Sales for Dummies: Technical Founder Edition

A three-step approach to technical founder sales.

Most technology founders begin with a vision of a better mousetrap. But soon they learn that they must build a company in addition to a product, and that the early days of building the company inevitably rely on the founder selling that product. Unfortunately, many founders have minimal sales experience and consider it far outside their skill set.

In my experience as an accidental salesman, the actual process of selling looked nothing like I initially imagined ‘sales’ to be. There were no golf courses, no slapping of backs, no ‘coffee-is-for-closers’ high-pressure tactics. I didn't learn to sell by learning how to act like a salesperson; I learned to sell by learning how to use the skills I had to solve a customer's specific problem and then discovering that doing so often led to a sale.

I’m an introverted geek at my core. It was true when I led early selling at MarkLogic, when I built Oracle’s eCommerce consulting team from scratch, when I was CEO of MongoDB—and it remains true today. I am, and have always been, energized by things like understanding a new algorithm, but petrified by a cocktail party full of strangers.

Like most founders who accidentally become sellers, I began with no formal sales training. Despite that and my introversion, I managed to close more and larger software deals than anyone - especially I - expected for each of three different companies. As I tell the technical founders I work with today, if I can do it, you can, too. Here’s how to get started:

My Simple, Three-Step Approach to Technical Founder Sales

1. Seek to understand the customer’s problem.

What do customers need done? What are the key parameters of their technical and business problems? What would be a home run vs. a mediocre solution? I encourage founders to try to understand the problem in both technical and business terms.

Say a customer is interested in an online storefront, as many of my customers at Oracle were back in the 1990s. In my role, I would seek to uncover what types of products they would sell, how many, for what price and to whom. I’d dig deeper, too, asking how often products were updated, where they came from, whether orders were simple or complex, how many they sold per day, whether there were busy sales periods during the year and how that might affect the load on the system.

Essentially, my job as the salesman was to understand everything about actually making a solution work: or, alternatively, to determine that we could not make a solution work. As best you can, try to get to the bottom of the customer’s problem. That’s step #1.

2. Map the customer’s problem to your technology.

Now that you understand the problem—with a particular focus on what challenges might impact a potential solution—your job is to figure out how to use your technology to solve it. When I was selling, I’d ask myself: How was the problem a natural fit for my solution? Where did the technology easily handle big parts of the problem? Where did the problem differ from what the technology naturally accommodated, and how could I, the seller, help to bridge that gap?

In my experience, the better I understood the customer’s problem, the more often I was able to get them to accept a different solution than what they had envisioned — if the solution worked.

3. Explain how your technology solves the customer’s problem.

Last, but not least, you’ll need to share your plan for solving the problem, what it requires and why it’s a good fit for the customer. Often, I would explain what I thought were the hardest parts of the solution and how we would mitigate risk in those areas. I made sure the customer understood the upside of the solution, but also the limitations they’d need to be willing to tolerate. When the customer was right there with me as I understood their problem and mapped the solution, there was less explaining required at the end. But sales processes often involve multiple parties, so we needed to explain this solution to additional stakeholders.

A board member at MarkLogic who had experience with sales once told me that customers buy from people they like, trust and respect. The "like" didn't need to be that the customer wanted to introduce me to their sister as her future husband. But they probably did need to feel like they would enjoy having a dinner meeting with me to discuss a business or technology problem. The trust and respect came from asking the right questions and being realistic about where the solution would shine and what they were willing to trade off.

Potential Pitfalls in Adopting My Approach

Savvy sellers, technical or not, are always open to cutting the cord—figuring out, often quickly, that the customer’s problem isn't the right fit for a particular technology. The faster you can identify a misfit and move on, the better for both parties. This can happen at any point in the process, but the sooner the better.

And while all of this sounds simple and common-sense, execution can be tricky. It's easy to ask a customer a lot of questions about their problem. The challenge is to ask the right questions. The more you know about how you might solve a customer’s problem, the more efficient you can be in this discovery process. Similarly, in mapping a potential solution, there are good and poor ways to implement a given software tool to solve a business problem. A poor mapping could force a customer to accept many painful tradeoffs without sufficient balancing benefits.

Ultimately in a competitive marketplace, what matters is that you do this better than your competitors, and if your competitors are much larger than you (usually the case in the early days!) you need to do it much, much better. You aren’t just mechanically checking boxes with each step of the process—you need to make sure you have gathered the information you need to design a solution your sponsor has confidence in, and one on which the customer will bet his or her career on.

But there’s a silver lining: For most technical founders reading this, you’re likely very confident already in your skills in solution mapping and discovery. In the days before there’s a product, all you can have is founder-market-fit. If you, as a founder, understand deeply the problem you are trying to solve and how current solutions fall short, you are well on the path to being able to design - and sell - a solution that will delight your customers.

In Conclusion

This advice is not a blueprint for getting to $50 million in ARR or building a scalable sales team. It’s a recipe for making the first few sales, before you have references, case studies or a big, professional sales team. What worked for me can work for a founder with exceptional depth in a specific domain and enough technical understanding to design a solution to a customer’s problem. The skills you will rely on aren’t those you will hire for when you need 10 or 50 sales reps, but they are what you need to blaze that early trail yourself.

You might have a sales rep or two in those early days. You should expect them to be able to set up meetings and drive a process, ensure there are next steps and so on. But they will need a lot of help. Winning that first handful of customers will rely on your ability to understand the customer's problem, map it to the product and explain the solution. If you embrace selling as a technical founder, it can make all the difference in whether you get initial customer traction or not.

The information contained here is based solely on the opinion of Max Schireson and nothing should be construed as investment advice. This material is provided for informational purposes, and it is not, and may not be relied on in any manner as, legal, tax or investment advice or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by Battery Ventures or any other Battery entity. The views expressed here are solely those of the author.

The information above may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or expectations. Predictions, opinions and other information discussed in this publication are subject to change continually and without notice of any kind and may no longer be true after the date indicated. Battery Ventures assumes no duty to and does not undertake to update forward-looking statements.