§ How to Make Your First Sales Before Launching

Answering the question, how do you do early sales when you are pre-product?

• Find the right buyer
  • You probably don’t know the right one yet
  • Talk to a lot of people
  • founder-led sales
• Warm intros are better than cold outreach
  • Cold Calling Techniques Literary Notes
  • you should be able to get from seed to series A on your network alone
• Operationalize intros
  • Speed is undervalued
  • make it easy to say yes to making an introduction
• Have the pricing conversation early
  • willingness to pay should be at the core of product design
  • Monetizing Innovation
  • founder led sales helps identify product problems
  • product design partner or pilots
• Setting up a sales process
  • Ride-alongs to help synthesize feedback or use Gong
• Closing the sale
• Turning into reference customers

Links to this note

• How to Set up an Inbound Sales Motion

  It should be repeatable, measurable, and profitable. Every product and business is different. This will focus on a B2B SaaS product.