49: Getting Your First 10 Clients

all right here we go good afternoon everybody this is john barrows make it happen mondays hopefully i'd all had a fantastic easter weekend for those of you that celebrate that type of stuff but anyways i wanted to um super excited uh for our guest today tukhan dask from lead sift uh tukhan you want to introduce everybody sure a little bit of background on yourself where you come from yeah definitely so my name is tukhan i'm the ceo and co-founder of lead sift um i'm originally from india uh based out of halifax nova scotia in canada my background is in computer science in data science um started the company about five years ago and then for the last two years been heads down focused on sales and product discovery and those kind of things very cool and what's lead sift all yeah so lead sift uh is a sales intelligence platform that helps other b2b software companies identify and prioritize target accounts to go after based on signals of intent and interest and more specifically uh by figuring out when someone is engaging with your competitor or news about your industry we use that to basically score and prioritize and suggest accounts for you to go out there it's nice nice and i love the intent piece of that right so it's not just a scoring thing where it's like hey they were on your website a bunch like hey no this is what's actually going on and this is who they're using right absolutely yes yeah very cool well um one of the things that um we had talked about and i thought would be an interesting topic for the audience here um again either facebook live if you're if you're on facebook live by all means just ask whatever questions you want uh for those who listen to the podcast uh appreciate that but the the con the topic came up about you know how to how to get your first-hand customers right and and the reason this came up was because i i have a lot of uh reps who i work with most of most of the demographics that listen to this are sales reps you know usually young between 28 and 20 you know 22 and 28 years old just getting their career started and a lot of times i'll go in and i'll do my training and you know i talk about my history and my background of where i got to where i am and then how i started my own company a couple of times and inevitably there's two or three reps that come back and say hey john you know can i talk to you about how you started your own company like that type of thing and then so i always have those conversations and inevitably at least a few times a year a rep will call me and say you know what john i did it i went off on my own uh now what and it's like getting that first few accounts is always the hardest and i always say you know take my story as a bit of uh um it's a little bit of an anomaly because when i started j barrows it was actually from an offshoot of basho uh the company that i worked for they ended up screwing it all up and literally left the training on the side of the road to die and i always said i'm not a like a full-blown risk taker like drop everything live on mom's you know couch and eat ramen noodles type of stuff but i'm definitely like the secondary risk where there's if there's a couple of pieces in place then i'm all in on jumping in on this and um and that's what i saw with basho like they had left a this new ceo came in completely fired everybody and went all in on software and and decided and really left this training on the side of the road to die which used to be like a two and a half million dollar company with a product that everybody loved a client list that was insane and a revenue stream that was already there so for me starting a company yeah nobody starts a company with a with a product that everybody already loves a client base that's anybody would die for and a revenue stream that's already there so a little bit of an anomaly of how i got to where i am right um but but that topic of but i still have that idea of how to get that first client so talk because you you did you started a couple of companies at this point right so for the for those people out there who are trying to or thinking about starting their own firm or whatever and whether they have an idea they want to be a consultant or they they're an engineer and they've come up with something what's your thought process around like where do i start from up from uh who do i go after first do i go mass appeal do i have friends family and fools like where does that first few clients come from and where what what should their mentality be when looking for those clients yeah so the way i look at it and and think about it is getting your first 10 i would say unaffiliated customers is a massive milestone what do you what do you mean by unaffiliated exactly what i mean by that is um you can it's depending on how big your network is and you know how many people know you it is it can be relatively easy to go after your friends family and your immediate network on linkedin reach out to them and say hey i'm building this would you try it out yeah there's a very high probability they will they will they will use your product um and give you feedback which is which is great but it's these people are a lot of them might do it just because of your goodwill because they know you right so that's that's that's i would that's some form of validation for sure sure but it's not true product validation yeah so it's super key to reach out to people that are just out there in the universe um that fits your buyer person or that that needs your solution is getting to them so getting those 10 first 10 unaffiliated customers is a is a pretty big milestone it doesn't mean that you'll succeed eventually but but that's a that's a pretty big milestone that you need to celebrate uh now what what that means basically is these 10 companies these accounts give you their time to have a meeting with you however you reached out to them and then from there on they decided to use your software and pay for it yeah so now comes a second stage um and and i'll talk about the tactics to get it but one thing that i've learned is uh two things first is those 10 unaffiliated customers and b getting them to pay yeah my experience um because um i come from a product background and engineering background i was always shy to ask people to to pay money it was like hey would you would you try it out um for 30 days to give us feedback and all those um you know typical product discovery type things and majority of them said yeah i'll try it sure like we got super excited these 10 unaffiliated they didn't know of us and wow they're starting to use uh you know sign up for it but the key difference in hundred percent of the examples that i've talked to none of those customers that we signed up in the early days for free stayed yeah none of them stayed um and the reason is and there could be many reasons but the biggest reason is without some kind of skin in the game they don't really care because if i come to you john tomorrow and say hey john i'm gonna you know i'm making this t-shirt would you like to try 99 of the time you're like yeah it's free i'll try it why not right um but it's not solving a pain but you didn't really need this t-shirt you just got it you're not going to give me the right feedback you're not going to use it so it's super important to start asking customers to pay money and this is one of the best form of qualification in the early days now one of the things to realize is early on your product is half paid it's very barebone mvp so you cannot and you probably shouldn't charge a full price of the value that's okay at least you charge a number if it's one-fifth one-tenth the price that you're thinking of charge some money to them because that's that's a very very solid validation at that point yeah so this is about value i mean this is about valuing everything right i mean i always put it to reps like you know when you get something for free how much value do you put on it right and the answer is almost no and this this actually even comes all the way down to the main new level of of send me information right or or like sharing case studies or stuff like that it's like reps don't put any value on the content that they share so therefore the like the client doesn't you know what i mean it's like hey here's a here's a case study here's a white paper here's an ebook and that type of stuff and it's like okay thanks but if you don't put any value on it i'm not going to and so i always recommend is a very minute kind of tactical thing it's like you know maybe your first email to somebody is hey i have the you know you fit a really good profile of a company we've done some work with as a matter of fact we showed this company how to drive these type of results and i have a case study i'd like to share with you right and and don't give them that case study yeah and then and then when they say and when they don't respond or whatever then you say hey by the way here's that case study i was telling you about at least you put some value as the same thing with people to pay for stuff i mean absolutely webinars right i mean webinars are a dime a dozen so that's why i don't think of but if you were to charge people for a webinar even if it's ten dollars yeah might not get 5 000 signups but you'll get 50 signups and the likelihood of those 50 people showing up very very night and day compared to the ones that don't right absolutely no and that's that's a big lesson that we learned so that's one of the things i say is try to get the first 10 of unaffiliated customers make sure you charge money for it decide whatever the amount is yeah and and from there on then comes the tactics right like how do you how do you go about it first thing is um this is i'm assuming you have done some form of customer discovery spoken to a few people and those guys can be you know your friends and family that's fine your network do discovery you have a very basic bare-bone minimal viable product and then that's when you're going to market so the first thing you need is have that mvp ready have a landing page to use insta page as our home page it has a sign-up form and everything built in and you can customize it so that's great second thing that i will also ask is make sure you know you have something built in from day one that a person can pay so you know because you know getting the payment is is a good skin in the game make sure you know you have some kind of a stripe checkout or something where they can put their credit card you get some kind of money again it's nominal so they can put it on their credit it doesn't really matter so those are two things now once you have your mvp you have your landing page now you go about customer acquisition uh before going over the customer acquisition the first thing is is defining your ideal customer profile is defining your buyer persona who do you sell to and um and we were chatting john is it's very easy for entrepreneurs to go oh i can sell to everybody i can send legion everyone needs leads right so construction companies chemical companies software companies everyone um and for any product like if you think of sales training you can you can think initially everyone and potentially 10 years down the road it might be everyone and i'm i hope it's everyone but early days when you're you know one person three person company you just do not have the bandwidth and resources to go after all of them so it's super important to have a defined ideal customer profile and when defining an ideal customer profile uh one thing i've seen some companies do and we have done it too is it's come up with fancy gimmicky ideal customer profiles meaning saying marketers uh that went to saster or marketers that are part of the abm group or you know jenny who who who's a millennial who listens to justin bieber or something right kind of buyer personas are not helpful they might sound cool and practice one one rule of thumb i read somewhere was your buyer persona is something that you can search on linkedin for example okay um so for example let's say you're going after software companies so initially going after all software companies and maybe you're selling to sales people your buyer persona can be a list of all head of sales in california because you live in california in california that are over 50 employees and more that's a pretty good well-defined buyer persona that you can search on linkedin or any database you get a list of companies um so that's your serviceable addressable market or whatever you call it someone that you can service right now um so that you define that uh don't go it's as i said be be very careful about focusing on who you're serving um so you define that buyer persona um and then you go after them knowing very well that buyer persona is gonna change um so you need to be ready to be i was gonna say that's because i i was gonna chime in there as far as the buyer persona i think a lot of people and this has happened to us a couple of times in my the first few startups was kind of you go in with this perception that hey this is this is who i think this this sells to best but then very quickly you kind of you start to see other people coming in either through lead forms or whatever so how do you how do you identify the shift like where you think it's oh it's this how long do you go into that addressable market before realizing wait a minute i'm i need to adjust this and are there some triggers or some things that you look for that would say we need to make an make a shift and one more part of that is what kind of data what's too much and not enough to collect on those on that lead page or that landing page that'll help you understand because i hopefully as you're kind of going after your ideal customer profile you're doing at least some social and marketing stuff that might drive activity towards your website right so is there anything is there something that you can gather so you can understand a little bit better but then also what are some of the things you look for to make the shift so now that's a great question right so you define your buyer persona and then um after defining the buyer person the goal would be is to target them right you target them whether it's through email uh linkedin um social media ads facebook ads linkedin content and all those things to drive them to talk to you that's that's the that's the that's the first goal right right so one once coming up with the targeting strategy you need to have some kind of a kpi some kind of a hypothesis saying you know this is my total addressable market i'm going to target them through these these channels and i'm going to be talking to at least x number of of them no you need to have that metric from day one whatever that metric is so the first red flag our first signal would be if you follow all these strategies over a month or two month period or whatever time frame you set and you did not hit that goal that should give you a signal saying there's something going on right so you said i'm going to be reaching out to 100 sales people in california over 50 employees and your assumption is at least 10 of those people will have a chat with me not by i'll have a discussion with them let's say and you say set a time frame of 30 days after 30 days go by you probably book one meeting with those 100 people right out out of the gate you start realizing the messaging that you're that you're saying with those audience or sales people it's not resonating right right so that's that's one signal then let's say you did have a chat with those 10 people you did talk to those 10 people when talking with them i think it's super important and this is all sales details and you know all about this john is is is understanding their pain point and and seeing how it fits especially in the early days you're doing more product discovery really you're not going for the hard sell shoving it down their throat um when doing that maybe you you did speak with those 10 people and out of those 10 maybe only one of those people actually said you know this is something that i would pay for i would use right out out of the gate within 30 days you already figured out that maybe it's a sales professionals at companies over 50 employees is not a fit those kind of things would give you an indication saying number of people that reply to your email or come to your website and fill out a form or after having a chat with you say you know what this is i'm not going to pay for it because it's not solving a pain point for me that's those are those are some very concrete signals that give that should give you an indication saying i think it's not the market and it might be it's not sales it might be marketing or it might not be companies over 50 it might be actually companies over 500 employees or companies under 50 employees it might be smaller companies that might have a pain it doesn't mean you have to completely change the product but it means that buyer persona that you define is not going to work so you then define your second set of buyer personals based on what you learned um from the initial discovery so i got a question because i i couldn't agree more in in what i've so my wife started her company and you know i started mine and and i think one of the big things uh you know again from a tactical standpoint is consistency with your message and your presentation and the questions you ask in those first 50 however many meetings so not only the consistency and the message like trying different messages to attract people right to say yes that that initial qualification but then also that qualification call or that that initial meeting i my opinion is you should be or my experience is you should be asking very similar questions to the same type of person and being as objective as you possibly can be so that you can compare that data because unfortunately too many people go in and have really good conversations but they don't really document them in a structured way so they can't really gain data or insights out of those conversations let's figure out okay was it just i wasn't talking to the right person or they just weren't in that scenario that was perfect fit for me or what right so i do believe there there needs to be some consistency around that 100 percent i 100 agree around the consistency and also not leading the the customers your way right let them talk about their pain it's very easy for especially for founders to when talking is like oh we do this what if we had this would you use this yeah yeah i'll use it but you did not actually ask their workflow their pain point so having a consistent question and documenting it so that you know end of the 30 days whatever sprint or time frame you decided you basically can analyze it objectively not i spoke to someone with this question and someone with that question then then you're comparing apples to oranges so that's that's a big thing let me ask you too on on on your approach because you're so you're from an engineer standpoint right you've started companies from an engineer i'm a sales guy i'm about as far away from engineering but my first company that we started was an engineer company was an outsourced it services company and i and i wrote this post a long time ago called uh um the founder's dilemma and and i specifically meant it about engineers founders to limit and it's associated with sales and the question this is going to lead to is basically um you know when do you introduce sales as a founder when do you hire your first sales guy right because my here's my founder here's the founder's dilemma that i've seen all too often engineer like you comes up with a great idea and most engineers say straight up i'm not a sales guy i'm not a sales guy and i challenge them every single time because i'm like bullshit you are a sales guy talk to me about the last product or thing you've developed built and all of a sudden they start telling me about it and they get all animated and super excited about it i'm like look you're in sales like you're trying because sales is the transfer of enthusiasm right in a lot of ways yeah so you know engineer starts a company and they come up with a really good idea and to your point earlier friends family and fools they go and talk to a friendly audience about their product so now they're they're expressing their enthusiasm for their product to a friendly market and that friendly market gives them obviously really good feedback and people say sure let me try it they might even get a few people to pay for it right and at a certain point it's like well shit this stuff's easy like everybody wants this i'm getting such good feedback from people right so you know hey i just gotta hire sales reps let's get let's go and then you give them the slide deck and give them a territory or a quota and say this is how much you need to sell good luck and that fails rep that sales rep inevitably fails miserably because they don't have the same passion for the product they don't have a real understanding they can't really answer all the questions and so then that you know that the an engineer hires three four five sales reps they all fail miserably and then engineers like oh sales sucks you know what let's try to do this from a marketing standpoint instead you know so does that first of all does that paint an accurate picture of of of a lot of engineers who start companies and second of all from your standpoint with that as a context when do you when should you bring in a sales person yeah yeah so first of all this was not scripted right john because this is because you can go read my blog post i wrote this blog post like a year ago called the founders dilemma i actually wrote this as as one of the another points to discuss um one of the biggest mistakes we made was was was this is we we we we raised capital yeah we are we were all all of us were technical founders so first thing we did was hire a vp of sales yeah because we are comfortable with writing code sure sure we're a very bare bone mvp and we told the vp of sales like go sell right yeah single biggest mistake we made because we were uncomfortable selling uh that's that's that so that's that's not our comfort zone so we're like yeah we'll write code sales guy goes sells the the the number of problems that happen from there is first of all um salesperson will not have the same motivation and passion as a founder ever right especially in the early stages your product's not ready um you're not you're not selling a salesforce or a net suite or an oracle product it's not there is not no collateral there is no marketing air cover there there is nothing there is no onboarding material um so if if you bring in a traditional salesperson they would expect some of those things and that that should be there um your set is not built out so they start selling and they hear these pushbacks and and and the the thing that starts happening is as founders you go sales people suck though this this person sucks they're they're not good or and at the same time the salesperson starts going saying the product team sucks they're not building the right product that i can sell and that's a disaster for recipe other things that i recommend is when getting those first 10 20 50 unaffiliated customers the founder should sell yeah it doesn't matter who is selling whether the cto chief product i don't care the founder needs to sell no one will have as much knowledge about the product you're solving as the founders and if you don't have it then you then you are not ready to build the product you need to know the market better than anyone else so and that feedback right isn't that feedback critical for you to come back to the product team and say hey i've been on 15 20 sales calls yeah they keep asking for this feature maybe we should do that versus the sales rep coming back and saying hey uh these guys are asking for this and now the engineering seems like no this is what we do right we're not going to get outside of this but you as a founder can be like we we have to because there's too much market validation for that thing if we don't do that we're going to lose deals right absolutely so one of the common things that happens is and and i i what i would say is it's no fault of the salesperson oh yeah mistake on the founder's end typically one of the things happens is the salesperson goes in tries to sell to an account and the and the client would like this is good but if you guys had this we would pay salesperson without asking the details why would it what their first reaction is okay let me go to the product team hey guys we need this and we are going to close this big account engineering team goes okay uh you know early days we're going to spend two months building this new widget yeah and all the resources now the salesperson goes back to the uh client and the client goes sorry we don't have budget let's let's talk a year this happens every single day what you just did was you destroyed the product culture you demotivated and crushed your product team because they they spent two months working on something that was not useful and the blame is on the founder well but it's usually so that the blame it should be right but then it goes to the sales rep because now the the engineering team gets frustrated with the sales rep continuing to come back and telling them stuff and that stuff not panning out so now the trust in sales is significantly diminished and and and now when a sales rep does come back with a legitimate the engineering team's like yeah no we've been down this road before that's right that that is such a common thing so what i'd say is get your salesperson get yourself as a founder to sell whatever it takes and and you're right if someone says no i i can't sell they're they're lying somebody to investors to other cool for founders to work with you right you you did a sales job you convinced them of the of the exciting opportunity the pain you're solving so you're a salesperson you have to be so you go sell and then what i would say is again i don't think there is a it's a hard metric to be honest with you john which goes to say you know um now i'm gonna flip the switch on and bring my sales team right what what what i would say is keep selling for as long as you can maintain once at a point it comes one metric could be you you have more pipeline than you can manage yourself that's a very good metric to go say you know what i am capped out um like that's one of the things that happened with so we did a product pivot for leads and and one of the things that happened was so i kept selling i'm like i'm gonna sell this um and we went to 50 customers 55 and then one thing happened was my pipeline was so full that i could not persistently follow up with all my pipeline so then we're like okay i've proven it out i know most of these objections and i think it's time to hire a salesperson one interesting thing to also keep in mind is um when you have you know venture capital money or some kind of investor money one of the things our investors told us was um one thing to try it as you scale the business you might be a you might you as a ceo or the founder uh you you might be doing relationship sales your product is probably not that good but you're so persuasive convincing passionate that might make other people sell um so that's that's that's a valid point you you're so passionate you can sell the product better than anyone else but for you but that's not sustainable or scalable right eventually need to hire salespeople and to scale it out so one of the things to do is hire another salesperson and see if he or she can sell the same product assuming the same training has been an onboarding is done can they sell because if they can sell then you just proved out um you initially sold the product and now you have another just a completely new person selling the product as good as you are or better than you then then that's the time to then say you know what now we are going to double down on this yeah yeah so that's that's a big lesson i one of my recommendations because i personally like building sales reps as opposed to buying sales reps right um the the i think it's it'd be great from a lead gen standpoint if if a company can afford it um they hire sales early but don't hire the field sales rep don't hire the one that's going to go close deals yeah go hire an inside young sales rep wants to take a chance you know pay them reasonably but obviously you can pay them less right and then have them do lead gen and cold calling and trying different approaches and managing the campaigns and doing the initial call phase and but then kind of the and then for the founder to go on all those meetings and then as a next step up once that person kind of gets ramped and okay maybe three to six months in start bringing as a as a next level up of a of a kind of a bonus if you will have that person then come on a couple of those really good sales calls with the ceo take notes right so now they're being introduced into this and they can you know because they got the meeting they can set the stage but then really let the ceo take over it yeah and then the ceo mentors that person on more and more sales calls and then transitions for that person to then come in then you hire an inside sales rep to back that kid up and that kid pushes over further and then you start to build this machine right absolutely i i 100 agree is the first sales person that you should hire should not be a field sales like high paying fields it should be an inside sales person who's hungry who's young um who's motivated and let them let them go up the ranks um the person that we we locked out we we hired someone who had one year sales experience yeah closing you know twice the number of deals that i am doing within seven months so love it and and and and now he's he's he's hiring other people to help him out so i 100 agree yeah and actually my profile for that is is that kid who's been in corporate uh who's been trained by my point on this is have somebody else train that kid right so have a name brand you know have a big company go after a big company inside sales yeah because there's always those kids that get into inside sales because they think oh sales is my thing right and then they they they like sales but they don't like the corporate it was kind of like me like i love sales but i hated corporate because i just kept slamming up against this bureaucracy and this red tape and all that other stuff and i was and i didn't know i was a startup guy but i thankfully i was given the opportunity to but i just felt uncomfortable i'm like wait a minute i'm working harder than everybody else here but yet i'm not getting i'm getting the same promotion as that person is that's not fair yeah in startups you find that kid that's already gotten their teeth kicked in on the phone so you're not the first company that's bringing them in right um and they've been trained in some way shape or form by somebody else and they're kind of sitting there going hey i'm frustrated i want to go do more and you can pay them a few bucks right so it's not a hundred percent commission job because yeah 22 25 year old kids are going to stop everything for 100 commission job right and that's not fair on them either yeah yeah exactly so i i love that build out and again let's put things in context here we're talking about you know when you don't get a hundred million dollars in funding right like if you're if you're good enough to create a product and go and get a then go get a big baller vp of sales yeah build out a huge sales team yeah absolutely you're like the other 90 95 of startups where you're scrappy and you're trying to you know figure out things out you get a few bucks on a seed round an angel round or something like that yeah that's kind of the approach that i would take right absolutely absolutely awesome we're wrapping up here i think there's a ton of good stuff out of this as far as charging for your first clients you know focusing on that icp being structured with the way you take notes and so you can have some analytics there and selling to your point and thank you for coming on and saying this and as a ceo being the first sales person and not outsourcing that because you're not only thinking about it from a sales standpoint you're thinking it from a a product development standpoint exactly exactly yeah perfect cool man well uh any last parting thoughts and then and then just tell you know the people how they can uh get in touch with you and in ways they can follow you and yeah and that type of stuff so please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about you know starting up your business you know how to how to you know acquire customers through scrappy tactics uh reach out uh my email is tdas at leadsift.com okay uh you can follow me on twitter it's tdas or connect me with on linkedin uh happy to help i'm also part of the john barris group i make it happen on facebook awesome um and uh happy to help this has been great cool well thank you so much tukhan for all this and for everybody listening really appreciate you guys chiming in and as always make it a great week all right make it happen thanks to god cheers yeah god cheers yeah