There are two major mistakes that many founders will make… 1- not selling their own product and 2- waiting too long to sell their product. 

The goal here is help prevent those mistakes by addressing what seems to be the hardest part of building a company but actually is very similar to riding a bike- for it to become easy you have to first get on the bike. 

When I started RestauRent I cam into it with zero “traditional” sales experience but rather I came into it with many years of figuring out how to “Sell shit”

• In 5th grade I built a duct tape wallet empire that ended up selling to the majority of my school and even created “distributors” in other schools 

• In 6th grade I was taking photographs and selling them at local farmers market

• 7th-9th grade I was working for my uncle selling fish at local farmers markets 

• 9th-12th grade I was building my early “businesses” in both the concert & apparel industry; selling tickets, shirts, and much more

• And by Freshman year in college I was “selling” investors, employees, partners, clients and more on my different startups I was building. 

That’s why I compare it to riding a bike; you don’t jump on an instantly win the Tour De Franc but you first master balancing, then turning, then you get a bike with gears, then you go off road, then you go around your block, then around the town, and then you are off! It’s the same thing with sales- I didn’t start one day by building a highly successful startup sales process but rather I “fell off my bike” over the course of 16 years and each time I got back on the bike I figured out how to get it one step further. 

So for the sake of this lets say you already know how to balance, pedal, and change the gears; where do we start with sales? Well we start with getting started. 

The thing is to build a successful sales process for a startup you have to remember that every startup is different and no matter how many “one size fits all” books you read, seminars you attend, webinars you watch, etc the answer is all the same; just because it worked for someone else doesn’t mean its going to work for you so you need to figure out what works for you. 

Discovering Your Sales Process: 

I’ll always remember the day we sold our first client for RestauRent- I showed up to this guys venue with an early mockup of the idea and after pitching I asked him; if you were to pay for this how much would you pay? And he goes “I would probably pay $50 a month easily”- so I went back, finished it up and called him 2 weeks later to get started for $50 a month. 

But something weird happened; he just gave me his credit card over the phone. I was so excited I didn’t even pay attention to it and moved on to the next. 5 clients in, the excitement started to wear off and I realized something. We built this whole “traditional” landing page to a sign up form to a payment portal and only 1 out of the 5 clients had used it…. The rest just called me. So I started to monitor the next clients I sold and one after another they all proceeded to provide their credit card over the phone. 

So there it was; a piece of our successful sales funnel was discovered. Our clients didn’t do “sign up” pages or even invoices- rather we were dealing with extremely busy operators who did not spend a lot of time behind the computer so the best and easiest way for them to get started was directly over the phone. So we pushed that further. 

The next step was figuring out how do we increase the funnel of clients we were reaching. We started with a couple traditional B2B tactics: email, LinkedIn advertising, and cold calling (myself cold calling). After 3 weeks of testing we had brought in 50 new clients & of those 50 we had 3 come from email, 0 from LinkedIn ads, and 47 from cold calling. So we figured out out core channel: Cold calling. 

One book that I recently read that I did not add to the list of suggested reads had one quote that stuck with me; “Just because you master one channel doesn’t mean you can master them all.” This is a big trap that startup founders will fall into very often. They will think “Cold calling worked, now lets try email, ads, events, etc”. This strategy isn’t wrong but its also not 100% right because you will never be able to master every channel.

Expanding Your Process: 

After we spent 3 months (80hrs per week) focusing solely on cold calling we had gotten it to the point where our script was perfected, the intro to appointment process was seamless, reminders were set up, and the process was “automated”. That meant we could not start experimenting again with other sales channels to assist us in growing the pipeline faster. But as I said before, you cannot nail every channel so when you start to expand your process you need to go in with a couple clear guidelines

• What is my set budget I am willing to spend to test this new channel

• What is the “end goal” that would categorize this new channel as a success or failure

• What is my current Cost per acquisition through my most promising channel and how will this new channel compare to that?

• Is this an entirely new channel or does it compliment my current one?

With these things in place we then started experimenting with channel 2: Facebook Ads. Normally when people think B2B they think of linkedin but remember, sales is about finding YOUR channel and with RestauRents core B2B target being local hospitality professionals it was clear that these decision makers were not on linkedin but rather they were on FB- in fact they were on FB between 8pm and 2am; when they are closing down and wrapping up their day & take a minute to just “scroll”.

We tested this channel with a couple key guidelines

• Test FB lead ads vs FB click ads (to a simple sign up form)

• Set a clear budget of each ($5k was our budget for the test for each type)

• Test with the same content for both but test 10 different types (video, reel, photo, sliding, etc)

• Achieve a target CAC equivalent to 20% cheaper then our existing cold call funnels

After a 2 week campaign we assessed the results and found a clear second channel winner- FB native lead ads. These campaigns generated qualified meetings at a CAC of 35% cheaper then cold calling & resulted in “deals closed” 60% faster then cold calling.

Now you might be thinking; did we replace cold calling? NO- each channel has its place; FB is dominant for launching new cities fast but cold calling provides us with a consistently full funnel. So together these two channels were like PB&J in terms of helping us scale quickly.

Now overtime we did eventually test out other channels that worked in smaller markets or specific scenarios but none were as consistent & stable as cold calling and FB advertising.

Optimizing your process

So now that you have your core channels the next thing you want to do is rather then focusing on discovering more channels you need to pivot to focusing on optimizing your existing channels to their highest potential. For RestauRent this included focusing on optimizing conversion velocity, CAC, and overall ROI per channel.

We first attacked FB ads. To do this you should put on the same mindset you had when first discovering which channels were going to work for you. Establish your goals, what does success look like, and what the benchmarks are to compare against. When it came to FB ads we knew it cost us $28 to acquire a lead and they would close within 11 days so the target was clear- decrease the cost per lead to sub $16 and get the deals to close in under 8 days.

The first step was to identify what breadcrumbs we could find in the existing process that could indicate where we could make the strongest improvements. Some of the discoveries were:

• Video reels generally averaged 30% lower costs and higher leads

• the CAC started lower but slowly increased over time as we “saturated” the audience size

• People would fall out of the funnel if they did not instantly book a call within 12 hours of entering their information

So now it was time to attack each of these 1/1:

• We hired a marketing agency to record over 35 different pieces of video content to have a consistent rolling basis of high quality content to advertise with

• We focused on launching new regions faster to increase our audience size

• To decrease fall off we:

  • connected our FB leads funnel into our cold call team and auto triggered cold calls within 24 hours of an inquiry coming in

  • We put leads into a 12, 24, and 48 hour email drip campaign

  • We launched a weekly webinar series that if a lead did not schedule a 1/1 demo meeting within 2 days of filling out the form they were automatically invited to the next webinar

All of these things combined we were able to decrease our CAC, increase conversions, and decrease our time to close to 6 days. But now we needed to address the other channel- cold calling.

That’s the balance of being a founder; once you put out one fire there is another one that needs your attention and it’s your job to stay focused on the fires that actually matter.

Re-tooling

So your sales channels are fully built and fully optimized; now what? Well its time to go put out other fires. If you still need to rapidly increase sales then you need to start the discovery process over again and find another channel that can compete with the other successful channels you already have lined up. But only you will know what to focus on next and if you need help with that- don’t worry; I have an article for that too! (coming soon)

Hopefully this helps you avoid some WTF moments when you’re building out your sales channel for the first time.