All I know about sales comes from my work in early stage startups.

That’s over 5 years spent thinking about how to set and achieve sales targets in an environment where you’ve got to do most things yourself.

The sales-person in such places is also the marketing, business development and customer success ‘person’. They’re a 1-man band. Tremendous upside but also tremendous risk and pressure.

I’ve tried it twice with middling success- which has been frustrating.

At this stage- I’ve spent 5 years doing this and haven’t really cracked it.

I wrote recently about my latest startup role ending and some key learnings. Despite repeated failures however, one thing that I haven’t lost is faith in the process.

As I (potentially) finalise my next gig in a few days, here’s my gameplan. You can steal this and make use of it, regardless of what you’re selling.

#1 Know Your Customer At Least As Well As Your Best Friend Knows You

Think of it this way:

Can you read your best friend’s moods, know what they care about, what irks them? Can you describe them accurately to someone who’s never met them and they immediately know what kind of person your bestie is?

If not- please be a better friend.

And if yes- great. Now just get to know your customer, like you know your friend.

In sales, the term used frequently is ‘Ideal Customer Profile’ or ICP.

It simply means- be able to define who your customer is basis…really two factors:

1. People who care the most about the problem(s) you solve

2. People who are most likely to buy from you

Knowing your ICP is the most difficult when you’re starting out. It might take you a year of consistent iterations, if not more to figure it out.

That’s why early stage sales is HARD. There is no repeatable process without knowing your ICP. That’s where consistent focus has to go from Day 1.

#2 Find The Words To Tell Your Customer How Well You Understand Them

Day 1- after starting off with an educated guess of your ICP, you start with another guess - how do you get them to buy from you?

To break it down even further- how do you get them to take one meeting with you?

That’s why I like to build a table, that I learned from the book called GAP selling by Keenan.

It’s the very first thing I do in any sales job. Here’s how it looks for a HRTech startup called Deel that I was keen to apply for recently:

This forms the framework for everything else.

This table tells me what my customers care about, their priorities as well as their manager’s and executives’ priorities. It also tells me how to talk about my product/solution from the POV of solving their problems- which is where you want to be coming from.

#3 Build A List of Potential Customers

I really like Chris Ritson’s post talking about how he builds a list of accounts.

He’s really detailed about defining the ICP- basis 3 factors:

1. Knowing the type of organisations he sells to

2. Knowing the buyer personas he sells to within those companies

3. Knowing WHEN are they likely to buy

Pts 1 and 2 are relatively easy. Knowing 3 is a big unlock- but also hard.

If you’d like a case study to see this in action- here’s one I created for a HRTech startup called Deel that one day I’d love to work for.

This week’s action:

For whatever it is that you’re selling, create an ICP matrix like the one I outlined above. Send it in to me if you’d like me to share feedback!