Last week Bowery Capital interviewed their good friend Pete Kazanjy of TalentBin to discuss the concept of “Founder Led Selling.” Pete was formerly the Founder of TalentBin, a category-defining talent search engine and recruiting CRM that sold to Monster in 2014. Since then he has been heavily involved in the software sales ecosystem coaching the next generation of founders. In our podcast, Pete discusses the high level concept of founder led selling and how to really understand the gap between having your MVP ready to go and hiring a salesperson to then sell it. This gap is obviously filled by founder led selling but Pete dives in on a specific structure that he created that any founder can use to their advantage. There is a gap between the product creation hypothesis phase, and the initial commercialization which should be bridged by “Founder Led Selling”. This is my take on the process:
Customer Development
Product development should be thought of as a spectrum, where you are starting out and trying to find a problem to address. You will need someone in tuned with the product-problem space, how the messaging can be framed with the customer, continue to refine the message, and prove the fact someone will pay money in exchange for the product. Often entrepreneurs ‘bake’ products that they think will solve a problem and then immediately hand the product over to VP of Sales who will try to sell to a market that will not be receptive. The notion of founder led selling is that the founder will bridge a gap, so you get to a point where you have a ‘bench-scaled’ repeatable sales process that can be handed to a sales professional to scale out.
Right Commercial Argument and Sales Messaging
The right commercial argument will articulate the pain of the customers, show them a solution, and explain the commercial value of using the product. The founder should continue to run iterations on this process after the first 10, 20, 30 customers, only then can you find someone who does this at the same level of efficacy you can. Customer development proposes to you the features you should build, the solution you should build, and your narrative will make the argument on behalf of the product to the market. In order to have recipients for this product they will need to have this pain that you are trying to solve.
Your Ideal Customer Profile
You really need to consider if your prospect has the pain point that you will solve and have them in such high intensity and quantity that they will care about your solution consistently and will be willing to pay you for this solution. You will need to see this pattern in your prospects and when you do, develop your ideal customer profile (ICP). You need to have discipline on the requirements to use your product. Startups from portfolio networks (accelerators) have problems with this because they are insulated from the feedback loop, which forestalls the moment where they will have a real talk with their customers. In TalentBin’s case their prospects need to have at least 5 open software engineering hires, as well as have in house recruiters to use their products. You need to cling to your ICP otherwise your users will not have success with the product which will hurt the “word of mouth” process, as the product will not meet their needs.
Prospect and Build List
After you have created your ICP, you will begin prospecting and building your list of future users. This list can come from customer development interviews; from which you will develop features for the diversity of problems of your prospects. Pete sees this process as ‘baton passing’, each prior step will inform the next step. If you did great customer development you will have a great prospect list from which you can engage prospects with the solutions that will fit their pains. If you did not do great customer development, then you need to identify, using sites such as Datanyze or Crunchbase, those who have pains and care about your solution to build your list.
Presentations That Leads to a Close
When presenting a demo, the goal at the beginning is to validate to pain. You can have a discovery call ahead of time to make sure you are not wasting time for both the prospect and yourself, they either have the problem or not. A demo is a manifestation of your commercial argument. You need to make sure that each feature exists because it solves a pain point discussed with your prospect. Tease out the problem to get prospect to explain how they deal with it. By forming a full commercial argument and making sure you and your prospects are lined up, you are setting yourself up for success. The best sales process is almost like a ‘therapy section’.
For more information check out the podcast with Pete.
