Landing a great position with a startup is different from landing a great position with a mature company, or even a growth company. While much has been written to guide engineers and programmers in finding a great position with a startup, I have yet to find anything providing guidance for sales executives. Having just gone through the process successfully myself and now looking from the inside outward, I have isolated seven strategies that I believe are most important if you are looking to land a great sales position with a hot startup.
Perform a Courageous Self-Evaluation
There are two important things you are going to need to know well about yourself. The first is your strengths and weaknesses. The second is what evokes your passion. Take the time to re-evaluate yourself and who you have become today. Knowing your relative strengths and weaknesses is valuable in anyone’s career, but it is essential when it comes to joining a startup. In larger companies there is always someone whose relative strengths can help you compensate for your relative weaknesses. At a startup, you are much more on your own. As such, you must target the sales opportunities that will naturally play to your strengths and leverage as much of your competency and past experience as possible. You also need to understand your passion. Your passion will give you an edge when selling something hardly anyone has purchased and will sustain you when nothing else will.
If you are seriously interested in landing a great sales position with a hot startup, it means that things have not gone as you had hoped since the last time you took a position. This is where courage is required. You need to see clearly what you did wrong and what you did right. You need to distinguish what you learned from what exceeded your aptitude. You need to differentiate unfavorable conditions from the natural outcome of bad choices just as much as you need to differentiate actual skill from dumb luck. It is possible for you to be both your most faithful advocate as well as your harshest critic. Armed with this self-awareness, you will have the skill to both recognize and secure the best opportunities that are out there for you.
Engage Your Extended Professional Network
The internet has done much to shine light on the once “hidden” job market as well as the once “hidden” talent market. But this is less true among startups. Some great startups are overwhelmed with unsolicited resumes due to early media attention, but most are still hidden among the noise. In either case, your extended professional network can assist you in connecting to great opportunities.
When you join a startup, you enter as employee single digit or low double digits. Corporate culture is not yet something that was created by a visionary CEO and an HR Department renamed to something that sounds more cutting edge. In a startup, corporate culture is created by the small number of people that make up the company. As such, when joining a startup, “fit” is particularly important. Your extended professional network can likewise assist you in qualifying opportunities that are the right fit.
Your best contacts in your professional network know you and the value of what you contribute. They are the colleagues in your professional life that rose above the herd in your eyes. And you in turn rose above the herd in their eyes. Engage your professional network and then by referral their professional networks, which is your extended professional network. Your extended professional network can introduce you to opportunities that are for you a gem in the proverbial rough, and provide you access to the entrepreneurs behind these great opportunities. And as you go through the entire process of identifying and ultimately joining the hot startup of your dreams, your extended professional network will be a great source of valuable counsel and feedback.
Research Like a PhD Candidate
At any given time, there are many startups. Most will either fail completely or fail to breakout beyond a small niche. By definition, a startup’s solution is a future proposition. Any business that needed a startup’s solution is already out of business because the solution didn’t even exist six months ago. Will the world embrace it or will the world yawn? You can best answer this question by doing some serious research. As a sales executive, you need to ask how this solution delivers a return on investment and what other solutions might either do a better job or simply bury the startup’s solution in the noise. In order to move forward, you must be convinced the startup’s solution will prevail.
Walk Away From What Feels Wrong
One of the most unexpected aspects of my most recent search was how many times I elected to withdraw myself from consideration: Twelve times. The most common reason was unrealistic expectations. Such entrepreneurs wanted results that I knew I could not deliver because there was either not enough funding or not enough willingness to invest more, and the entrepreneur was looking for a superhuman sales executive to come to the rescue. The second most common was personal style. I knew what kind of work I would need to do, what kind of people I would need to sell to, and what value proposition I would need to communicate in a compelling manner. In many such cases, I simply knew the entrepreneur needed someone else. The final reason won’t be a surprise. Most of the entrepreneurs I have met are truly the most intelligent, most interesting and most inspiring people on earth. But a handful turned out to be people I knew I would never want as my boss, especially in such a tight-knit group as exists in a startup.
Start Before You Are Hired
As a new sales executive at any firm, you need to start by learning the product, its target market and its value proposition. Then you’ll need to make a territory plan. At a startup, you are going to have one large territory to plan. And it will be part of how you will distinguish yourself from your competition in getting hired. This is the major distinguishing factor with a startup. Nobody has ever sold this before. There are no historical metrics. When interviewing for a traditional sales position, hiring managers will look at similar things you have sold and how well you performed relative to your peers and established performance metrics, applying a sales strategy and messaging somebody else developed. When interviewing with a startup, you will need to be able to explain your plan of how you will apply your skills and experience to sell their product successfully, what messaging you would use, what people and businesses you would target and what results you would expect to achieve.
Leverage Your Full Skill Portfolio
Have you ever been interviewed by someone who sees no value in some of your strongest attributes or greatest accomplishments? Recent graduates experience this often. If you went to a competitive school, earned high grades, or were elected to coveted leadership positions—but not your interviewer—many interviewers will act like there is no value. The opposite is true in a startup. While you may be interviewing for a sales role and this will be your primary responsibility, every skill you bring to the table will be valuable.
In my case, I had managed my company’s CRM before. I now manage the CRM at my startup. I also advise my CEO on marketing strategy, hiring decisions, HR policies and corporate structure. I’ve written copy for our press releases and job announcements and even contributed to the corporate blog.
Do not misunderstand me. The vast majority of my time is spent selling. But far too much stuff needs to get done at a startup to squander resources. A startup cannot afford to hire someone who says or even thinks “that is not my job.” Think of it as wearing many hats, many shoes, but only one suit. When looking for a startup and when interviewing, think about how your non-sales skills would add value.
Develop a Great Plan You Will Execute
The evaluation cycle with a startup is a two way street. Both you and the entrepreneur must believe you will find those critical first customers and a solid early revenue stream quickly. By the end of the evaluation cycle you should have a very strong sense of the product, where the market will be found for the product and how to go about winning business for the company. If not, go back and read the section above about walking away. But assuming you have taken the evaluation process this far and you have a great plan to execute, you and your entrepreneur will want to shake hands and make it official. I wish you every success!
Interesting and helpful perspective on joining a start up in a sales role. I particularly liked the section relevant to leveraging your "full skill portfolio". Start ups definitely need to utilize all the skills their people bring to the table and will be more likely to acknowledge that value than a large corporate organization!
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