#49: How To Scale to 1 Million + In ARR With Founder Led Sales

#49: How To Scale to 1 Million + In ARR With Founder Led Sales

Read Time: 3 min

New Cohort Announcement
The new founder-led sales cohorts will begin on May 2nd for the (B2B) cohort and May 4th for the (B2C) cohort. These accelerators are designed to help you build a fully fleshed and repeatable sales process that will allow you to close revenue predictably, validate your minimum viable product (MVP), identify your ideal customer profiles (ICP), and begin scaling your product. To learn more, book a call with me here.

In this issue, I will share the Rampd framework for testing the hypothesis of your minimum viable product (MVP).

The framework shared below can save you significant sums—potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions—by steering you away from wasteful burn, preventing unnecessary setbacks, and sparing you the heartache of constant reevaluation and premature pivots. I still see many founders overlook the importance, often due to a misunderstanding of sales effectiveness or the belief that selling a product in its conceptual stage is crazy. 

First-time founders obsess over the product. Second-time founders obsess over sales and distribution

~Yin Wu (Founder / CEO @ Pulley)

If you haven't read Yin Wu’s (Founder / CEO of Pulley) Twitter thread about what she learned scaling Pulley to 1M in ARR and how important building a repeatable sales process was, I highly recommend it. You can read it here.

Let’s take a high-level look at the framework we use to help clients test their hypotheses before focusing any more efforts on building. 

Step 1: Discovery (qualification)
The purpose of a discovery call is to identify how they currently manage their workflow and, ideally, how they’d like to manage it. This is done through the BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) framework.

Step 2: Demo
The purpose of the demo is to take the needs/use cases they shared on the discovery and show them how your product can help solve them. 

Step 3: Scoping Call
The goal of a scope is to understand what success criteria would look like at the end of a POC. In other words, what are they looking to validate with your technology before moving forward as a customer?  

Step 4: Paid POC
The goal is to validate that your technology can solve their needs/use cases.

Step 5: POC Recap
After the POC, you set up a call to recap their success criteria and identify whether or not you were able to achieve their objectives.

Step 6: Negotiation / Close
If you’ve achieved technical validation, the next steps are to negotiate the price, reach an agreement, and close the deal.

Here's what the framework looks like at a high level.

Here’s a short list of benefits that will come from selling before building.

1. You'll keep burn rates low.

2. You’ll identify a real market need faster.

3. Your early wins will help fund iterations.

4. The feedback you get will be more impactful.

5. You can iterate and adjust the product a lot quicker.

6. Hopefully, you’re getting paid to build rather than building to get paid.
   

That’s it for today, folks!

See you all next week.

Darren

P.S. If you’re ready to level up, you can book a call with me here