What is Founder-Led Sales?

If you are the founder of an early-stage B2B technology company, congratulations! One of the many hats that you wear includes being the first salesperson.

The idea behind founder-led sales is simply that you, as the founder, will develop the initial sales process and execute it yourself before hiring a dedicated salesperson.

It is critical that you reach a high level of repeatability and expertise around selling your product before even thinking about transitioning sales to someone outside of the founder team.

Top Sales Tools for Startup Founders and Small Businesses

For early-stage B2B startups where founders lead the sales process, you'll need the right tools to get things started. These early tools and processes will allow you to start experimenting quickly while beginning to build the foundation.

Here are essential sales tools for founder-led sales:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

CRMs are critical for managing leads, keeping track of conversations, and building relationships with potential customers. Founders often juggle multiple tasks, and CRMs help keep things organized.

Google Sheets (Free/Paid) - This web-based spreadsheet will be your first CRM on day one and allow you to easily experiment with important fields to capture and other data. Use Google Sheets until you outgrow it and need a more formal CRM.
Pipedrive (Free Trial/Paid) - A visually stunning CRM made for small businesses. Manage contacts, companies, deals, and more.
HubSpot CRM (Free/Paid) - Offers more advanced features than Pipedrive and includes the functionality to support other go-to-market (GTM) teams, such as marketing and customer success.

2. Lead Generation & Data Tools

Founders need to start to develop target lists of contacts to pursue based on initial personas and ideal customer profiles. These lists will then populate their CRM tools with contact information, conversations, and other activity data.

LinkedIn & LinkedIn Sales Navigator (Free/Paid) - The best tool for finding and engaging potential customers. You can start off with a standard free LinkedIn account which has limited search functionality and upgrade to a paid LinkedIn Sales Navigator when ready to scale.
Hunter.io (Free/Paid) - Helps find and verify email addresses for cold outreach. It has other lead generation functionality as well as integrations in several tools including Google Sheets, Gmail, Pipedrive, and HubSpot.
Apollo.io (Free/Paid) - Combines lead generation with email outreach capabilities. Its search filters are super detailed, allowing you to narrow down target prospects based on criteria like company size, industry, job title, location, technologies used, revenue, and more.

3. Email Outreach Tools

Gmail (Free/Paid) - An email service developed by Google, offering users the ability to send, receive, and organize emails. It's also integrated into Google Workspace.
LinkedIn DM (Free/Paid) - As the world's largest professional networking platform, it features the ability to connect and communicate with about 1 billion professionals globally.
Mixmax (Free/Paid) - An email automation tool that sits on top of Gmail and gives you templates and tracking features.

4. Scheduling and Meeting Tools

Calendly (Free/Paid) - Allows prospects to book meetings directly on your calendar, eliminating email back-and-forth, and offers customizable scheduling options, reminders, and integrations with tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and CRMs to streamline the entire booking process.
Google Meet (Free) - An easy-to-use, integrated option for video calls if using Google Workspace, offering seamless collaboration through features like screen sharing, live captions, and integration with Google Calendar for scheduling and reminders.
Zoom (Free/Paid) - One of the most popular tools for hosting virtual meetings, conducting sales demos, hosting research calls, and more. It also has countless integrations into tools such as note taking apps like Fathom.

5. Sales Asset Creation and Management Tools

‍AssetMule (Free/Paid) - An easy-to-use, affordable solution for creating externally-facing sales assets such as one-pagers, case studies, competitive comparison sheets, sales decks, proposals, and other 1-to-1 sales assets.
AssetMule's Professional Services (Paid) - A service to convert your static PDFs, docs, and decks into interactive sales assets. We'll take your static PDFs, docs, and decks and convert them into web-based assets with interactive components and real-time engagement tracking.

These tools will help you as a founder engaged in selling your product, conduct customer discovery, figure out your initial sales process, and eventually develop the repeatability and expertise required to successfully transition from founder-led sales to a dedicated sales team.

For now, put your head down and get to selling!

💭 P.S. If you need more advice on founder-led selling feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.