Selling gets a bad rap, and for a good reason.
Many of us have been on the receiving end of a sales pitch that felt pushy or manipulative.
Maybe the seller wasn't really listening to your needs. Maybe you could feel them pushing too hard to influence your point of view. Maybe it’s impossible to explain but the whole situation just gave you the ick.
These crappy encounters are ubiquitous, but they aren’t representative of all sales. They represent bad sales.
Good sales is a conversation.
It’s curious and open-hearted.
It gently pulls out insights, and pushes nothing.
It’s an invitation without expectation.
If you told me five years ago that I would be stanning sales methodologies on the internet, I would have never, ever believed you.
You see, when I was a seed-stage founder, I had a lot of feelings about sales...
Most were negative.
I couldn’t shake feeling forward, awkward, or sleazy. I also felt helpless and confused, with a healthy sprinkle of desperation on top.
When I started my coaching and consulting firm The Extra Group last year, I knew I wanted to support non-traditional early-stage startup founders (impact-driven, underrepresented, bootstrapped, etc).
The more I worked with founders, the more I realized how critical sales is to survival and success (this isn’t particularly profound, given non-traditional founders have a harder path to raising funds). I now believe that when a founder embraces selling, that’s when product-market fit and profitability really become possible.
Over the last year, I’ve provided sales coaching and training to dozens of incredible founders building startups across health care, climate, education, workforce, and beyond. It’s been the most fulfilling work of my career to see them collect hard-earned revenue wins like a 50x increase of repeatable sales, or a 400% increase in sales calls per week.
These founders are showing up for their mission, their customers, and themselves. This work is exhausting and vulnerable. I’ll do everything I can to make it a smidge easier.
In this newsletter, I’ll share what I see working and not working when it comes to early sales.
So much sales advice for early startups is reverse-engineered from a later-stage paradigm, or put forward by people who haven’t personally done early sales. Sometimes, this kind of advice can hurt a startup more than it helps.
So, I’ll share tactical approaches to selling (from cold outbounding all the way to closing) that are specifically designed for founder-led sales, and that I’ve seen work firsthand.
I’ll also write about the emotional work of sales, and how founders can build a high-yield sales practice without wanting to fling their laptop into the sea.
You’ll receive this newsletter every other week, except for a quick welcome sequence which will go out every four days. My welcome sequence will walk you through my three pillars of founder-led sales:
- Selling is the fastest way to reach product-market fit, and you’re ready to start now
- A sales-positive mindset makes recurring revenue happen
- Show up for your sales process, every day
Thanks for reading, and see you in a few days.
This is the first issue of Extra Extra, a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early sales. I’m Caroline Fay, and I’m an exited social impact founder that’s spent my career launching and selling new products. I help non-traditional tech founders build sustainable, recurring revenue.
Good Work Music: I’m a big music guy (fun fact, I spent my 20s writing for a music blog with about baker’s dozen’s worth of readers). I love to find good music for deep work (is this its own form of procrastination, though?!). Here’s what I listened to while writing this newsletter. |
grow revenue ON YOUR TERMS
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Caroline Fay
