In this workshop, speakers walk through a practical sales framework tailored for early‑stage companies. They begin by flagging leads that lack sufficient information as “omitted” and therefore excluded from forecasting. The conversation then moves to follow‑up interactions, distinguishing discovery calls that surface a prospect’s pain or gain, and intro calls that set expectations and timelines. After uncovering needs, the team explains how to present a solution, provide proof of value, and shift the prospect from a lead to a deal in the pipeline for forecasting. The discussion covers negotiation beyond price—covering payment terms and feature bundles—and illustrates how pricing and packaging decisions are informed by real‑time sales feedback. Finally, they highlight the sales team as a primary source of market research and the challenges of scaling that insight as headcount grows. The overall tone is instructional and supportive, aimed at founders and salespeople navigating product‑market fit.
Chapters
So, this, we call it omitted.
Omitted.
So, omitted because we're not gonna put this in the forecast. It's not gonna be in the forecast at all because we don't know anything about them yet. We don't know if they're ready to buy now or in 12 months from now. We're not gonna even bother. All right, so after the lead comes in and we have that, this is basically, we decided one conversation. What's step 2? Follow up.
Interaction.
Interaction. What kind of interaction? What's that conversation look like?
OK, so it depends on the lead, of course, because there are a lot of kinds of leads. But if we have a lead that comes through our website and we know their interaction to the website, what's their interest, et cetera, Then we can start a conversation with them regarding what we have learned from their behavior on our product.
Yeah.
Website.
Yes. What else? Okay, so I'm going to show you guys something, and these sometimes can be blended. So what you were just describing was a discovery, which is Let's talk a little bit more about your pain points. Typically people buy either because of a pain or a gain. It's one of the two. And so what we want to do is go through and understand that. Depending on the product you have, you may or may not have this as separate conversations or the same conversations. But one of the things that we find is people probably won't know how to buy your product because your product is new. Your product is different. How to buy is I was just at a JP Morgan conference in Chicago 2 weeks ago with a bunch of small businesses who were just getting started as well. And someone said, how do I teach someone how to buy my product? The reason they said that is because you might be offering something different. And so they might not even know what's the best process, but you might. So when we say the intro call, that's something like, hey, Mr. Cut— like, I'll give you an example of one I had the other day. I was talking to a company that does Interior design. Interior design. They're growing. And basically the conversation was, hey, we just want to talk to you as you think about how you might use technology specifically to help you run your business. What I'd like to understand is what your expectations are in terms of how quickly you want to evaluate, how that looks like. I would love to give you some suggestions based on what I've seen with other customers to make this as quickly as possible because I know time is your number one priority. So, do you want to kind of walk me through a little bit what you're thinking? And then no matter what they say, I will still make a recommendation. It's like, typically what I see is this will take about 14 days. What we will do is we'll set up a call right after this where we'll do a deeper discovery specifically into what you're trying to do as a business, not only specifically in this pain that you have, but where are you trying to go strategically? Because we want to make sure that what we're solving for helps your overall strategy. From there, we'll go back and we'll actually demo back to you and prove to you that we have something that will solve the problem. Once we get on the same page there, we'll negotiate on the price. I'm sure you're curious already. I'll send you a link after this call that gives you specific pricing. And at that point, we'll have a yes/no in the next 7 to 14 days. Are you on the same page? The hardest part is getting a timeline because people don't have timelines. So you want to really get them on a timeline and keep them accountable to timeline. But also the way you frame it is, I'm trying to keep myself accountable to your timeline. If their timeline is 3 months out, you just created another way to create a safety net for your time, right? Because you might not— oh, it's 3 months out? Great. I'll send you some resources, some videos, some— here's a link to our website, or a demo, or whatever it is that you want to send. And let's loop back in a month. So those are options. But that's basically what an intro could be, and the discovery is what you said. What happens after the discovery? I kind of gave it away, but once you understand what their pains are, or what they're trying to gain, what do you do next? Solution.
Solution. Proof.
So basically, you need to prove to them that what you have solves their problem. Or helps them get something they didn't have before. So that's basically the next step. And this is value. This is time. As you keep going, you need to be more valuable to them. If you're not, then you basically are going to lose them. And on top of that, remember, part of the value you provide them is how you bring them through the buying process. If you have a self-checkout, that's great. Then it's going to be— it's still this. It's just Think about this embedding it into your product versus embedding it into a process with sales. The last thing I want to say is, so this is omitted. What I would call this is pipeline. What is also very tricky is when you're trying to think about like, is marketing doing— are we doing a good job marketing or not? Is it— and when we think about the tactics that Bala was talking about, when you get it into this piece, Like, a lead, there's no deal here. Once we start having this conversation, at this point, we've now moved it from a lead, I'll use a different color. This is from a lead, now this is now a deal. We're designating it, saying we're accepting this as a deal, it is worth our time to track it as a deal, versus just another millions of leads that we might have, hopefully. If not, I would still separate it. A lot of times people use the same definition, but the reason you wanna separate it is 'cause you're trying to, for analytics. Even if it's a spreadsheet you're using to track, just being able to designate these different stages allows you to understand where in the process are you losing customers. Is it because of a product flaw? Is it because of a process flaw? Is it because we have the wrong product-market fit and we have a different customer base? This is what this stuff is going to help you understand better. So you create the deal. Then you go through here. Pipeline, meaning I'm going to forecast it. Then proof becomes best case. And I'm just giving you standard definitions, but it's just as you go along in this part of the buying process, we shift the category so we can start tracking how many people close from this category. Are we losing them here, here, here? Just a simplification of a category. What happens after the proof?
They're sold.
It's the most fun part of sales.
You guys were super active earlier.
Come on. I'll just start calling people. I have no problem doing that.
Closing.
So, negotiation. You telling me— I negotiate everything. After being in sales, I just— I even negotiate— there's a sandwich place below us. At 2 PM, I always ask them for a discount because they're going to throw away the sandwiches otherwise. So, highly recommend it. You get 20— it's very easy. I got 20% off. So I saved a whopping 40 cents, I think. But, so, okay. So negotiation. What does that look like?
Trying to see what, what, what the other party wants and like try to make him comfortable, and at the same time try to bring him to your point of view.
Yeah.
Then like not compromise, but make it feel like everybody's winning, but at the same time you're getting the discount. Yes.
So is price— is negotiation only price?
What? No, no, not price, but yeah, payment terms, feature terms.
Yes.
How many of you— so the people who have started something already, would you say you're very early product market fit? Like the market fit's very early on. You're still testing the waters. Or do you feel like it's a developed market? You have a pretty good idea of how your product fits into that market. I know a bunch of you over here raised your hand. So early?
Late?
Early?
Early.
Early. Okay.
I tested the product and now I will go out to my beta test instead.
Yes.
How do you know how much to charge people? Exactly. This. When you think about negotiation, it's about the value you provide. You're testing the waters. And Vala said something extremely important at the beginning. When you think about strategic marketing, pricing, and packaging, Who knows? Okay, so when I was at a company, so when I moved over to Work.com, that was actually called Ripple when I first moved over, and that was a company that was acquired by Salesforce. We actually built an entire feature set just to get Facebook as a customer. We built an entire feature set that we then repackaged and sold just for them. And then we actually had a different product, we had a different pricing and packaging because we added all these feature sets. But that was to win that customer. So the reason I wanted to tell that story is because you're gonna be in that all the time, but this is critical in the process because you're gonna learn what people value in the market, and everyone's gonna want a discount, that's not the point. Everyone's gonna try to negotiate. But you're gonna be able to understand what is it in your product that will establish value, and how do you use this feedback to pump it back into as you figure out from a strategy perspective what you might price it at, what features are in it, it takes very little effort for you to move features from one line of it, like maybe you have 3 editions of whatever you have, or it's really easy to move things around potentially. And if you're in manufacturing, you could just bundle different things differently. So there's a lot of options, but we don't know. This is super helpful. And if you have, I think you had 7 people?
Yes.
So once you have 7, you're not involved in every single one, or maybe you are. But it gets harder even with one extra person. You need to make sure you're capturing that so you understand. Because you— this is your best product— your best research team is your sales team first for acquiring new customers. Your second best research team is whoever's handling support. And most of the time it's everyone's the same person, but every time you add one other person it gets a little harder to keep track of. But that is your best free research. You don't have to go hire— Any fancy company, they can give you everything you need. I use it too today. When they say— when our sales team says that there's a gap and they hear something, we then can respond from marketing and try to market to them in a way that shows value in the way that the sales team's seeing success. So as you get big or small, it still helps.
