🎯 4 First Steps to Sales for B2B Startups


➡️ Competitor analysis

Spend the time to get this right, because a lot fo what you do will flow from this.

Arm yourself and your employees with the information they need to be confident in their actions, and their judgement.

You need to go deep.




➡️ Unique selling points (USPs)

If you understand your competitors, and hopefully understand your own business, you'll now know where you stack up, and where your strengths are.

If you've built an SaaS, you should have done this **before** you built it, not when you were ready to go to market.

Hopefully, you've got a real competitive advantage, and have build that into your "product".

EVEN BETTER, if you've been reading Category Pirates, and have been learning to become legendary, and not just basing yourself of what's there in the status quo.

🔑Have your USP(s) written down, and visible to the entire organisation. Yes, the ENTIRE organisation. Your employees are prospecting for you no matter who they're with, or where they are. If they can clearly state your USP, you're a chance connection away from a new client. ++ it gives everyone clarity on what you do and what your priorities are.


➡️ Who is your ideal customer?

1. Define who you need to be selling to (not who you want to sell to)
2. Define who you should NOT be selling to, even if it turns out to be who you WANT to sell to

You'll be surprised how precise you need to be here.

Get targeted penetration to start with (i.e. lead with the tip of the spear), rather than going for a broad scattershot approach.

Define your marketing and everything you do around your specific ICP, speak to them.

If you really have multiple, some people do, build out targeted landing pages for other ICPs – don't rely on just your homepage.



➡️ Buyer personas

What pain points are these people feeling, what solutions are they looking for, what keeps them up at night, what frustrates them?

DON'T bombard people with the features of your product, UNLESS you're tying it to a pain point.

Focus on BENEFITS, not features.