Startup Sales Playbook from “Zero to One”

When I started my first enterprise SaaS company, I had no experience in sales and knew a grand total of two people who had sales jobs. After being focused on product for way too long, it became apparent that this whole notion of “build it and they will come” wasn’t going to cut it. We were going to need to get out in front of our customers and sell.

At the time, I tried to solve my problem by reading every book I could about sales, talking to people who had done enterprise sales their entire career and asking for advice.

Fast-forward almost a decade, I’ve been a founder for two early stage companies and been on the ‘revenue side’ of startups going from pre-seed to Series D. I’ve done every function from SDR to Account Executive to Business Development to RevOps.

Below are my slides on how to lay the foundation to go from Zero to One with your sales motion.

(Slides have been updated from a presentation for the 2019 Thiel Fellowship retreat)