Lesson: Sales Market Fit with Whitney Sales

Step #1 Sales Method: Getting to sales market fit

Sales is basically the exchange of goods or services for money. That's the most basic sense of what sales is. There are a lot of actual negative stereotypes around sales itself. I think a lot of it has to do with Hollywood and "Glengarry Glen Ross" and the "Boiler Room" scenario.

But in reality, to me, sales is actually helping businesses make the best decision in regards to the products and services to grow their business. When you frame it from that standpoint, it's actually really important as a startup because they're trying to target the customers that are the best fit for their solution.

My name is Whitney Sales and I founded a method called the Sales Method. Essentially it's the philosophy of sales market fit. We all know what product market fit is--finding a market where you have a product that satisfies a market need.

The lean methodology that's been developed for startups has done a fantastic job from the product development standpoint and helping us find our MVP. There have been some methodologies that have come out as well around lean sales. But a lot of them don't actually cover the go-to-market strategy and how you actually find a solution that's going to be in a product that not only is going to be a good fit for your market but you can actually have that solution that you can actually reach that market.

So if we look at what sales market fit is, it's looking at the lifetime value of the customer and what the cost is to sell and market to that group of customers. There really is an element in which sales and marketing can work together. This is actually a really critical piece when I talk about my sales methodology. It's the intersection between sales, marketing and product. That's really where growth hacking fits in a lot of cases. We look at it as this. There's marketing. There's SEM. There's the area in which you're creating your product or helping your product actually go viral.

But then there's also this element within using every sales opportunity as a marketing opportunity, using customer feedback to develop your product and actually develop a product that your customers are really going to want. And then there's using the element of every product iteration as a marketing opportunity. In my opinion, this is where growth hacking really sits.

When I decide to work with a startup, there are a couple of different things I actually look for in the startups I work with. The "if you build it, they will come" element, it does actually happen in some markets. The developer tool space is actually a really good one for initial traction for low-cost products.

But as you start to grow your database of customers and developer tool space or if you have an enterprise solution or a mid-market solution or even a low-cost solution, you start to see that initial traction. The founder is starting to sell and they're really trying to develop a methodology and scale out their team and create a process.

That's really where I come in. When I look at who to work with, I look at founders, number one, who have started to sell themselves. They actually know what the market is looking like and they know that they've done a great job, but they know they can do better. They want to figure out how to scale the market fit.