Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (co-founder of JJELLYFISH)
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I've always wanted to create a very tactical episode on how to do sales. Especially with a focus on founderlet sales. A lot of early stage founders get tripped up as they're taking late stage sales advice. The founder is the product. You have studied, you have experienced something that most of the market hasn't even had a chance to maybe see or visualize yet. A billion sass tools emailing me constantly about their product. How do you get someone to even want to talk to you and be open to learning about what you're doing? So if you can focus the messaging in a way that speaks to something that is a bit of shock value or is counterintuitive, you'll get them to continue reading. When a problem is truly being felt by the market, people will get on call. People will respond. The next step I imagine is you're on the phone with them trying to convince them to actually care. What do you do there? How do you get them to engage further? You need to be vulnerable. I would be very open and honest with where you are. Hey, I'm an early stage startup. We have a lot to learn. Can we kind of gain your insight into like how this problem is manifesting on your side? Founder led sales is not about revenue on day one. It is about learning as fast as humanly possible to get to that pulse so that you can earn the right to sell. Today, my guest is Jen Abel. Jen is the co-founder of Jellyfish, where her and her team help early stage founders learn how to sell, do early customer discovery, and set up a repeatable sales motion. Prior to Jellyfish, Jen was an enterprise sales director at the Muse and a general assembly, and she's obsessed with helping founders in the zero to one stage of their journey. In our conversation, we get extremely tactical and in the weeds on how to actually do sales as a founder. We talk through each step of the sales process, and Jen shares what you should be doing and saying at every step. We go through how to find your first set of leads, how to reach out to them, what to say in your message, how to structure your first sales call, how to get through procurement,
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