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#35: The Lifetime Value of Learning Founder Led Sales

Read time - 4 min

Today I’m going to discuss the lifetime value (LTV) of learning founder led sales, and why it will pay huge dividends for your entire career.

Once you learn a framework that is simple and cuts away all the fat, you will never unlearn it. It will get better and better with repetition. It’s like riding a bike. Regardless of how long you haven’t ridden, you can always get on a bike and pedal away.

A lot of the founders I speak with are technical who have little to zero experience in building out sales processes. It’s completely a new language they’re trying to learn. Most struggle for a long period of time before coming to the realization that they don’t know what they don’t know, and by investing in learning the superpower of founder led sales it can change the whole trajectory of how they build, present and close business.

Ideas Are Easy. Implementation Is Hard.

~Guy Kawasaki

Let’s touch on five skills you will acquire for a lifetime through founder led sales that will pay huge dividends over the course of your career.

1. It will teach you how and why people make decisions.
   As discussed many times in these newsletters, people buy for 3 reasons. (1) They believe you’re competent. (2) They believe you’re an authority. And (3) they believe you can deliver on expectations. If you try and sell, it will be hard to close consistently. Instead you have to solve. Solve problems. But first you need to understand where the problem(s) exist. You do this through a discovery process to understand where their source of pain is coming from, and what’s preventing them from getting to their desired situation. When this is established you can empower them through your product to achieve their ideal situation. This is how people make decisions. They have the current way they’re managing, and the ideal way they want to be managing. The in between is where you show them a path to their end goal. If you do this, you will learn why and how and people make decisions.
   
   
   

2. It teaches you how to be an effective listener and communicator.

   Strong communication is about being a good listener. Your goal is to listen to what the prospect is conveying, and to ask good follow up questions to understand their problems deeper. This is very hard to do if you’re not listening to understand. When you ask great follow up questions, subconsciously this conveys to the prospect that you care; and when prospects believe you care they are a lot more inclined to do business with you. This all stems from being an effective listener and communicator.
   

   
   

3. It teaches you how to build relationships

   In number one I shared the 3 reasons on why people buy. This is also how relationships are built. People buy people. What does this mean? They buy your competency. Competency is trust. They trust you can deliver. People look to you as the authority. Something we speak about constantly in our program is controlling the conversation and conveying authority. Why? Because they are coming to you for the solution to a problem they want to stop thinking about. If you can deliver what you say you can relationships are established. It’s built on competency. Competency is trust. Trust is the foundation of a relationship.
   
   

4. It teaches you how to not be afraid.

   Sales is the business of rejection. It’s also where 3 of the biggest fears in life are staring you in the face on a consistent basis, which are: (1) The fear of rejection. (2) The fear of public speaking (pitching). (3) The fear of failure.

   
   Learn to make friends and embrace fear. When I began my career as a stockbroker in 2002, it was a pressure cooker. A much different time than it is now. Pressure creates diamonds, but it also breaks pipes. My success in finance was based on my ability to make friends with my fears and insecurities. How I did this is by practice and repetition. This is why we have our clients record their calls and we provide loom feedback on their calls. Because by understanding what they’re doing right and wrong, they start stacking W’s. And when you stack W’s you get more confident, and confidence is the antidote to fear. Consistently stepping into the arena and failing is where you earn your stripes. Darkness cannot live in the light.
   

   
   

5. It teaches how to be a good operator.

   The best operators I’ve known have always lead from the front, never the rear. What does this mean? It means they understand every part of their business thoroughly. When you have actively sold on the front lines and understand your customers needs and desires deeply there is something inherently that changes the way you operate your business. It’s the same way with various roles within an org. The strongest leaders have worked their way up, from a salesperson to manager, director to a VP. This is the same for a founder of a CEO. You will learn invaluable lessons when you learn how to sell and it will make you a much better leader and capital allocator.
   
   

If these are areas where you feel you have it dialed in, then keep doing what you're doing. You’re on the right path. If not, you need to be honest with yourself, and your team, and ask yourself a serious question, “Is 2024 the year I level up my sales game?”

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more you can book a call with me here.