Amos Schwartzfarb
Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups
ISBN: 978-1-119-59780-3
Sales are the lifeblood of any startup. You need some form of funding coming into a company in order to keep the lights on – either raising money from angels and venture capitalists, crowdfunding, or by selling whatever is being produced. Unfortunately, sales can be one of the most difficult things to do in a new company or startup. You can have a fantastic product and an amazing team solving one or more problems but the business fails because they are unable to generate enough revenue through sales. Therefore, having a strategy for sales is a key to success.
Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups is a spiritual sequel to Do More Faster, both part of a series for startups published by Techstars. The author, Amos Schwartzfarb, is managing director of the Techstars accelerator in Austin, Texas, and has decades of experience in sales and marketing prior to his current position. This book is structured as a step-by-step strategy for sales, rather than the series of stories and lessons that made up the bulk of Do More Faster. It actually felt more like the follow-up to The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, as it focused more on the process of finding customers through research, customer discovery, and continuous iteration.
In this book, Schwartzfarb talked through different sales strategies based on the stage of the startup involved. Early-stage startups are going to have much different sales requirements, such as securing the first big business-to-business client or the first thousand users of an app, as opposed to much later startups with multiple large contracts under their belts. The author works through finding and securing the first customers at the beginning of the book, and then focuses on repeatability and scaling the process in subsequent chapters, including scaling the sales team. It’s tough to find the first people as you get your startup off the ground, and scaling from there can be even tougher. I really appreciated the author including the entire process in the book.
There were a number of great takeaways throughout the book. Schwartzfarb stressed the importance of using a customer relationship manager, or CRM. Businesses of any size should use some form of CRM from day one – every contact you make, from networking events to trade shows, as well as any other opportunity to collect contact information from potential customers. Even if you’re just using a spreadsheet at first, make sure your business has a CRM system. There are more robust customer relationship management systems at many different price points, from free to quite expensive, based on the number of features and plugins available – do a bit of research as soon as you can and get something in place sooner rather than later.
Schwartzfarb also discussed the idea of moving in the direction of product-market fit, as well as continual testing of hypotheses based on feedback from prior tests and customer discovery. I had never really seen discussion of “product-market direction” in anything else I’ve read to this point – other authors discussed product-market fit as an end point, and really only discuss experimentation and customer discovery in broader terms. Either way, it’s a constant loop of experiments and feedback, however you phrase it.
Most importantly, the author stressed the importance of setting your company culture early, which will make hiring decisions a bit easier. Over the last few years, the importance of company culture has been discussed thoroughly at a number of different entrepreneurial events I’ve attended, and I’ve heard a number of different opinions on what is involved in creating and maintaining company culture. Much of the discussion has been around scandal-plagued companies with toxic cultures – what not to do when creating your company’s culture. Shaping a company in a positive way from the beginning makes every decision later in the life of the company easier, and can prevent a number of problems in the future, if a company decides to raise money or go public at some point.
Overall, 9/10, would recommend for startups in any stage of development. It’s a relatively quick read – well under 200 pages – but full of information cover to cover. As any founder or team builds out a startup, this is a great resource not only to build out a sales team, but all of the ancillary issues that come up with a startup at the stage in which a sales team is being created. Touching on customer relationship management, company culture, and the constant need to iterate through experiments was a great way to round out the core content of the book. If you have read Do More Faster or have it on your reading list, you should continue the Techstars series with this book.