Introducing the Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales

Today, we’re launching the Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales, a guidebook written to help founders and CEOs to build, manage, and scale a sales force.

As the author of the guide, I’d like to share some quick thoughts on what this covers, and who it’s designed to help. 

It is a seven-part guidebook designed to help founders build, manage, and scale a sales force. Because most founders come from a product-oriented background and every founder should be their company’s best salesperson, the guide starts from scratch with an introduction to the fundamentals of sales.

The seven parts of the guide are:

1. Selling. The seven things all founders should know about sales.
2. Building. How to build both a sales model and a sales force.
3. Managing. Day-to-day management of the sales force — and the sales pipeline.
4. Renewing/expanding. The role of customer success and the common models for sales/success interaction.
5. Marketing. The basics of marketing, with an emphasis on pipeline creation.
6. Partnering. The key types of partners and relationships, an often overlooked areas for increasing sales leverage.
7. Planning. How to plan growth with an emphasis on models and performance metrics.

While the guide is written primarily for founders and CXOs, I believe it should be useful to anyone with an interest in sales and marketing (S&M) — e.g., developers, product managers, and aspiring executives. Most software companies spend between 1.5 and 2.0 times more on S&M than on research and development (R&D), so I’d argue anyone with an interest in the business of software could benefit from learning this material.

Everything a Founder/CEO needs to know about building and managing a B2B sales team.