Video and slides from Brendan McAdams briefing at Lean Culture on Five Sales Fundamentals for Startup Founders Getting Early Customers.
Brendan McAdams on 5 Sales Fundamentals for Startup Founders
The ability to establish early customer engagement, adoption and revenue is critical to the success and sanity of anyone looking to start a new business endeavor. And it’s far too easy to focus on the wrong details and objectives, causing delays, setbacks and disappointment. In this session, Brendan will focus on five core components that will increase a startup founder’s ability to improve customer engagement, eliminate wasted time and effort, and make the sales process more coherent…and more fun.
In this short video snippet, Brendan explains “Why Customers Don’t Buy?”. He also provides an example of someone who built an app for barbers, but the barbers didn’t actually need or want the solution, resulting in a waste of time and money.
Watch the full video on sales fundamentals below. Slides are available.
Session attendees also received additional sales resources and early access to his next book, Sales Launch: A Sales Framework for Startup Founders
About Brendan McAdams
Brendan McAdams is the founder of Kiinetics, a sales coaching/consulting agency working with early-stage startups and founders looking to excel at sales execution and customer success. His sales background includes extensive experience in both enterprise B2B and early-stage startup sales, with over $200M in direct revenue generated over his career.
Brendan is also the author of Sales Craft : Proven Tips, Practices and Ideas to Advance Your Sales Success, which emphasizes the importance of simple sales fundamentals as the key to sales effectiveness. He is past Program Director for the 2021 AccelerateBaltimore program, 2022-23 ETC Baltimore Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and frequent mentor for TechStars and TEDCO.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmcadams/
- https://twitter.com/brendanmcadams
- https://kiinetics.com
SKMurphy Take
A couple of key pieces of advice resonated:
- Start with conversations with prospects, not building a product. Make sure you understand how the customer views their problem or need. Do you understand their pain?
- At least one founder must learn early stage sales.
- Start with low fidelity prototypes, they encourage prospects to provide feedback. Highly polished high fidelity examples communicate that you feel you are done and less open to feedback. As Roger Cauvin noted, “It also orients the conversation to what matters instead of finer aesthetic details.”
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