Going From 0–1: (Founder-led) Sales ALWAYS Comes Before Marketing
Hard truth: There is no way to scale yourself from 0–1. Whether it’s generating your initial 1–10 early adopters OR securing the first $1MM in revenue, hitting these milestones requires manual efforts and the willingness to learn. Extensive learning involves Customer Discovery and Founder-led selling.
You need to earn the right to sell and market. This requires slowing down to go fast. Founders must go deep and unlock specifics around their initial target market.
In the early stages of your organization, specificity is one of the few ways to inspire, build trust, and convince the market. This is especially true when you’re operating with limited/no brand equity.
To achieve this level of specificity and find your niche, you must put sales before marketing.
Common Misconception: Marketing BEFORE Sales
The traditional line of thinking says that marketing HAS to come before sales. Marketing is what generates leads. Without marketing, there is no sales pipeline. Marketing, by definition, is broad and shallow. Sales, on the other hand, is narrow and deep. You start broad, cast a wide net, and focus your time on the most promising leads. Right?
Wrong.
Early-stage founders often ask me where they should first invest their time and resources, sales or marketing? No matter if you’re selling a $1,000/year bottoms-up solution (i.e., leveraging Product-led growth) or a top-down, $100,000/year business, my answer is continually the same — go direct via Founder-led sales. Here’s why.
Your Business Isn’t Ready to be Marketed
Before you can run a marketing campaign that will deliver results, you need to have a validated understanding of who the end buyer and user is, what inspires them, the frequency and intensity of their pain points, and the implications of not solving them. In other words, you should be very confident in both what inspires the market and how to best reach them. Prior to this, most marketing efforts are a colossal waste of time and resources.
The reality is when you’re going from 0–1, your business still requires zig-zagging. You shouldn’t be marketing until you’ve achieved proof the market cares about what you’re solving for. That proof comes in the form of a paying customer(s).
Sales is not marketing, and marketing is not sales. Sales provide you with 1:1 real, raw feedback. Marketing, on the other hand, is 1:many. A 1:many approach makes it far easier for customers to ignore. At this stage, you can’t afford to be ignored!
Going direct into the inbox of select prospective buyers 1:1 is much more straightforward and proactive than sitting and waiting to see who reacts to a marketing initiative. It’s much harder for customers to ignore a personalized, 1:1 email from a Founder. If you, the Founder, can’t convince a highly-targeted prospect to join a call via personalized note, then your organization is not ready for any level of marketing effort.
The feedback you receive from sales conversations may be humbling, but it will allow you to move quickly towards the market pulse. Don’t fear their feedback, and DO NOT delegate this task to anyone on your team who doesn’t have Founder in their title.
You need concrete evidence of your target market, brand, and value proposition before you can adequately scale any marketing efforts. You should not invest in any commercial headcount until you have proven the business is viable, and you have acquired your first few logos.
Reminder: Without sales/paying customers, your entire business model is an assumption.
Sales is More Affordable Than Marketing
In early-stage sales, funding is likely tight. Fortunately, Founders prioritizing sales promotes efficiency, is far more direct, and is a cheaper option than marketing and advertising.
Making any dent in marketing requires a significant budget. Grabbing attention with zero brand equity requires an even more substantial investment. And if your sales process is not defined, your marketing spend is completely wasted.
Additionally, sales is more affordable than you think. Adding bodies does not accelerate sales, nor does hiring sales reps with legacy domain experience. Instead, a Founder’s tight management of process, market, and feedback drives sales acceleration.
History Proves it Works
As Jessica Livingston outlines in her piece, “Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing,” numerous B2C and B2B companies have succeeded by focusing on being narrow and deep from Day 1.
She mentions Apple, which founder Steve Wozniak inadvertently started by making a computer to impress his friends. When Mark Zuckerburg first created Facebook, it was exclusively for students of Harvard University. The earliest adopters of Slack were software developers leveraging Github and collaborating with their teams on code.
From Livingston’s piece:
“Our advice at Y Combinator is always to make a really good product and go out and get users manually. The two work hand-in-hand: you need to talk individually to early adopters to make a really good product. So focusing on the narrow and deep end of the sales/marketing continuum is not just the most effective way to get users. Your startup will die if you don’t.”
So go ahead and jump into the deep end — doing so could be the difference between your startup’s growth and failure.
Founder-led Sales vs. Marketing — What Do You Think?
So, what do you think is more critical for B2B startups, founder-led sales, or marketing? The results were close when polling the startup community …
