January 21, 2025
Testing 1.21
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Here are the key aspects to keep in mind when you are applying for an entry level sales role. This advice is for someone young in their career (a couple years out of college) and actively interviewing for an entry level sales role.
Sales roles have the same fundamentals, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Sales leadership is looking for a bunch of core principles (especially when younger in career/lacking a bunch of experience).
Here is advice and what people are looking for/what to highlight when you’re interviewing for sales positions.
Everything else can be taught.
For the interview itself, come prepared with the following stories.
Building a business is constantly about making small changes.
You have to focus on the big stuff, and then let the little stuff fall into place
This is especially true at startups, and especially true with software.
Take Loom as an Example:
They started off as a user testing marketplace.
Initially, they were selling the feedback from experts. But theirs users didn't care about 'expert' feedback.
They cared about REAL feedback from REAL users that were using their product!
Now, Loom would not have been able to make this pivot if:
Quick pivot, and BOOM, Product Market Fit.
Naval nailed this is a tweet from a few years ago i haven't forgotten since.
The faster you get to 10,000 iterations, the faster you have an outlier product.
The faster you get to 10,000 iterations, the better.
Necessities for productive iteration:
Action Items:
Momentum is everything - the hardest thing is to get started from nothing.
That’s crawling (this is where we are with Hirexe)
But crawling isn't the goal - you want to go fast!
Getting to the crawl level (shipping the prototype) was important for us.
Here are our primary focus areas:
UX is going to be king for this product. We are not reinventing the wheel. We know what the marketing is looking for. Quality candidates (if hiring) or a great job (if looking for full-time work). There are other companies/tools out there that 'help' get you there right now; they do a bad job at it.
So, the experience you get as a hiring manager/candidate is everything.
We are aiming to make it as simple/valuable as possible.
Nothing is worse than signing up for a new product or service and spending 20+ minutes filling out a profile immediately.
So we are doing everything in our power to automate this, perform 80% of the work for you, and let you complete the 20% to fine-tune.
Our search functionality is badass right out of the gate!
We have architected and will continue to ensure searchability, allowing you to find/highlight exactly what type of roles you're looking for.
And that's where things stand currently!
Remember, if you try to run right out of the gate, you'll fall and hurt yourself, or at the very least, pull a muscle!
As we continue to walk/run/fly:
So you start slow, and as you get more comfortable, increase speed/difficulty.
When building software:
Have the long-term vision in mind, and ALWAYS build towards that (automatically match up the best candidates with the best roles for them)
Everyone wins.
'Helping' is doing the things that need to be done without being told to do so.
There are layers here:
1 - being able to figure out what actually needs to be done
2 - being able to make an impact on whatever that thing is
A simple ‘how to help scenario’ can apply to preparing the Thanksgiving meal in the kitchen at home.
But it can also apply to your manager. Or the CEO. Or the VC. (an ongoing joke in the startup community)
Helping is seeing the future. And then executing. An example:
A more complicated business example:
Look at the lead flow:
Look at the product:
Outlier or standard
Collateral
Price
Support
And, of course, talk to your AEs (and the rest of the team) / get their input.
But often, the most important thing you can do for your team is impact all of the other inputs I highlighted before!
Going into a conversation with the above breakdown level is much more helpful.
Put yourself in a position to understand and address the root cause, then implement change!
Action item:
Instead of asking someone, 'How can I help':
Put yourself in the shoes of the person you are asking
Happy Thanksgiving.
Experience is Everything.
This is a topic I write/talk/preach about regularly - How you make someone feel will never be automated.
The 'Zorus Experience' was a huge reason we were successful at my last company.
The Zorus Experience was our mantra on everything customer-related.
Sometimes, technology doesn't work as you want it, especially when you're a new company. Sometimes, you can’t ship updates as quickly as you'd like. Building is tough; there are always delays. That stuff was outside of our control.
What's inside our control is the experience we can give people when they interact with us personally.
And that, when done right, makes all the difference.
Our primary areas of focus were always:
And it worked really well for us. People gave us many second and third chances.
More here: Why You Should Embrace Crisis.
That’s software, though! Especially early on. But that isn't the goal.
Our goal is to build an 11-star experience.
11-star experience is all-encompassing. It ranges from fantastic UI/UX, to customer service, to quality product to branding, everything.
Brian Chesky put this together, and it’s what Airbnb models themselves after:
You will win if you can curate this experience for your users.
Work in that direction.
Robert Cialdini’s book, INFLUENCE, is one of the most important you can read in your life. Here is a breakdown of the book's most important highlights + personal notes.
RECIPROCATION
"We should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us"
The Free Sample
Strong Cultural pressure to reciprocate a gift, even an unwanted one, **but there is no such pressure to purchase an unwanted commercial product**
Unfair exchanges
Concessions
Perceptual Contract Principle
Commitment and Consistency
Human beings have a (often subconscious) nearly obsessive desire to be consistent with what we have already done.
Horse Betters at a race track
Beach Blanket story
Consistent Decision making
Automatic Consistency actually often times hides the subconscious from imperfect realities
COMMITMENT IS THE KEY
If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill considered consistency with that earlier commitment.
Cold Calling Technique: "How are you doing today" (pg 51)
Start Small and Build
The Magic Act
Writing things down
The Inner Choice
Approach with children:
This is the only way to get people to buy into decision making long term - they need to BELIEVE themselves
Lowball method:
SOCIAL PROOF
We determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct
This one is so engrained in the subconscious its silly:
and
The Social Proof Phenomenon:
The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct!
When we are unsure of ourselves, the situation is unclear, or uncertainty reigns
Remove Ambiguity when dealing with groups
Social Proof also strongest when we view others as similar to ourselves
LIKING
We most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like
This is why warm intros play so hugely in sales:
Halo Effects
Similarity
Compliments
Contact and Cooperation
Association
AUTHORITY - Follow An Expert
Most of us put an alarming high level of faith into the 'expert' point of view
We are literally trained from the second we're born that obdience to the proper authority is RIGHT and the improper authority is WRONG
Connotation, not Content
Titles
Clothing
Interestingly, w/ Trump in the White House and all of the back and forth w/ COVID-19, a lot of authority rhetoric has since been brought to light!
SCARCITY - The Rule of the Few
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost"
The scarcity principle simply states that opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited.
Limited Number tactic
This works with any sort of item:
Going from having an abundance to scarcity will produce the most dramatic effects from the scarcity complex. Its not even close.
Highlights our Competitive Nature as well
Stumbled on the napkin math investing breakdown for SaaS companies in 2023. (Shoutout to Luke Sophinos @ Linear)
Check it out:
This does a great job of explaining what the industry expectations from Pre-Seed through Series B.
Some additional context (from my experience personally)
In order to secure funding:
1 - Team matters
2 - Momentum
**For early investment purposes (Seed/Pre-Seed). After a SEED investment is locked in:
Emphasis on capital efficiency is at an all-time high. (understandably so, given macro environment)
= KEEP BURN LOW
Metrics and financial models only get you so far in early-stage investing with tech companies. You don’t have a ton of real data. Many of the projections are a bit of a shot in the dark.
However, what you can directly control is your burn rate. Your burn rate is simply the amount of $$ you spend on a monthly basis.
The lower your burn rate, the longer the runway you have. (aka - the less money you spend, the more time you have till your bank account goes to $0 :)
Only spend money on technical folks until true PMF is really achieved. This is why you stick with founder-led sales for as long as possible/you’re ready to really start to scale.
This is where Naval’s famous quote comes from:
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build.
If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
In conclusion:
Early-stage companies need small teams with dynamic founders who can do the roles of multiple people simultaneously. This allows them to keep their expenses low while they are building the initial version of their product and getting the traction necessary to justify institutional investment.
They currently have:
They were founded 8 years ago, in 2015.
Their first round of funding was 500K at a 6.5M valuation cap and a 10% discount.
That means a 25K investment would have bought you .3846% of the company... Which technically would be worth exactly $3,750,750 today.
Additionally, if you got in early, you would have gotten first right of refusal for subsequent fundraising rounds at that above discount %. So, if you kept putting in $$, you could easily have a much higher return %. (Hint: because loom was killing it, you would have kept maxing out the money you could put in... Your risk goes down with/ every fundraising round.)
Here is an example from Greg Isenberg, who actually passed on the round!
Today, he's wishing he was a part of it!
A software wedge product literally gets your foot in the door.
All businesses are competing for your time and attention.
A wedge puts you on people’s radar.
The only reason people don’t buy from you right away boils down to 3 reasons
Your wedge starts the introduction process. AND you can use it as a lead capture device!
It's much easier to approach someone with a value add wedge vs:
“Hey I wanna sell you this product, do you have 20 minutes to jump on a demo”
^It’s astonishiong how many ‘me too’ software companies approach top of funnel with the latter offer. Makes it tough on the sales/marketing folks!
This is exactly what I’m doing with Hirexe and mspchanneljobs.com.
mspchanneljobs.com isn't the final destination, it's a very early gen 1 of the product. It’s the wedge. But we’re aggregating all relevant jobs for the IT Channel in 1 place for folks who are looking. Adding immediate value to all companies trying to hire and all candidates looking for work!
And it’s completely free!
The long-term vision is to completely change the current hiring experience.
But it's gonna take us a while to get there.
Our wedge allows us to go to market today, start adding immediate value, testing price points and different types of offers, all while capturing leads and making people familiar with what we're working on.
