3 - Sales Learning Curve

Hi. Here's a quick video on the sales learning curve. It's based on the 2006 article in the Harvard Business Review, which at 10 pages is one of the highest value things you could pick up here at the school, with the possible exception of your diploma, since that's only one page. It's based on the idea that your organization must learn how to sell its product or service and will do so in three distinct stages. In the first stage, you're still trying to figure out what is your product and why would anyone buy it. And the only person who can overcome those kinds of obstacles is the founder with the founder superpower of passion for what they're doing. In the second stage, you're then trying to invent how do we actually sell it in a repeatable way? What is the talk track? How do we negotiate it? What are the ways we handle objections? And for that you need a leader who can actually sell it themselves and then hire a second rep and a third rep and a fifth rep to try and sell it in the same way. In the third stage, you're trying to go from five reps to 50 or to 150. And now the challenges are yet again very different. These challenges are more around how do you manage all those people, what processes do you use, how do you do things like forecasting? And so that for you need a leader that is much more about systems and processes. The two main failure points that occur for startups are when they try and bring in a systems or process leader too early, someone who tries to scale a playbook when it still needs to be invented or discovered. The second failure point comes when you bring in a non founder expeditionary leader who's trying to invent the playbook when the product is still varying and pivoting too much. So that's the sales learning curve. One food for thought is that this is probably something that applies to more than one role. Not just sales, it could also apply to marketing, product engineering. So read it three times, sleep with it under your pillow, and good luck.