4 builders who never spoke to each other

Treat selling as a skill and practise it early

Selling is built from repetitions, so start with something small and immediate: five seats at a workshop, a spreadsheet, a phone call, a hundred people you help for nothing. Deferring it until the product is ready means learning the hardest skill at the worst possible moment.

The method

1. 01

   Treat selling as a skill you build with reps over years, and get out and sell something early rather than deferring it until an exit that may never come.

2. 02

   Getting five people to pay for a one-day workshop is a lower bar than selling software to strangers online, so use it as sales practice.

3. 03

   Practice the manual sales loop deliberately: write a pitch, build a prospect list, contact each person one at a time, and keep following up until they say yes or no.

4. 04

   Getting good at selling matters at least as much as getting good at the craft, and trying to help everyone is what stalls a services business.

5. 05

   Use a small content product as your training ground for selling, since it goes out fast and needs almost no upkeep, leaving you free to practise the sales side without support tickets and bugs eating the time.

What it returned

• 15

  Justin sold door-to-door as a kid, then t-shirts and concert tickets in high school, web development in college, and 15 years of software and recurring plans, and still wants more sales practice; on his first day in software his boss handed him a phone to work inbound leads.

• Glen Allsopp says he gave up on selling SEO services for a time, and puts the failure down to not deciding who he wanted to help or how. His own advice is to read books on sales, hunt down every agency owner interview available, and approach agency owners offering value first.

• Ryan of Damn Good Leads offers this as a challenge to anyone who dislikes cold email

Sources

• The $122Bn SEO Industry: 32 Success Stories (with Revenue Numbers) for 2024 - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Building a Profitable SEO Agency (Based on Personal Experience) · 2023-01-23
• ⭐️ The different kinds of humble businesses you can build – Jakob GreenfeldJakob Greenfeld · jakobgreenfeld.com · Physical product vs . a software product vs. content product · 2020-07-20
• Unconventional bootstrapping: round 1Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · 2. Make sales now (instead of later) · undated
• Startups should make moneyJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · The devaluation of sales · undated
• One thousand replies to cold emailsHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · One thousand replies to cold emails · undated