GTM Zero to One: Handbook For Building Your Sales Stack

Insights and tools for building your sales tools stack + tracking for pre-seed companies and early-stage nonprofits

Source (and licensing approach); Googling sales memes > GenAI this week 😂

Footnote on restarting this newsletter¹

Someone I respect and trust texted me this week: QQ: Do you know where I’d go to find recommended sales funnel tech stacks for pre-seed companies and early stage non-profits? How to create a seamless (and tracked) experience from top-of-funnel down to sales?

I couldn’t think of a framework or resource that I thought specifically nailed this question, so, I wrote my own, sent it to them + two other founders:

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BOTTOM LINE: Early Days, Don’t Outsource Sales

Usually this is a critical founder-led sales period, where doing a bit of both building and selling helps keep a tight feedback loop when trying to

• execute on building/selling and

• validate what you’re building/selling.

Don't outsource sales, and don’t be scared.

• Many founders didn’t have prior sales experience when they start,

• but connect through deep understanding of user/customer pain points and

• personal and professional networks (e.g., former teachers starting edtech companies)

Then stack wise, a lot of what you use flows from the above and what you as the founder or leader has the discipline + team support/buy in to use (or to ensure they use + checks/gives feedback/reviews in meeting)

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THE FUNNEL + STACK

📣 MARKETING

Social media, content — usually a lot of this depends on if founders likes to do this, and how critical /which channels (do your users spend time on and signal problems/intent on those channels) | (LinkedIn, posts, sales, etc.)

Instead of worrying too much about TOFU, MOFU, BOFU —> what’s important is how to deliver value at different points along the funnel to build trust, and embedding CTA (call to action) to get people to arrive at your website

• Google Analytics is your friend as a start, so you know how people get to your website

• e.g., Mixpanel or Amplitude, to help track usage inside your platform

🔥 hot tip: you can see ad sets on Meta/Facebook: use this link to look ups names of competitors or keywords

🔗 WEBSITE

🚪 aka the (digital) front door to your business

For a landing page, I ALWAYS use this framework to build it:

https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages

• it’s a forcing function to create the shortest version of your value proposition (header), and then a slightly longer version (subheader)

• through the exercise, you should also be determining your user persona and JTBD/why they use it

🔥 hot tip: user personas often look something like this;

• I prefer to think in archetypes, for example an amazing breakdown of gym user archetypes ²

💳 SALES:

🔨 a) Commit to a CRM that you actually use and can afford —>

• even if it’s spreadsheets

• alternatively, I’ve used Copper CRM

• I personally wasn’t a fan of Monday.com CRM —>

  • Known more for project Mgmt; I tried it’s CRM when in beta (Jan 2024)

  • I felt some key dashboard/tracking/bulk action features were lacking

• Hubspot is good if it’s free features are enough (10 free customizable fields), or once you’re at a sizable enough MRR/ARR to justify it’s fairly hefty price tag

🌪 b) Funnels/stages —> it’s important to set these up and define, but not kill yourself

• Connect Top of Funnel/Marketing + Referrals/Attribution (usually a super important thing that lots of folks miss)

  • Lead Generation: how do I find and add new people or orgs I should target or reach out to?

  • Then I have a list of Prospects, in long-term nurture mode

• It’ll be some version of this, and can be adapted for investors/funders also:

  • Qualify Lead

    • how do I figure out if they’re a good fit for my business / offering / product, at least before meeting

    • some like to do this as did they fill out form (at least for inbound)

  • Initiate Contact

  • First Call

  • Follow up

  • RFP/Contract/SLA (agreement) desired/requested

  • RFP/Contract/SLA (agreement) sent

  • Contract Won/Signed

    • (or lost, mark lost then why - ghosted, competitor, price, etc.)

🃏 c) Critical collateral:

• sales decks

• RFP/proposal templates

• pricing/packaging for your offering (product and/or service)

• your form for indicating interest — figure out key parameters you want (if you want, you can look at Leanlab's form for example on what key info they collect)

🦾 d) Automations are your friend esp. when doing lots by hand; beyond core tools CRM, email, scheduling (e.g., calendly), contracts (e.g., docusign)

• Zapier for integrations/automations across tools

  • once someone signs docusign, save to Google Drive

  • once someone fills out an interest form, add them to the CRM

• I’ve used Superhuman for a while (read notifications, schedule send and reminders, validate email format), and testing Shortwave.ai for AI-powered email

✉️ e) For marketing automation when you start mass email + data tracking:

• Mailchimp a classic;

• Yesware has sales engagement + email marketing

• Active Campaign is an integrated CRM with sales engagement

• ^ these are all great tools for early days/early stage startups

🔥 hot tip: I tell people to start charging day 1. You can start charging even with pilots and/or co-design/build partners (how enterprise software gets built). More insights from a16z here.

• Charging both helps you get early revenue

• AND validate that someone is actually willing to pay for your product.

📊 DASHBOARD + DATA

First it’s about humans and discipline to track metrics.

• I did this just writing a report for team and down weekly when scaling up our software engineering program at AL —> we used Asana for project mgmt, so I did my reporting + comms there.

• Then we layered on/built automated dashboards and tracking to track across stages of the funnel (in marketing and in sales)

TOP LINE: Goal is to calculate conversion at each stage of funnel, and see how inputs/activities lead to outputs

• Initial, maintain discipline/habits and do in Google Sheets if you have to (top 3 metrics)

• As you grow, again automations become your friend:

• Pick a data unification/analytics and visualization tool

  • Google Looker

  • Salesforce Tableau

  • Microsoft Power BI

  • Airtable

  • ^ are great standard options to begin with

More sophisticated databases that start to leverage SQL and when you bring in data talent to supplement design + engineering include ones like:

• Metabase (used at Reforge, Series B) or

• Superset (used at ALG)

Over time, you can connect the dots and tools across the stack

🔥 hot tip: revenue is a lagging indicator, so you need a leading one (e.g., am I at least getting meetings with key users and buyers

IMPACT

• Make sure to measure NPS or how disappointed they'd be if your' product didn't exist (Superhuman's approach to product-market fit)

• Build your logic model or theory of change because your mode of impact will likely drive other student outcomes or attributes you’ll want to track for impact purposes and having early thoughts on that helps you not have to backtrack/rebuild too much

🔥 hot tip: measure NPS correctly, it's not an average; only 10 and 9 count as positives; 7, 8 neutral; 0-6 net detractors and are subtracted; also it’s only a rough proxy for how much they like your product so be sure to ask/interview and do other things to understand why

CORE METRICS / BENCHMARKS

SaaS:

• Core things to measure

• Additional things to measure 2024

• 2023 Benchmarks

  • More detailed 2023 benchmarks 2023, and why growth slowed relative to 2022

Edtech:

• John Danner on PMF (early stage), has a whole series, Part 1

• Graham Forman: what metrics do VCs want to see (pre seed, Seed, Series A)

1. Restarting LXD

tl;dr The core I hope to focus on is at the intersection of:

productization x go-to-market (GTM)

especially in the 0 → 1 days.

Reintroducing the artist formerly known as David Fu, writing under Learning By Design.

It’s been some time since I published here. I’m going to push myself to start publishing daily on weekdays.

The intent/cadence will be to publish:

• shorter, snackable pieces (~200 words) daily

• with a longer piece (1,000+ words) going out Fridays.

My intent is to start with doing it for all of August and September, and then see if I can hit 100 posts before end of the year.

If you unsubscribe, no hard feelings! Totally get it.

This will touch on everything from edtech to workforce developement to AI to product to honing your value proposition to 0 → 1 product.

2. For example, those who watch ESPN or use espn.com

• Sports fanatics, die hard fans

  • People who bet money and/or do fantasy sports (and alternatively, die hards who don’t bet)

  • People who used to go to the bar to watch the games

• Casual sports fans

  • They’ll flip through channels and turn it on, maybe

  • People who sorta got into F1 due to Netflix’s ‘Drive To Survive’

• Not really into sports (but maybe watch because their partner is)

• (and you can also break it down further potentially by fans of a specific sport, team or athlete)

• also timely and difference btw those who get into the Olympics and those who don’t, and why