#63: 6 Key Insights To Close Your First $100k in ARR

#63: 6 Key Insights To Close Your First $100k in ARR

Read Time: 2.5 min

Today, I’ll teach you how to avoid some of the biggest mistakes early founders make when getting to the first $100k in ARR.

The Rampd system is designed to get you to your first million in ARR and establish PMF, but through deep experience, closing your first $100k in ARR is even harder.

Why?

Reaching $100K in ARR is a critical milestone that requires overcoming significant challenges related to finding indications of PMF, identifying your ICP, having no track record, and typically having no or little sales processes fleshed out. Once you have a couple of logos attached to your brand and the foundational elements are in place, like lead gen and sales GTM, scaling to $1 million in ARR becomes much easier.



It's easy to get people to say they like your startup idea. The real measure is if they agree to pay you. Up front. In cash.

~ Gary Tan

In this issue, I’m going to share 6 tips that will help you avoid some of the biggest mistakes I see. Let’s dive in!

1. Book qualification calls, not product calls.
   Product calls solicit feedback on your product, while qualification calls ask people to buy your product. The difference between the two calls is the messaging (copy) in your email. Also, you should ALWAYS take a top-down approach when prospecting. Speaking to a user who is not part of the decision-making process is the fastest way to get yourself out and have very few conversions. Let the CTO tell you that you need to speak to the head of engineering and see if it makes sense for them to continue the conversation. Bottoms-up is fine for user interviews or product discovery calls but never true qualification calls.
   
   

2.  Create a talk track to help navigate your conversation.
   If you go into a discovery call with no idea of what needs to be identified, you've lost the deal already. A talk track is a tool that will allow you to navigate the convo and collect the right info to qualify them as an opportunity at revenue. Scripts, or talk tracks as I call them, are the best tools to help navigate the conversation and extract all the useful information you need to continue moving forward in the process.
   
   

3. Record and listen to all of your calls.
   There are many tools for this. Listening to calls is easily the biggest needle-mover when it comes to leveling up with founder-led sales. How do you level up when you don't know what is broken? Simple: hire a coach or burn through tons of unnecessary cash.
   
   

4. At the end of a qualification call, the goal is to identify BANT.
   There are many methodologies designed to confuse you. All you need to know is the budget, decision maker (s), needs/use cases, and timing for when they'd be looking to move forward. This is what a discovery talk track is designed to accomplish.
   
   

5. Start your day with 60 min of building TOFU. 

   It'll pay off huge. Startups don't fail because they run out of money. They fail because they have no lead generation and no repeatable sales process built out. Building channel(s) to generate consistent TOFU will extend the runway and give you time to figure shit out.
   
   

6. Before a POC, understand what the prospect is looking to validate.
   Before you go live on a paid POC, you need to understand the success criteria the prospect is looking to validate. This is called a scoping call, which you should always do before going live on a POC. Once you have mutually agreed upon success criteria established before you go live on the POC, the deal is closed, given that you are able to achieve the criteria.
   
   

Building systems and having a recipe starts with adding the right ingredients. These will help steer you in the right direction.

That’s it for today!

See you all next week.



Darren

P.S. If finding PMF and scaling to $1M in ARR through founder-led sales is on your radar, book a call with me here

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