(I am the CEO of Sourcegraph, an enterprise software company, and Pete’s advice has been directly helpful to us.)

I haven't read the book you mentioned, but have come across it a few times previously.

If you're wondering how the S4F course is different from this book (or other sales resources, such as Steli Efti's amazing content on early-stage sales), maybe this analogy will help:

Most sales resources are like programming tutorials - they'll teach you how to write a for loop, for example.

The S4F course, by comparison, doesn't teach you how to do sales prescriptively, so much as helps you debug how you're already doing sales reactively.

This is (in my experience after several iterations of the course) much more effective at helping you get sales results - as the real difficulty isn't in working out how to do sales, but instead in diagnosing what has gone wrong in the first place.

Happy to answer any questions (also about sales more generally).

That used to deter me as well. My line of thinking was: if the problem X is already solved by N companies, why should I launch yet another competitor? Now that I'm wiser, my answer is "because people are familiar with the problem, are already paying for the solution, which means there's a market for that". I can't stress the last point enough. The market that you choose to serve will determine most of your growth (some markets are harder to get into than others, though).

In essence, you swap an idea validation challenge with a sales and marketing challenge. If all you're looking for is building a small, independent, and sustainable business, I believe this is the most optimal approach to take.

For the context: I run a B2B SaaS in a competitive market.

This is temporary, but it is a loop that comes again and again between projects.

Being a founder / CEO is the closest thing to magic in sales. While it's certainly hard moving into a sales role, you will come across as far more credible than any salesperson you'll ever hire.

Hell, your first and third sentences basically sums up your pitch. It's going to be a lot more convincing coming from you, the person who knows the infrastructure and the product than a salesperson.

Good founders tend to be involved in sales for a while. Not to say you will be doing it forever, but if you can't close customers, you'll also struggle to close candidates & investors. Sales is a critical skill that you simply must learn.

I've seen quite a few founders try this, and it normally ends badly.

There are two main drawbacks...

1. The salesperson effectively becomes the CEO. They understand the customers better, have the relationships, and may not get all of this across to you - especially in the event they leave suddenly.

2. If you hire a salesperson without knowing how to sell your product (and some results already), you'll never know if it's your salesperson or your product that is underperforming. And you'll have no idea how to fix it.

I don't know what the best solution for you is, but consider looking into the Mom Test book to help you learn how to get from zero to one by talking to customers. It's a great book, and required (included) reading as part of my S4F course.

Good luck!

If the direct customer doesn't know, ask for introductions to the people who might. This gets you ahead of any type of issues that could possibly pop up in these types of situations.

In the end, always start by listening to the customers needs and asking the right questions to understand everything you need to qualify the deal.

The easiest way to overcome it is to reframe the problem.

Instead of asking "how do I go from yes to paid invoices", ask yourself "how do I change the default outcome from they don't buy my product to they buy my product".

This involves setting up a shared success plan with the customer.

Mark Fershteyn talks about how to do this in depth on a podcast episode we recorded last year: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-close-y...

There are thousands of 'successful' cold email templates and guides out there for free, for example. You don't need another one.

But they probably won't work for you - any more than downloading the Uber app onto your phone will teach you how to build your own ride-sharing app.

Instead, I focus on the fundamentals of sales - how to approach finding potential customers, understanding them, and creating a shared success plan that results in them 'default buying'.

A lot of that will be very useful outside of B2B sales...

- consulting - hiring - applying for jobs - press outreach - pitching investors

I assume someone has already created a great resource on press outreach which would be higher impact for you than taking this course, but it would definitely help.

Same reasons apply here...

- I want to give you time to see bits of the course and learn about whether it's a good fit for you before making a (nontrivial for some people) purchase

- I want to make sure you're the right fit for the course too

- You're more likely to purchase after getting to know me and the course content, understanding the value, and overcoming your objections

Asking for your email address is the happy middle ground of "can I buy you a drink" between "saying nothing" and "asking someone to marry you".

But that's not what this website appears to targetting: https://salesforfounders.com/

My perception is that 90% of the sales people I meet are unpleasant just like 90% of the ads I see are bad. Then you come across a cool Hermes advertisment that you want to sit through because its beautiful.