Many B2B tech founders struggle to successfully make their first sales hire. Why is it so difficult? There are three main reasons. 1) what sales support founders think they need and what they actually need to get their business to scale are often misaligned. Founders often lean towards salespeople with the best rolodex or who are the most extroverted, neither … Read More
It’s February! Where did January go and what did we achieve? (There’s a song in there somewhere.) If you’ve read our earlier posts on the journey you’ll know that we have outsourced our product development to a firm in Ukraine and we continue to ready ourselves for launch in parallel with various marketing activities. Firstly, the product development. The design … Read More
Execution around sales and marketing remains a major challenge for B2B tech startups looking to move along the growth/valuation curve. Despite founders readily accepting the importance of sales and marketing in moving from startup to scale-up, execution remains a major barrier to success. As a gauge of the challenge, less than 1 in 5 startups accepting seed investment ever make … Read More
One thing I missed in part 1 of this journey diary was the development of a messaging framework for The Right Five. This was almost a day 1 activity after we said “we’re doing this”. The messaging framework ensures you communicate consistently across all channels. It’s based on traditional PR practices and looks to consistently establish (in 25 words, 50 … Read More
In our last post we looked at our journey to date. For this and future posts we’ll be looking forward and detailing our on-going progress – a living, breathing account of the birth and growth of a bootstrapped B2B tech startup. As of today, January 4th, 2022 our MVP (sales recruitment technology focused on the unique requirements of the first … Read More
We thought it would be fun/useful/interesting to create a blog series that tracks our journey. This is different to the usual ‘how they were successful’ story in that it’s a real time account (this first post excepted) of what we’re up to, our strategies and tactics, our successes and failures, warts and all. This first post is a brief catch … Read More
You’re a B2B tech founder. You’ve won some early deals proving that some people will pay for a solution to a problem you address. What now? How do you scale the knowledge and passion that you’ve inevitably brought to those early forays into the market? The temptation (and well trodden approach) is to look to hire as ‘experienced’ a salesperson … Read More
Many B2B tech founders struggle to successfully make their first sales hire. The Right Five automatically delivers the right five candidates for interview, thereby, saving time and getting the right person into the market quickly. Certainly for founders with a non-Sales background, making that first Sales hire is likely to be the hardest they’ll ever make and one which can … Read More
You’re a bootstrapped B2B tech founder. You’ve done much of the hard work building a product, getting it to market and closing those first deals. What’s more, you’ve done it and, likely, not drawn a salary. It was tough, wasn’t it? Maybe even a little uncomfortable for founders with a more technical background. It would be natural to now want … Read More
OK, not that kind of agility. You’ve heard of the great resignation, something we looked at from the standpoint of hiring your Pathfinder salesperson in a recent post. Let’s look in more detail at how you can view this unprecedented moment in time more opportunistically, more offensively. Perhaps in this crazy world any hire and associated hiring process must seem … Read More
