Enterprise-Wide Sales Activities

All Founders and employees are in sales (in some way)

[Original Post here]

It’s an older post, so even if you’ve read The Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie, Founders should re-read it, and re-read it again.

I won’t recap the post, but many Founding teams (and teams who hit PMF) approach GTM in silos, but it’s not how companies win anymore. GTM is a full-contact, team sport operated jointly across each domain to improve the likelihood and efficiency of pipeline and revenue. It also requires tight collaboration to create clarity for your Engineering, Product, and Design team(s) to understand what customers are saying and need to put in their credit card or sign a contract. A favorite section of mine in the post are the “Enterprise-Wide Sales Activities.” What I love about the concept is that this doesn’t change whether you’re a small team or large org, it just becomes more complex. During my time at Databricks and Segment, both companies were exceptional at this and still are.

We see many Founders try to play whack-a-mole solving a “sales problem,” “product problem,” or a “positioning problem,” but the harsh reality is, as Founder you’ve signed up to own every problem and every solution even when you start to hire people to own those domains. You must have a constant drumbeat on the business and each function must understand their role and how they collaborate to achieve the main goal: grow revenue. Great products can sometimes (Occasionally? Maybe?) sell themselves, but even in those rare cases, the companies with great products pride themselves on how strong their revenue growth is based on what they’ve learned from the market; its a different form of sales.

Building a company is incredibly hard and is even harder when teams operate in silos vs learning what the customer needs and how you become more efficient on delivering product to fulfill those needs while making it incredibly easy to buy from.

Regardless of what “leads” your GTM (Product-led, Sales-led, etc.), these activities are a checklist and framework on how revenue is created efficiently and repeatedly. Teams of “zero salespeople” are still focused on leads/users, support, distribution, and phases of the conversion funnel. This applies to all companies — we’re all in sales in some way.

Read The Sales Learning Curve here.