Quick Announcements

Check out some new case studies here! 

#96: When Is It Time To Build Your GTM?

Read Time: 2 min

Today, I wanted to discuss one of the most frequent questions we get asked.

“When is the right time to hire a sales coach?”

Unfortunately, no matter which way I slice it, my response here is going to seem biased, and I’m ok with that. I started this newsletter for two reasons:

(1) I wanted to share and give back to the community.

(2) Most advice on customer acquisition and sales GTM is terrible and often leads to disaster for early-stage startups.

There are countless examples. I was ostracized for never allowing our clients to do free pilots. It went against the valley’s ethos of letting users use the tech for free. I knew this was terrible advice from people who didn’t understand sales. I was “in the arena” for years selling, and I knew it was the fastest way to get users touching the product with skin in the game. As it turned out, I was right.

Paid POC’s became one of the biggest needle movers for our clients and readers. The second screenshot is from today.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

– Pablo Picasso

Let’s take a closer look and unpack this question deeper.

As you develop your product, the priority should be to ship your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and validate demand before throwing more resources into prod dev. Why? Until you secure real customer interest and traction, the existence of a viable market is a guessing game. Building without validation increases the risk of wasting time and resources on a solution that may not have PMF.

As you develop your product, ship your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and validate demand before further investment in development. Why? Until you secure genuine customer interest and traction, the validation of a viable market remains uncertain. Building without validation is the fast track to wasting time and resources on a solution that may not have PMF.

Collecting data lets you iterate on the product and determine the best direction to pivot. As you build, this allows you to make early decisions rooted in data, not speculation.

This is very difficult if you don’t understand customer acquisition channels and how to run a repeatable playbook to extract the necessary information. This is why you hire a coach: to help you validate that there is a market and keep your burn at a minimum as you validate and build out your product.

What is the alternative to hiring a coach and trying to figure it out on my own?

It can be done. However, the outcomes I frequently see are high burn rates on cash, less runway, high CAC, high anxiety, and usually high churn.

The ROI on hiring the right person to help you do it correctly can be massive.


Here are a few things that you should consider before hiring a sales coach.

1. Make sure any coach you hire has done what you want to do successfully and has credible case studies or testimonials to back up their work. There are a lot of pretenders out there who have no business coaching and advising. Most sales coaches, in my opinion, are failed salespeople. Make sure you vet them.
   

2. If you have raised a pre-seed / seed round of funding, built an MVP, and are ready to start testing, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   

3. If you have no lead generation or are only generating calls through your friends or your internal network, you can hire a coach.
   

4. If you struggle to figure out who your ICP (ideal customer profile) is, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   

5. If you burn through leads that you should’ve closed and ghosted, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   

6. If you’re going through an accelerator that focuses on helping you build and develop your product, you can hire a coach. Doing the two concurrently is incredibly powerful.

The simple answer is this:

How quickly do you want to validate that you have built something the market wants?

How can you come close to definitively knowing that you have something rooted not in speculation but in real user data?

Your answer is when it’s time to hire a sales coach.

That’s it for today, folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re a Venture-Backed company interested in coaching, book a call here.

💡 How We Can Help