Sales Is the Best Training Ground for Future Founders

Good Morning. Welcome back from the long weekend, at least for those of you in the US. Coming back after three days off is never fun, but on the bright side, you've got yourself a short week. On the not-so-bright side, the month isn't over yet, and your quota doesn't care if you have four working days or five. Time to get moving. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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Mark Cuban worked in sales at a software store in Dallas before founding MicroSolutions.

Ray Kroc spent 16 years selling milkshake machines before he discovered McDonald's.

Michael Dell sold newspaper subscriptions at 16 and made $18K in his first year. Two years later, he founded Dell Computers.

There’s a pattern here.

Some of the most successful founders in the last 50 years started in sales.

It makes sense. First Round Capital found that 72% of successful B2B startups had their founders personally close the first million dollars in revenue.

The first thing a founder has to do is sell. The product to customers. The vision to investors. And the opportunity to early hires.

If you're in a sales role right now and you think you might want to start something one day, you're sitting on more opportunity than you realize.

Here's what you should be doing in your day job to set yourself up for your own venture.

There's a big difference between selling a product everyone already knows they need and convincing someone to believe in something that doesn't exist yet.

If you’re willing to learn, sales will teach you both. But the second one is what sets founders apart from a typical sales rep.

If you're pitching investors, there's no product demo to fall back on. And when you're recruiting your first employee, there's no brand recognition or big salary to do your heavy lifting.

You're selling a vision. And in most cases, the only tool you have is your ability to frame a story, build trust, and make someone feel like your thing is worth betting on.

That's what persuasion is. Influencing someone’s beliefs, feelings, or actions. Reps who learn to do that, especially early in their career when nobody's heard of them or their company, are training the skill that founders need.

A shocking number of people in a company don’t truly understand how revenue is generated. But sales reps do (or at least they should).

You’re on the front lines, so you get to see the full picture. What it takes to bring in money. And what needs to happen after a deal closes for the customer to actually succeed.

But you should also go beyond revenue. Figure out where the money goes after it comes in.

What does operations need to do in order to fulfill what you just sold?
How big is the support team, and why?
What does marketing spend to generate the leads you're calling?

If your company shares financials at an all hands, be the person asking questions. Then write the numbers down and do the backwards math. How does the company generate a profit? Or do they generate a profit?

Keep tabs on department sizes, headcount changes, and how cash gets allocated. Pay attention to which teams are growing and which ones are getting cut. Notice why certain employees love working there and why others quietly start interviewing.

Culture, morale, retention. All of this stuff matters when you're the one building a company from scratch, and you can learn for free while collecting a paycheck.

When your manager asks someone to build the onboarding playbook for new reps, do it.

When there's a new hire to train, be the one who runs their first week. When the team needs someone to sit in on interviews, volunteer. This is founder work.

Every early-stage company needs someone who can document a process, train new people, and figure out when it's time to bring on help. You can practice all of it right now with zero risk.

If you build a playbook and it's bad, your manager gives you feedback. If a founder builds a bad playbook, their company tanks and their first three hires quit.

Sara Blakely said that her 7 years of door-to-door fax machine sales gave her the rejection tolerance she needed to launch Spanx.

That part of sales skills transfers automatically. For the operational stuff, you have to go looking for it.

If you’re serious about being a founder one day, the best thing you can do right now is to treat your sales role like a paid apprenticeship in how to run a company.

It’s like college for founders, but you also get paid.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.