6min chapter

Sales Transformation cover image

720 - Mastering Founder-Led Sales, with Lloyd Lobo

Sales Transformation

CHAPTER

The Evolution of Sales Career and Essential Founder Skills

This chapter follows the speaker's path from cold calling in telecom to leading sales in startups, emphasizing learning, risk-taking, and essential entrepreneurial skills. Community, communication, creation, and consistency are highlighted as crucial, with a focus on selling skills in the entrepreneurial journey.

00:00
Speaker 1
I couldn't even imagine being in Silicon Valley where I spent the last 15 years now. But nonetheless, it was in the mind. And so I, one company applied to was a small telecom startup and they found or needed cold callers and he didn't care about my background or anything. He's just get on the phone, man. And so that's how my journey started. I started as a cold caller for a telecom company and then my girlfriend, then now wife, gone into med school in New Jersey. So I needed to apply for jobs in New Jersey. Now here's the thing. If you, your first job as an engineer a year, you spend this cold calling for a telecom startup. Chances are no company in New Jersey is going to get you on a visa to work there, right? But luck would have it. Another founder found my skills valuable and hired me to do sales. Now when I joined that company, I was all excited to do sales now. Like they were selling to big companies, Tiffany, Armani, Simon and Schuster, etc. I'm like, oh, I'm going to be in person. It's quite an upgrade from banging the phones and begging to just get a meeting and pass it on to an account executive to actually doing the deal. But when I went there, realized they had no repeatable scalable sales process. There was no repeatable scalable product per se and there was no marketing. So my job was tagging alongside the senior sales executives, the VP of sales, going site to site, talking to customers, figuring out their pain points and writing that down, then turning it into wireframes for the devs to build. And then guess what? I got to build marketing materials and messaging and all of this. Now today in 2024 or 23 in this era anyway, it's very important that that job is done by the founders. Back then though, in 2005 and the age of on-prem software, these people with lots of money or working for enterprises, they would raise some funding and hire people to do this job mostly. So for me, I lapped it up because it was my second job at a university. It was like the best skills I could ever learn. I didn't know this, but then from there, I went off to run sales and marketing at another startup and passed for another year, my best friend from university reached out to do a startup together and I jumped at the opportunity because I already had the risk appetite. I was always at an early stage company talking to customers, reeling them in, figuring out what to build, and then creating all the messaging. And that effectively is founder-led sales. So I think if I had to recap, what were the key things? One is luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. The ones that get luckier, the ones that never stop flipping risk risk risk risk. If I hadn't applied to every single college, despite not having a high school diploma, I probably wouldn't have graduated engineering. And that engineering was a very unique program because it's probably one of the few in 2005 graduating year, Bachelors of Engineering in software. The other thing is to succeed as a founder, you need four basic things. Number one, I can't stress this enough, whether your community or your companions matter the most. If I hadn't worked for a founder after a founder after a founder, I don't think I would have had the appetite to just jump into a startup myself. I watched it so closely like I was the right-hand person. Number two is your ability to communicate is everything. If you can't communicate, you don't have an audience, you have an empty room. The third thing is just create, get out there and create. In sales, people don't value this enough, but you're creating playbooks. You're creating frameworks, you're creating content, you're creating products. Just get into this motion of creating, which is a combination of writing and building. But just do that, it is super valuable. And then the last one, you may have the best community and the best creation and the best communication, but if you don't have this fourth C, you have nothing. And that fourth C is consistency, like from Warren Buffett to Mr. Beast to Gary Vaynerchuk. They all are consistent. They always show up, they never stop. A lot of people, like they pick a career and then they jump and they jump and they jump, which may be okay, but in the early days, you need to just accumulate skills and get really good at it. And then you get really good at a skill is by doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it. And then you layer on more skills and more skills and more skills. So if you want to ever be a founder someday, the number one skill you need to have as a founder, in my opinion, is the ability to sell. You can call it communication, but you're communicating with the ability to sell in a way where you don't seem like this slimy sales guy, right? You're evangelizing people as the right word to your way of thinking. You're going to be a spouse. I'm not going to bring money for a few years. Early customers, I barely have a product, but believe in me, early employees on working on low pay, investors. And then as you grow and grow, you got to keep repeating the same thing. You got to communicate your vision to inspire and excite people. And it's not a one and done activity. You got to do this day in, day out. So people also keep showing up on your vision, right? So it's probably, in my view, the most valuable skill, I wouldn't change a freaking thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.

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