With more than 40 years of cumulative experience in strategic selling and leadership, UpTempo's founders regularly share tips we learned along the way.
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I’m a big fan of the writings of entrepreneur and author Eric Reis, because he expertly articulates what it means for an early-stage company to test hypotheses, iterate based on results, and evolve. Most Founders start with domain expertise, ambition, and connections, but very few can build the test-centric culture that Reis advocates.
Many Founders must decide whether to hire a marketing leader before a sales leader or vice versa. Rather than fixating on those roles' responsibilities and goals, consider the tests your business needs to conduct. It only makes sense to build a sales team after you have proven specific hypotheses - because a sales team is an amplifier and accelerator of product-market fit, not a builder of product or market. Consider the examples listed below:
Try to answer some of the left-side questions before you scale a sales team. Then, ensure you have sales representation (individual contributors or testing the items on the right side of the table. Mixing up the order of these steps will frustrate your underutilized sales team or stunt your ability to hone your product-market fit. The lessons on the left side can be learned by founders alongside product and marketing leaders.
Of course, each column has many more rows of questions that can be added. What would you add?
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