talk about our relationship with selling, especially in the Andy Hackers community, right?
Or maybe from a background that is more technical and less
and less in the kind of sales and marketing world.
I do think that sales has a bad rep in a kind of deserved fashion, right?
There's a lot of people, a lot of my friends that are not coming from a sales background,
that always kind of told me that when they think of salespeople and selling,
it was just like the internal response was just like,
ugh, ugh, you know, it's just like sleazy people that are just like annoyingly persistent and just
want to like bully you into buying something you don't want, right?
And so there's a lot of like, I think, internal resistance.
And I think that that is really, that's the core of a lot of problems that can occur later on.
You think that selling and sales is just this fundamental, terrible thing,
then you will not want to learn anything about it.
You will not want to practice anything in it.
And if you are somebody that is building things and want these things to be brought to market
and find a customer base, you are going to have to sell.
Now, you might want to call it something different,
but what you are going to be doing is you're going to be selling, right?
In one way or another.
So I think, first of all, I'd like to give a definition,
like my definition when it comes to sales.
To me, sales is really nothing else than result-driven communication.
So if the two of us just chit-chat and there's no purpose, rhyme, or reason for us talking,
we're just talking, the moment that there is an end goal in mind for one of us or both of us,
right, when I'm trying to convince you of something,
when I'm trying to get you excited about something,
when I'm trying to make you make a decision,
whenever there is a purpose and an end result I have in mind while I am communicating with you
and vice versa, we are now in the world of selling, right?
We're not just talking, we're selling, right?
And selling does not necessarily have to do with a financial transaction, right?
For people that have children, have two boys,
when you have children, you know it's a never-ending negotiation, right?
It's just like a never-ending pitch of the parents
just trying to sell their children on doing something or being into something
and the children selling the parents on some ideas that they have about the world and what they want.
And so, you know, there's so many different situations in life,
even when it comes to like hiring people is nothing else than a sales interaction.
Finding a significant other, a lot of it is a sales interaction.
You're communicating, trying to convince somebody of certain things that are good about you,
certain things you want them to see in you that might be attractive or interesting to them.
And so it's a never-ending life to a larger degree is selling.
Not all of it, but a good portion of it.
So if it happens and if it's so ubiquitous and if it's so core to being successful
with the products that you're building and the things that you're bringing to market,
you might as well get good at it and understand how it works.
And then you can do it well and you can do it with the right intentions
without being sleazy, without being a terrible human being,
without, you know, doing things that are unethical,
which I wouldn't recommend anyways to anybody in today's world.
So one of the things I see in a lot of indie hackers is a bent towards more mass marketing
rather than individual sort of high touch sales conversations.
People are really averse to selling.
It's not just because they think it's sleazy.
It's because it seems hard and mysterious and not particularly scalable.
You know, like how many of your product are you really going to sell
if you're relying on sales?
When you look at these big inspiring companies that you're trying to copy,
you don't really see their salespeople.
You see their marketing materials.
You see their blog posts at the top of Hacker News.
You see their advertisements and things that don't require a person to talk to another person.
Why should I as an indie hacker not just build one of these types of businesses
where I don't have to talk to anybody
and my product just spreads via word of mouth
or through channels that don't require talking to people?
Man, if you can build a product that sells itself, right?
Go ahead and do it and then come back and tell me about it.
And I'm going to be your biggest fan anyways, right?
I'm going to be like talking about you to all my friends
and telling them about everything you've done brilliantly.
I think the reality though is it's the same thing as like me saying,
you know, I want to, let's say, lose a lot of weight and build a lot of muscle.
Why should I be eating healthy stuff and working out a lot?
Like why can't I just take a pill and take care of that problem that way?
Well, because it's not necessarily, I get the appeal of the idea,
but it's not necessarily reality, right?
And these solutions that are easy and require no effort from you and no change
are usually truly bad solutions, right?
They're not really long-term good investments in your future, in your business.
First of all, let me dispel the idea that there are these companies
that have only kind of mass marketing and there's no sales team behind it.
Most of the modern products, software products that you admire,
you know, have massive sales teams behind them.
A lot of times, because in today's world, it's kind of,
it's a cool idea to say we have no salespeople,
especially companies that have a massive amount of kind of technical audience
or technical buyers, they like to, you know, explain to the world,
oh, we don't even hire salespeople here.
But then they hire a bunch of people that what they do is selling,
but they call them implementation engineers.
They call them, you know, customer success engineers,
or something, but what they are doing is they're going,
visiting their largest customers, they're shaking hands, kissing babies,
they're asking lots of questions, they're building relationships,
they're making presentations, they're negotiating contracts,
and they're closing deals, right?
And so there's a lot of BS going on in the world of we don't need salespeople.
And this might be too long ago for most of the kind of newer audience
that's listening to this, but the OGs of the Indie Hacker community
will appreciate this example.
Yammer, which used to be kind of the slack before Slack,
before Slack, was the poster child in B2B for,
we finally have built a company in the B2B space that is virally growing.
Individual team members start using Yammer to chat with each other,
and then more and more people of that do it,
and then eventually the company goes,
oh my god, all these employees are using this,
can we pay you money to get some control over it, right?
And that's how we grow.
But then David Sachs, I think, is the guy that started Yammer,
one of the original PayPal mafia guys, when he was interviewed
after they sold Yammer to Microsoft for an insane amount of money,
they told him what was one of the hardest lessons they had to learn.
And it was exactly this.
He's like, well, we were telling everybody we don't need salespeople.
We're doing this virally until we realized this isn't working without salespeople.
And then we had to hire a ton of them,
and then we had to figure out how to manage them and deal with them.
And then we started seeing success.
He's like, I wish we weren't so bought into that flawed idea in the beginning.
And we were like, we hold on to that idea for way too long,
because it was just such a cool idea, right?
And we had told everybody about it already.
It's kind of like a humble brag, you know?
Like, oh, my company's so good, we just don't even need salespeople.
We don't even need salespeople.
People are incentivized to say that.
You know, I never sleep.
I work so hard.
I don't need salespeople.
Like, so many things in the sort of startup world.
And it's actually not true.
It's sort of a virtual signaling in the startup world.
Like, we don't even need salespeople.
Our product is the selling itself.
So the other thing that's more relevant, I think, to the audience, more practical
and tactical is this, like, selling one customer at a time, it doesn't scale.
Even if we take this premise as true, right?
Especially if you have maybe a product that is not an enterprise-level solution,
which a lot of people won't have in the India hacker community.
It's more affordable in price.
It's true.
It might not be possible for you to sell your $10 a month subscription product
one person at a time through pitching and negotiating with them, right?
I get that.
And that's absolutely correct.
But in the early days, up until the point where you get to your first,
let's say 100 customers as a good benchmark,
you not selling one-on-one is only going to make it harder for you
to generate the level of customer intimacy, the level of customer insights
to truly understand the psychology of your customer,
the ideal profile of your customer, how to communicate with them,
what convinces them, what moves them.
And that will then allow you to both build the right features
or the product in the way that will get a better response from the market,
but also understand how to do sales en masse, which is marketing, right?
Copywriting, how to explain the benefits of your product with words,
how to design things that communicate in images
and create the feelings that your buyers want to have
and that will help them want to buy your product.
These things, you cannot get secondhand insights, right?
To me, it's like saying this idea,
why can't I just put together a landing page,
Cortland, and then I'll spend a thousand bucks on Google AdWords
and I will A-B test the shit out of the copy and the design,
and then the data will tell me what to do.
I love that idea. That's such a pure idea.
I like it. I also want it to be true.
But the reality is, in the beginning, when you don't have scale,
where you might be able to get a couple of hundred clicks on a landing page,
just looking at numbers is not going to give you enough context,
enough dense enough signals to truly understand what is going on.
I'm telling you, take your laptop and your landing page
and go to a place where there's a bunch of people that could be your buyers,
like maybe it's a Starbucks,
and then show somebody your landing page and tell them,
I'll buy you your coffee if you give me one minute of your time.
I just want you to look at my site and then tell me what it does, right?
And tell me what you think about it.
And I'm telling you, there's no better medicine to our stupidity than reality, right?
And reality, that's context-rich.
You could show somebody a screen and their facial expression is this.
Like they look all confused and puzzled and they squeeze their eyes
and they scratch their forehead in physical pain,
and then they tell you, I think I like it. Yeah, I get it.
Yeah, I think it's a cool idea. You should go with it, right?
And then you ask them, well, can you tell me what my idea is?
Well, how would you explain it to a friend?
They go, well, and then they go and they butcher it, right?
They explain it in a way that pains you.
Now, that's something you will not, this is context that you will not get
if you just send somebody to click a link, they see a landing page
and they maybe click on, see what's next or sign up or whatever,
or they just leave.
You might not understand why they're confused.
You might not understand, like when they score around on your website,
you'll see the areas where they're confused, where they spent more time.
You'll see the words they use, you show that landing page to four people
and all of them come up with the same flawed summary of what you do
and use the same words that you maybe used in your copy.
And that might point you into like what you need to change
about how you explain what you do in a way
that will communicate better and more effectively.
Now, showing five people or a coffee shop your landing page
that doesn't seem scalable, right?
But it is going to be a lot more insightful, I guarantee to you
because the information you're getting is richer.
You're not just getting an action like a click.
You actually can see the body language, you can hear the tonality.
I could tell you, this is good.
I could say this is good.
Those are not the same statements.
It's not the same amount of like positive signal.
And so the reason why we don't want to do these things,
I don't believe is because it's quote unquote not scaling.
I think that's a bullshit excuse, if I'm honest.
I think the reason why we don't like that
is because it's a much harsher feedback loop with reality.
And we all don't like when the feedback isn't good
and most of the times it isn't.
For most of the things that we do, the feedback loop is quite harsh.
It's much nicer for my emotions to see,
oh, shit, man, I got 400 clicks and just to sign up,
hmm, is this good, is this bad, what should I change?
It's a much softer thing to direct with
than going to a coffee shop,
showing my thing to 10 people and everybody's telling me this sucks.
It's much more, I'm going to get a much stronger emotional felt
reaction of rejection and failure.
And we all like to avoid that.
Like this just doesn't feel good to any real human being.
And so I think the reason why we don't want to do
the one-on-one sales in the beginning
is not that we truly don't believe it scales
because it doesn't have to.
In the early days, you don't have to scale.
You don't have anything worth scaling yet.
Don't worry about scaling.
You have to try to discover and uncover something
that is valuable and that people want.
And to do that, you will have to spend time one-on-one with people.
In sales, I think even Jessica from YC had written a blog post
about why sales is more important than marketing
in the early days in the startup.
Think about that.
That blew my mind for the YC community to be advocating for this.
And why her central thesis in that blog post in that article
was that sales is so direct in its feedback loop.
It's so less open to interpretation.
Like either somebody says, yes, I'm buying or no.
Marketing can be a lot softer.
Like they liked it.
They clicked on something, right?
They whatever, they hit a like button.
They retweeted whatever my ad or something.
There's so many more things that we can feel good about
that aren't a true clear result.
Yes, no, bought, didn't buy.
And so sales in the early days
is where we're really looking for strong signals
on what to do next, I think is a beautiful tool.
And it doesn't have to scale at all.
I love that.
So to summarize, it doesn't really matter
if sales doesn't scale in the early days.
You should probably still be doing it mostly as a learning tool
because there's really no better way
to learn what kind of product you should be building,
what your marketing copy should even say,
than having these conversations with people.
And it's important to go into it with sort of a mindset
where your primary goal is to discover the truth.
You're not trying to confirm what you already think,
but you're trying to discover the realities
because early on in those early phases of your startup,
the biggest risk is that you just build the wrong thing
because you don't understand what people want.
Let's talk about this process of sales
sort of switching over from being a way that you learn
to a way that you convince other people
to use what you're doing.
One of the first things that a lot of the founders
that I talk to begin with is sending cold emails.
Like I never went to a coffee shop, for example,
to show people, Andy Hackers.
Maybe I should have.
It would have been really easy to do.
But you know, I prefer to just sit in my apartment
and send emails to people.
I've talked to so many other founders
who also started their companies
by sending something like 50, 100,
the first person I ever had on this podcast,
sent 1,000 cold emails in the course of three months
to get his business off the ground.
What is your advice for your founders
trying to convince the very first people
to use what they built?
What are some tactics for being persuasive?
Yeah, I love that.
So I think in the very early days,
you can use the advice I got from an investor once
about fundraising and apply the same principles to selling,
which is you ask for money.
Oftentimes, what you'll get is advice.
You'll ask for advice.
Maybe you'll get lucky and get some money.
So what I would suggest is that what I've used a lot of times
and I taught a lot of founders to use successfully
and apply successfully is that in the super early days,
when you're trying to get to your first 10,
first 20 customers,
it can be a much better kind of approach
to reach out to potential buyers.
And instead of telling them, I built something
and I want to find my first customers,
do you want to give me your time and attention
and figure out if you want to purchase,
which is kind of a big ask, ask them for advice,
which is something you should be valuing
above their money anyways, right?
And you might get their money.
So what I would do is I would ping somebody and say,
hey, I've seen that you've been in this industry
for a long time.
I built something new for people like you.
And what I'd love to do is maybe as a founder,
I can get 10, 15 minutes of your time
to show you the technology that I've developed
and get some advice from you as an expert,
as somebody that has been in this industry forever.
I have learned that people love to give advice.
Everybody wants to be an expert.
Everybody wants to give advice.
People are much more open to talking to a founder
about that technology startup idea
and give them some feedback.
That seems like fun to people, usually.
So what you do is you jump on a call and you don't lie.
That's truly, that should be the number one purpose
that you have.
You show them what you do, you tell them.
This is something I built for people like you.
This is why I built it.
This is how it works.
You, as an expert in being you, I'm not you, right?
You tell me, what does that look like?
Would you want to buy this?
What about it sucks?
What about it did I think about?
And the beautiful thing about that interaction
is that they're going to be a lot more open to you
with their fee pay.
They'll tell you because they don't feel
like they have to keep their guard up.
They don't feel like this is a sales call.
They're just going to tell you the harsh, brutal truth, right?
Right.
Yeah.
I get why you wanted to build this,
but let me tell you something about this industry.
Nobody can buy this type of software
because my company is not allowing me XYZ
if you don't do this, this, and that, the other.
Wow.
Now, that might not feel good to you,
but you'll get the truth.
People will give you unfiltered advice.
And you don't want to ask for advice from investors or experts.
You want to ask for advice from potential customers,
the type of people that you want to purchase the product.
Now, there's a couple of potential ways this call could go.
If they are hypercritical, they hate everything you did.
They think you suck.
They think the software sucks.
They think it has no future.
Nobody would ever buy it.
They just crush you.
There's no sense in trying to get that credit card.
There's no sense in even pitching it.
You've heard all these things why they wouldn't want to buy it.
Now, you can ask them, what would I have to change?
Is there anything you could ever imagine me changing
that would make you interested?
That's an important question to ask.
But let's say that they're so critical,
they can't see anything they could ever find value in in what you're doing.
Cool.
Just keep it moving.
Tell them if it's cool to keep in touch with them
as you change what you're doing to see if their mind changes about this
and see if everybody you talk about has the same opinion.
Now, if they talk to you and they like some things that you're doing
and maybe find that you have to change some things,
take that into account, but now start changing the conversation a little bit
and ask them, hey, if I added these features that you told me about
or made these changes, would you truly believe this is a compelling product?
Yeah, I think it'd be amazing then.
Cool.
Would you be willing to buy?
Like, would that be enough if I built these things
and do these things that you just told me about?
Would you want to be a customer?
That now takes the conversation from a theoretical thing
to a very concrete proposition for them.
It's going to change how they're going to respond.
And now there's going to be a new layer of learning.
They might go, yeah, I would buy if you do this.
I would love to be the first customer.
Now, that's amazing.
Now we got something.
They might also, though, tell you, no, if I'm honest,
even if you do these things, I couldn't buy.
And now we're in the world of harsh truth again, right?
Why?
Why?
You just told me if I did these things, it'd be amazing.
Yeah, but I don't have the budget.
Yeah, but whatever.
I already bought software for three years.
And now I can ask and learn about the buying process.
Do you find that everybody, like, you buy software
for three, four years at a time?
So could this be, like, a problem
I will have and encounter all the time
when I'm trying to get customers?
Like, just trying to learn more about that.
And then, lastly, some calls, hopefully, once in a while,
you get somebody that gets really excited and enthusiastic
about what you do.
And you could ask them, hey, it seems like you really
love what I do and what I have today.
What would it take for you to become
one of my earliest customers?
Somebody that might help me build out the roadmap,
give me feedback, kind of be an advisor.
And they might just go, yeah, we're ready to go.
Like, I want to buy this.
I want to be a customer.
I want to be an advocate.
I want to be a champion for this.
And that's incredible.
But the conversation starts as advice and turns into sales
if it makes sense and when it makes sense,
versus going so harsh and cold into the,
you've never heard from me.
I've built something nobody has ever bought or used.
But do you want to give me your time, your valuable time,
so I can try to get your money?
Like, that just doesn't sound that sexy or that cool
or that fun to people, and rightfully so, probably.
Yeah, it's a very easy email to just mark a spam
or delete from your inbox.
Yeah.
How much of this is quantity versus quality?
Like, if I'm an early stage founder,
should I be sending hundreds of emails
and talking to hundreds of people?
Or should I just try to have really amazing conversations
and go as deep as I can and learn as much as I can
about selling so that my conversations are just better?
In general, I mean, the answer is always it depends.
There's a lot of variety.
But 99% of the time, I would tell you,
you try to find a balance between both things.
It's a flawed idea to think, all I'm going to do
is I'm going to email a million people,
and then surely those numbers are so high,
a few hundred people will buy and want to jump on a call,
and it's going to be all amazing.
It's not.
You're just going to get your email and domain blacklisted
and spammed, and nothing really good will come out of it.
The flip side is a flawed idea as well, though.
Oh, I'm just going to do so much research
that I'm going to find the three perfect humans on this planet.
And if I talk to these three, everything will fall into place
because they're just the perfect.
And no, it's not going to happen either.
You just want to mess around and feel safety
through research and time wasted before you jump on a call
with just too few of people.
You want to find a good balance between both.
I typically advise people, like sales is both a quantity
and quality game, but in the early days,
I would advise you commit to sending 50 emails a day.
50 emails, you can research 25 to 50 emails a day
from people that are good quality.
That's not an insane amount, but you want to do that
and commit to that for at least a month or two
where you're doing it five days a week.
And the reason why you're doing that
is if you send 25 to 50 people a message,
if you do a good message to good people,
you'll get three, four, five, six of them to respond.
If your first email sucks and you get nobody to respond,
now you just wasted one day and 25 or 50 emails.
Now you can experiment and change the email.
If there's something about your email,
if you're too successful and everybody wants to talk to you,
awesome, stop.
Have your first 25, 30 conversations
and then decide if you want to hire somebody
to keep doing emails since it's so successful.
But you want to do consistent action
at a certain level of activity
because usually there is going to be a funnel
and the funnel is not going to be like
converting 90% of people you're reaching out to.
That's not going to happen.
It's going to be a much smaller percentage.
But you want to do it kind of daily
so you can adjust, you can improve, you can tweak.
You want to find a nice enough balance
where you do quality work,
but you don't just rely on quality
and think you could just email three people
and these three people will become each
a million dollar contract for you.
If you just spend a year researching those people,
you're never going to have to do any kind of quantity game.
It's going to be a balance of both, I think.
So I'm searching my inbox right now
for some sales emails that I sent
when I was running IndieHackers
as a for-profit business back in 2017.
I was a total sales amateur, still am.
So I had really no idea what I was doing.
But the goal was to join the line sponsors
for my podcast, for my mailing list
and for my website.
So here's one that I sent to a company
called SparkPost.
They're an email marketing company.
And I sent this to somebody
in their marketing department.
We'll just call her Jennifer.
I said, hi Jennifer.
I run the IndieHackers blog
slash newsletter slash podcast.
And I recently came across SparkPost
while looking into sending email notifications
for my community forum.
After seeing your four developers
buy developers features,
I would love to find a way to work together
to get SparkPost in front of the IndieHackers audience,
which consists almost entirely
of developers and entrepreneurs.
Let me know if you are interested.
And she responded, hi Cortland.
Thanks for reaching out.
I would love to chat with you more about this
to see how we could work together.
Do you have time for a call on Thursday or Friday?
And she sent me some times.
So instantly it worked out.
But I sent almost that same email
but slightly tailored to pertain
to the different companies,
to a bunch of other people.
And I'd say I only got success
maybe one out of four or five times.
So what are your thoughts, Steli, on that email?
What could I have done better?
What did I do well?
Well, first let me ask you,
what was the subject line?
What did you say in the subject line?
The subject was literally just SparkPost
plus IndieHackers.
So their company name plus my company name.
Plus your company name.
All right.
So that's not a bad subject line, right?
So first of all,
I always focus on the subject line first.
Because if people don't open your email
based on the subject line,
it doesn't really matter
what the email says, right?
It doesn't exist.
So what you did is kind of industry standard.
It's not bad.
But by now, I think it's overused.
So I would assume that the open rates
are much lower for your company name
plus my company name, right?
What I would suggest in this kind of case
where it's a sponsorship,
in subject lines,
what I found to work well
is something that raises curiosity
without lying.
So you make a little bit of a promise
that makes somebody curious
and then you're delivering on that promise
in the text.
So maybe it'd be something like,
you know, let's say the IndieHacker community
at that point is a thousand people, right?
Like a thousand people that are downloading
the podcast episodes, right?
That's early days or 500 people even.
Say I have 500 developers
that might be interested in your software.
500 developers, question mark.
Like that could be a good short.
Question mark is like 500 developers.
For me, if somebody,
if I have a subject line in my inbox
that says a thousand salespeople question mark,
I'm opening that.
I'm not sure what it is,
but I am curious right now, right?
I want to know a little bit more.
And then it can say,
hey, I have a community of these people
highly engaged, highly smart.
They're all building something
and they're all building email lists.
I'm looking for one partner
to recommend to my community
that is growing
that they should use
to build their business
and build their email list around.
I've heard some good things about you guys.
I'd love to jump on a call and explore
if this is going to be
the right fit for my community.
And if my community
is the right fit for you,
if you guys would want to be
in front of my community
or something along those lines, right?
I haven't thought this through too carefully.
But the subject line would be something
around maybe the number of audience
that you have, right?
With a question mark that means,
is this interesting to you?
Do you want to talk to these people?
And then we'll tell them a little bit.
The value proposition would be like,
here's the audience
that could be great buyers
and your product might be great for them.
At this point, we both don't know
if that's true,
but I want to find the answer to this.
Like, do we want to talk to explore
and get to a decision
if this could be the right audience
for you guys
and if your tool is the right tool
for my audience, right?
Okay, so the call to action
on your email is very specific.
It's, do you want to hop on a call?
You're driving them to get on the phone
with you as fast as possible.
Why is that important?
And is that something you need to do
in your first email
as opposed to several emails later?
Yeah, no, I would go for one call
to actually in the first email
in this specific case,
I would want to jump on a call.
And the reason why I would want to
jump on a call again
is because I want to learn more
than just yes or no at this stage, right?
When I, so if I start a podcast,
I want to do sponsorships.
I don't know anything about sponsorships.
I don't know how marketing departments
decide how much to sponsor.
Where's the budget coming from?
How do they do the math internally?
Like, I want to learn all these things.
I don't just want to hear yes or no.
So in a conversation,
I can ask so many more questions
and learn so many more things
that then helps me shape
the next email that I will send
or who I'm going to send
the next email to, right?
So a conversation can be
an amazing tool for me to learn
and to even maybe they even volunteer
answers or information
I would have never asked
and I go, oh, this is how you,
oh, interesting, okay?
Like, it's just,
it can be a very powerful tool
if you encounter it with curiosity.
So in the earliest,
I would always try to talk to people
in person if possible
on a call in this case.
And I would make the call to action
very simple.
I would not ask open-ended questions.
Respond and let me know your thoughts.
Now, that's very open-ended.
They have to respond
and write out thoughts.
What are their thoughts?
How do they want to articulate those?
That's a lot of questions
they need to figure out on their own,
which usually leads to postponing
this to later, which then means never.
So I like things
that are simple decisions, right?
I'd like to jump on a call.
I think 50 minutes is plenty.
How about Tuesday at 9 a.m.
or Thursday at 1 p.m.
Pacific time?
Just let me know
which of these two choices works.
The beauty of the alternative oftentimes
is that I can just look at my calendar
at these two spots and see if one is free
versus if you tell me,
tell me anytime next week works for you.
Now I have to look at my calendar
and decide where out of all these three spots
do I really want to have this conversation?
We can just introduce a little bit more friction.
So oftentimes they'll get less response rates
to reach out to a highly technical crowd,
giving them your calendar link
or something your scheduling link could be good.
But sometimes people don't like that.
So it depends on who you're reaching out to.
But one call to action at the end,
that's very specific
where people just have to make a decision.
And sometimes when people don't respond,
one little hack that I'll share here
and have a lot more hacks.
There's a book that we just released,
kind of the startup sales handbook
that has like these email templates,
these call scripts,
all that stuff for free
for everybody that's listening
and wants to have that.
Just send me an email steli at close.com.
Just say book
and I'll, indie hack a book or something
and I'll know who you are,
how you've gotten into my inbox
and what you want.
I'll send you a link
that has that book
with all that information.
But one beautiful little hack
that fits on this
is the 123 hack
where sometimes when I try
to reach somebody multiple times
and I don't get a response,
I will send them an email
and give them three choices
and just ask them to hit reply
and give me a number one, two, or three.
Right?
I did this recently,
not even in a sales context.
I had a person,
really important person position
that we wanted to hire for.
That person had worked with somebody
I admire,
a founder that's a YC founder
that has built a billion dollar business.
I wanted to ask that founder
jump on a reference call
with that founder and go,
hey, you work with this person
really closely.
Would you recommend me working with him?
I emailed the founder again
and again and again,
not getting any response.
Eventually, the founder responded to me
and said, sorry,
I don't have time right now.
And then I replied to that response.
I get it.
Just please give me one more reply
with one, two, or three.
One means you've worked
with this person.
She is amazing.
You would hire her for any position,
any company you love her.
Number two is you work with her.
The relation was good.
Depending on position,
depending on context,
you might want to work with her again.
And number three is you'd rather not say.
And he replied with three.
Got it.
Just send me a three.
And I was like,
that's all you needed to hear.
That's all I needed to hear.
Thank you so much.
Right?
And this one, two, three thing,
I've used this in a lot of sales situations,
a lot of people have now
kind of stolen this little idea from me.
It's such an effective tool
because you can write out a scenario
that they don't have to write out anymore,
which is a big point of friction.
And they can just go hit reply.
It's four.
Like four is it.
And a lot of times in sales,
it could be you're really interested
but need more time.
You're not interested at all.
Or you didn't have the time
to check this out right now.
It's really bad.
But you want to hear from me again
in a month, in a quarter, whatever.
Right?
And people really appreciate that.
I had many people have sent me replies
where people wrote out a whole thing
that was like,
oh my God, this was the greatest email
I've ever gotten.
I would love to get an email like that.
Yeah.
Because it's so like
when you're checking your email,
like you don't,
no one wants to be checking their email.
You always have more important stuff to do.
You don't like,
someone sends you something.
Like if they put a bunch of work on your plate,
you don't want to take like
20 minutes of your day to respond
because some random person decided
to put that work on your plate.
But if they did that,
like it's so much easier
just to be like, oh, thank you.
Like it's three.
You know, I would love to respond
but I don't have time.
Send me more information or something like that.
Okay, so back to talking about
sort of this cold outreach process.
One of the things that I found
talking to people
and through my own experiences
is that it's much more lucrative
to sell to bigger companies usually.
They have more money to spend.
They have better processes in place
for basically agreeing to deals
and spending their cash.
But as an indie hacker,
it's kind of intimidating
to sell to big companies.
What are your thoughts on that, Steli?
Is it sort of a misconception
that if you're just starting out,
you shouldn't sell to the enterprise?
And if you want to sell to bigger companies,
are there any special techniques
you should keep in mind?
Yeah, so again,
the answer truly is it depends.
I do think that you should,
as a founder,
you should not be afraid
of any potential customer, right?
You should really be open-minded,
open-hearted and always confident,
even especially in the early days,
which is kind of hard, right?
Because you're like,
I'm nobody, nobody knows me.
I'm not even a startup.
It's just me and my pajamas.
Like I have nothing really to show for.
How can I, where do I get confidence from?
I don't know.
A lot of times we have like,
you have to find something in yourself
that tells you I am valuable.
I am building something I believe
will create value.
And I, yes, there's weaknesses
that I have in the sense
that I'm an indie hacker,
but there's great strengths that I have
that I need to focus on as well.
I can move so much faster.
They're talking to the most knowledgeable person
in the world around my founder.
You're the founder, right?
And most likely,
once you've worked on something
for even just three, four, five months,
you know so much more
about this little niche thing
than the potential buyers.
They don't think about this all day long.
They don't build these solutions.
They're not experts in this field.
So you can really bring
something great to the table
and you need to know that
and you need to feel that.
And especially if you ever get a meeting,
a lot of times people are so nervous.
They're like, oh my God,
I'm going to this huge headquarters
and this this billion dollar business
and here I am,
there's nothing of a person.
You know, you go all deflated
into the meeting just like,
oh my God, I'm nobody.
And these people are so important.
No, no.
There's a reason they took the meeting
when somebody's at the table.
At the table can be on a phone call.
It could be replying to your emails.
They're at the table.
It means you have something
of interest to them.
You bring something of value to them, right?
You might be able to move faster.
You might be more knowledgeable,
more creative, more flexible.
You have value.
So you need to feel that
and you need to act
with that kind of confidence
to make big companies
and big buyers also confident
in doing business with you, right?
Nobody's going to buy from you
because you're so humble
and nobody's going to buy for you
because they feel a little bad for you
because you're lacking confidence.
They're like, let's buy
from this good person to like
boost up their confidence
and their self-esteem.
Like nobody wants to do that, right?
They want to feel like, wow,
this person knows what they're doing
and we want to be in business with them.
So that's important to know.
Now, I think it depends
on what you're selling
and what the buying cycle is.
If I would recommend you
to do that from day one
in year one or in year five, right?
It depends on like how complicated it is.
So here's the big thing.
I talked a little bit about like
you should be confident
and you should look at even big companies
on kind of a equal level.
Like we could be equal partners.
Nobody is worth more than me.
I bring different things
to the table than they do,
but they are slow
and they're outdated
and they're like lazy in some ways
and they're like they can't move fast
and they have all the,
like these are negatives that they have.
Like you should be aware of them as well.
So that's important.
The other thing that's important
to understand is it honestly
does make a difference.
If you sell to IBM
or to marry around the corner,
IBM doesn't exist
as a single unit entity.
It's not a, IBM is not like some kind
of a logo with hands and feet
and a credit card that makes decisions.
IBM is nothing else
than a collections of Marys
and Johns and Bobs.
And it's just a bunch of humans.
It really doesn't make
that much of a difference.
There's no kind of completely different
beast that you're dealing with.
No, it's humans.
Now, the difference is
if you go and sell to Mary,
you're dealing with one human being.
If you sell to IBM,
you might have to deal
with 40 human beings.
And the problem with human beings
is that in and of themselves,
one human being
is a complex organism
with opposing ideas
and thoughts and feelings
and desires and fears.
If you have to deal with 40 people,
it's much more complicated
because a lot of these people
want very different things.
A lot of these people want things
that are in complete opposite
in conflict with each other, right?
So you have to work so much harder.
And this is why enterprise sales
takes so much longer
because you have to navigate
through the sea of different humans.
The person has different needs.
Maybe I just care about my promotion
or I care about not losing my job.
My department has certain needs.
Our department needs
to hit certain quarterly numbers
and we need to be better
than this other department.
And then the business has certain needs.
And a lot of times,
indie hackers or startup founders,
they go and pitch large organizations
with this flawed idea
as if it's one entity.
Here's why my product
is going to save IBM 5%.
Well, I don't care.
I'm Bob.
Tell me how this is going to make
Bob's life better.
Tell me how this is going to make
Bob's career better.
Tell me how this is going to
not risk my life, my salary,
my mortgage, like address my needs first,
then address my department's needs,
right, my team's needs.
And then if it's also good
for the whole organization
around the world, cool, right?
Thumbs up. That's nice.
But that's the end of what I care about.
And I think we as founders
or indie hackers,
you're so associated with the product
of the company that we only think,
this is good for our company.
Is this good for my company?
For my startup?
Is this good for my product?
We are so associated with what we do
that we don't differentiate
between our career,
our needs, our department
and the business.
But in large organizations,
people make that differentiation
and you need to be aware of it.
And so you need to just sell
on more levels and to more people.
So it usually takes a lot more time.
Now there's certain departments
and certain purchases
that can go quick, right?
And they have budget
and it's easy for them
to give you a couple of thousand bucks.
It's like nothing to them, right?
It doesn't even show up on anybody's radar, right?
And so you get somebody
to give you a full payment
where if you wanted to go to individuals,
it would take you forever
to get that much money from people.
But I would always make it dependent
on like how long will it typically take
for me and to how many people
would I have to talk
to get this big company
to purchase something from me.
And if it's too long,
it just might be something
you cannot finance in the early days,
even if the return is really great.
But you should never
not approach a big company
because you think you're too small,
you think you're not important enough,
or because you think that
it's going to be fundamentally different
to sell to them
because it's an organization
of complexity and it's no,
it's just going to be a bunch of people, right?
And they are just like you
and any other bunch of people.
It's just going to be a few more people
you have to deal with.
So that might complicate things.
One of the things
that I found weird when selling
is that I never really knew
if I was doing it the right way.
Like I'd be on a call with somebody
and I'm like, you know,
did I bring the right materials to this call?
Am I asking the right questions?
How do I sound compared to somebody else
they've dealt with?
Because this is my first time really.
I think that really hurts your ability
to be confident and be persuasive.
Steli, how do you prep for a sales call?
What kind of materials
did you bring to the table?
What kind of research did you do?
And how do you make sure
that you can be persuasive and be confident?
So two things.
One, don't worry about it too much, right?
It's not about like sales
really doesn't have to be,
you don't have to be perfect.
If you misspeak once
or if you say something
and it's a bit weird,
don't get over self-critical.
Oh my God,
I'm not as charismatic as I could be.
I'm not like,
I don't sound like the perfect salesperson.
None of this really matters
at the end of the day.
I think that what you should bring
as preparation into the call
is you should have clarity on
what the purpose of the call is
and what the outcome should be at the end.
What is the conversion?
What is the decision we want to make?
What is the things we want to learn?
Like and you should structure
a beginning, a middle and an end.
You should have some level of clarity.
How do you start the call?
So you have some safety there.
What should happen
during the middle of the call typically?
And how do we end the call?
Because if you have clarity
on these three steps,
it's going to give you a guiding post
if you're progressing in the right way
or if the conversation
goes completely off track,
it's going to give you a reminder
of wait a second.
We're talking about the weather
for 30 minutes right now.
I just got 15 more minutes
and I didn't address any of these things
I want to accomplish.
I need to steer the conversation back to this.
So you should have clarity on these things
and never get to a point in the call
where you're like,
well, huh, what should we talk about now?
I don't really know.
Like you should design an experience
and design a call with a purpose in mind.
Then at the end of the call,
you had a goal.
You wanted to learn certain things.
You wanted to share certain things
and you wanted to get
to some kind of a decision at the end.
Just ask yourself,
did we learn these things?
Did we talk about these things?
And did we make a decision?
Yes or no, right?
Were they ready to get
to that next step in the process?
And if they're not ready
to get to the next step
or if you didn't learn these things,
then the next call,
there's room for improvement.
You need to improve what you do,
your focus, the way you communicate,
whatever else it is.
And you could always ask your prospects
and customers for feedback on that.
Listen, you don't need a sales guru
in your life to teach you
the dark arts of selling.
Your customers can teach you
everything you need to know.
Just use them not just as pocketbooks
and credit card holders,
but use them as people
that can teach you how to do
what you do better.
Ask somebody at the end
of a sales conversation,
especially if it doesn't go well.
There's nothing really to lose.
They tell you, no,
I don't want the next step.
I'm not interested.
There's nothing worse that can happen.
It already was a failure of a call.
Ask them, hey, real quick,
if I could get your honest advice
for two minutes.
You know, I'm a founder.
I'm an engineer.
I'm a developer and a designer
and background.
I'm not really,
I don't feel like I'm good
at these kind of presentation
meetings, conversations.
Could you give me advice?
Help me out here.
What could I have done better?
What was bad about this conversation?
What was bad about
my presentation or demo?
What would you advise me to improve?
You'd be surprised
if you make yourself vulnerable,
if you open up,
and if you ask for help,
people will trip over themselves
to run to your rescue
and to give you feedback.
So they go, oh, no, no, no,
you did well.
And then they're going to give you.
You know, honestly,
you shouldn't talk about this.
You know, when you sell to buyers like us,
you really need to have this prepared.
And then they'll tell you.
They will tell you.
So sales is kind of a learning experience,
not just for what kind of product
you should build,
but also for how you should even sell.
They'll help you become
a better salesperson if you just ask.
Think about selling
just like another product.
You start with an MVP,
and if you just learn enough
and open up,
you're going to iterate, iterate, iterate
until you have a sales process that works.
And that sales process buyer fit,
if you want to call it that, right?
It's nothing else than a product.
It needs experimentation.
Nobody knows these things
right out of the gate.
Now, obviously,
if you're an experienced developer,
you're going to be able to build an MVP
maybe fast.
So think about certain things already
and not make certain mistakes
that you've made in the past.
But even if you do something
for the very first time,
if you move fast,
and if you're willing to make mistakes,
and if you're willing to learn,
you'll iterate, iterate, iterate.
And eventually, you're going to land somewhere
where people find value
in what you're doing
where you find some success.
It's the same thing with sales calls,
sales presentations, sales negotiations.
Well, listen, Steli,
it's been awesome talking to you.
You've given us just a tidbit
of your vast wealth of sales knowledge.
I know you mentioned an ebook early on,
link for that.
Can you tell listeners
where they can go to find that
and also where they can just go
to find more about what you're up to
and information about sales in general?
Yeah, I mean, the simplest way to find it
is just send me an email,
steli at close.com.
Just put an indie book, startup book,
and I'll send you a link
with all the information.
And if you have any questions
after this episode,
hey, I'm an indie hacker
and this is my number one problem right now
or I really messed this negotiation up
or I tried to pitch
and really like this terrible thing happened
or I have this lack of clarity
or challenge around that.
Just let me know about these things.
If you just want the books,
just send me a book in the subject line.
I'll know who you are,
steli at close.com
and I'll send you the book.
But if you have any questions,
feedback, or if anything you heard
didn't make sense or you need more,
just let me know
and I'll send you all the resources
and try to help as much as I can.
All right. Thanks so much, Steli.
Thank you so much.
Listeners, Steli is a super generous guy.
So I really encourage you
to take him up on his word
and email him to get a copy of this ebook
or sales advice whenever you need it.
Also, if you want to give back
to the podcast,
I think that's probably
the best thing you can do.
Reach out to the guests that I've had on.
Hit them up on Twitter or over email.
Just tell them that you heard them
on the show that you learned a lot
and thank them for coming on.
I am also on Twitter.
I'm at CS Allen, C-S-A-L-L-E-N
and I really appreciate
hearing from you guys as well.
So if you learned something
useful from the podcast,
let me know.
Or if you have any suggestions at all
or guests I should bring on,
topics that I could cover,
ways that I could make the show better.
I am all ears.
It's hard to get feedback on a podcast.
So I love it when you guys reach out
to me on Twitter as always.
Thank you so much for listening
and I will see you next time.