#71: 6 Habits That Lead To PMF With Founder Led Sales

#71: 6 Habits That Lead To PMF With Founder Led Sales

Read Time: 3 min

Today, I will discuss the six key areas you should focus on to improve your founder-led sales game. If your goal is PMF and a clear path to scaling ARR, focusing on these key areas will help expedite the process and illuminate some of your blind spots.

^{I see too many teams with zero customers and zero predictable acquisition channels, spending all their time on prod dev. This is procrastination masquerading as productivity.}

~ Yours Truly

Success in any endeavor is a recipe. A recipe calls for ingredients. These are the six key ingredients I’ve come to understand after working with well over 350 founding teams.

1. Sell Before You Build: 

   Prioritize customer validation over product perfection. Your MVP will be clunky, and it should be. Find buyers before you build and then deliver the thing they want. Otherwise, your hypothesis is rooted in speculation and hypotheticals. After your MVP has shipped, you should spend 70% of your time developing different customer acquisition channels and selling and 30% on the product. Your focus should be on sales until you can start predictably acquiring customers. Once you acquire customers, you can shift gears and refocus on prod dev. I see too many teams with zero customers and zero predictable acquisition channels, spending all their time on prod dev. This is wrong. 70% on lead gen and selling. 30% on prod dev. Sell before you build.
   
   

2. Master the Mental Game: 
   Selling is human psychology. It’s a mental game. If you don’t understand how to do it, you must practice religiously. Selling is about identifying pain and empowering people to take action. Repetition builds the muscle. What I see is a lot of founders who have the brains and competence but lack that killer edge. You need hustle, but you need muscle. If you know how to build. If you know how to sell and have that killer edge (relentlessness), you will be deadly. Nothing will stand in your way. Success is inevitable. You get there by being uncomfortable and continuously running into the fire, not running away. When you voluntarily gaze into the abyss for long enough, you will see the light, not the darkness. Master the mental game.
   
   

3. Use Structured Processes: 
   A structured sales process is essential because it will create consistency, efficiency, and predictability. It ensures every sales interaction follows a proven and repeatable system that reduces the risk of burning opportunities. It acts as a compass. A repeatable process provides data and feedback that can be analyzed to refine and improve your sales-led motion continually. Finally, so much of selling is confidence and communicating confidence. Confidence comes with knowing your shit and knowing your pitch. People buy people. They buy conviction. Use structured processes
   
   

4. Continuous Learning and Improvement: 

   The goal of a process is to learn, iterate, and test-repeat. Let’s break this down. Learning in this context is done by gathering info on a problem you believe exists in the market and building an MVP with a hypothesis of what your product can solve. Iterating is done by actively going out and asking people to buy it. You do this by consistently having people to sell to and having a process to validate your hypothesis accurately. Testing is done by extracting and adjusting your sails to move in the direction the market tells you to. Along the way, you’ll close revenue and begin to find stronger indications of PMF if PMF exists for your product. The only way I know how to do this with predictability is through this process. You have to learn and improve continuously.
   
   

5. Leverage Psychological Principles: 
   Selling is human psychology. Customers close for three reasons: competency, authority, and expectation. They believe you’re competent, they think you’re an authority, and they believe your product can deliver on expectations. You deliver this experience through a process rooted in psychological principles. The framework we build with our clients leverages these principles. A great book on this is Influence by Robert Cialdini. Leverage psychological principles.
   
   

6. Do The Hard Things: 
   If you have raised money, investors have entrusted you to allocate the capital appropriately. What does that mean? You must get good at outsourcing to real experts the things that lie outside your competence circle. Investors are investing in you so you can invest in yourself and your company to become better. You have a fiduciary responsibility to allocate capital to increase your odds of making these things come to fruition. You are investing in the years of experience to bypass all the mistakes and burn that will inevitably happen due to trying to go at it alone. Doing the hard things means embracing the most challenging aspects of the sales process. Typically, I see founders default to the things that come easy, like sitting behind a screen and coding, rather than going out into the world, selling their vision, and seeing what comes back. The byproducts of what I’m telling you are resilience, toughness, and the killer edge I spoke about in point 2. Rampd has been doing this for seven years, and as far as I know, we are the only ones who have actually done what we are coaching our clients to do. The surface area you cover in our program will increase your odds of success by 10x at minimum. Do the hard things. We can help.
   

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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