Hi everyone,
Are there any good books to learn sales for someone who is pursuing a one-person online business or a SaaS business with a small team (less than 10), pre product market fit stage?
April Dunford has two great books. Positioning comes first, then sales.<p>As a small outfit, you probably don't want to actually sell. The approach that worked for me was to focus on inbound marketing and let customers self-select and come to you. Have a great pitch, ideally right there on your web site. Then get them onto a trial, treat them as customer from day one and get them into your customer success programme.<p>In essence: build a great product, talk about it, find the right customers and couple with fanatical customer success.<p>Also, choose a problem for which there is a good audience: <a href="https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/" rel="nofollow">https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/</a>
foundingsales.com is a good resource that contains a lot of the wisdom and advice found in other sales books.<p>Generally the literature you're looking for depends on what account sizes you have, as others have mentioned. Advice for selling single $10/month accounts is much different from advice for selling 6-figure enterprise deals.
ABC, always be closing. But the key is to give the potential customer a break if it doesn't look like a good fit. You have to quickly determine if you can help them and if they can help you. Grinding with a bad target is a waste of time. You have to zero in on valid possibilities. Part of the initial pitch is to see if or with whom they can get a sale approved. Elevator pitch, you have to make a initial pitch quicky.
You need to know why people buy from you and build your sales and marketing pipeline from there. Sales isn't something you just bolt on afterwards, it fundamentally relies on your value proposition. So from that perspective, 4 steps to the epiphany if you're pre PMF.
The sales techniques depends on the channel, if its like $10/month, you will use different channel compared to a products sold at at $100k.<p>Most indie hackers rely on social media and SEO for traction. It's more of marketing and less of sales.
I recommend the book of hard knocks.<p>Selling is hard. Selling is painful because rejection is painful and rejection is most of selling. Everything is easier than selling.<p>Looking for shortcuts, tips, and tricks is easier than selling. It feels like work, but it is not. It is just pretending and avoiding pain.<p>In business, selling is all that matters. Technical competence without sales equals a failing business. Selling without technical competence is a road to riches.<p>You can hire technical talent better than you. Build the cost into your price and mark it up for overhead and profit.<p>You can’t hire sales who care as much as you.<p>Just grinding away at sales is the simplest thing that might work. The only thing better is luck.<p>Good luck.
Not specifically software-related, but “go it alone” and “resistance is futile” by geoff burch are great, and accessible introductions to the important parts of running a business in the first book, and more specifically sales in the second