Enterprise Sales | Startup School

Y Combinator Group Partner, Pete Koomen, led his startup, Optimizely, to $100M ARR. In this video, Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup.

00:00 - Intro
03:29 - Prospecting
05:15 - Outreach
10:09 - Qualification
15:00 - Pricing
18:13 - Closing
18:58 - Avoid surprises in procurement process
20:02 - Implement
22:01 - Outro

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Chapters (Powered by ChapterMe) -
00:00 - Intro: Sales process tips for founders
03:29 - Prospecting for potential customers
03:48 - Sales hypothesis and prospecting tips
05:15 - Outreach: List of leads for sales outreach
05:30 - Cold outreach vs inbound demand
06:30 - LinkedIn leads, cold emails, effective approach
06:59 - Cold emails waste time, encourage bad customers
08:21 - Founders waste time trying to sell products to startups
08:47 - Example: Building productivity software without coordinating with teams
10:09 - Qualify & Follow-up: Sales funnel mistakes ask questions, avoid adversarial approach
12:01 - Prospect doesn't care about problem, but offers solution
12:37 - Product Demo: Don't show off product, solve audiences' problem
13:42 - Demos have flow, magic moments
14:35 - Demo-friendly, cost-effective pricing tips
15:00 - Pricing: Advice for startups wait, ask questions, experiment
15:53 - Experiments, pricing flexibility, and surprise
16:44 - High prices lead to sales success
17:25 - Price negotiation tips for first-time salespeople
18:13 - Closing is not a single conversation
18:58 - Avoid surprises in procurement process
20:02 - Implement
21:40 - Roadmap for sales funnel success
22:01 - Outro

[jayesh_khanna]

I was watching this insightful video, and it got deleted halfway through! Was eagerly waiting for the reupload, thankss!!!

[igorstjepanovic]

This video is pure gold. 100% correct based on my own experience as a founder. Bookmark this video folks, and watch it at least once a month!

[khairm]

Advice this specific and tactical is gold especially with the reasoning behind it

[productfeedback]

Can confirm this with 15 years of experience, ask the right questions

[gedossman]

Great video!
Especially on the importance of implementation stage!

at Interf, our initial idea was to build an AI adoption agent to help vendors with the implementation stage - still believe it's a good problem to solve!

[samgeorge]

If folks are contemplating with cold emails like me, Pete said it right. If you are not gonna be excited reading the email you are sending, then your prospect won't either. I just needed to hear this to trust my intuition. Mass email campaigns are perhaps not for early stage enterprise sales.

[Marco-wzxw]

ABSOLUTELY great content! A must watch for a whole sales team! I’ll certainly come back to it many times until I have memorized it, haha. Thank you for sharing! 🎉

[arpitsingh]

Is there any yc audience group? Or can we create one? Imagine all people watching this in a community. Because of yc s wisdom amazing products and programs can emerge. Looking forward

[samgeorge]

Pete is absolutely right! There is demand for this information. For early stage startups dealing with top-down enterprise sales, this info is golden.

[NathanRomeiro-Nzero]

Great video!!
Fundamentals were very clear. Now its time to act on it!!!

[susan]

This is incredbly good! I hope Mr. Koomen does more videos. There are too many "how to sell" videos for start-ups that just yammer on about all the stupid things founders do, instead of telling the viewer what is the right thing to do and why

[AbhishekPatel-siuq]

Yes. This is helpful. Applicable right now and we are going to meet to take action following this immediately.

[iyebiyeolawuyi]

Really nice information. Thanks for sharing. But then, about not showing them your product on the first call. If you're selling to lawyers for example whose time is really valuable and change clients by the hour. How easy would it be to book a 2nd call with them when you only managed to book the first call (especially when you hadn't shown them the product yet in the 1st call)?

[entrepreneuw]

This is pure gold! Thank you Pete Koomen and YC for sharing this content! ❤

[Guanggge]

if you get a customer paying for high price, but you launched early and product quality is not on par will they loose trust on you?

[CreativeDm]

Is Founding Sales free onilne? Can anyone point me to the pdf / site?

[elliottbailey]

@0:46 whup! time to go.there goes the corny side view angle

[hustlin_heev]

This was a great video, I really enjoyed watching it.

If you have a product where the person experiencing the problem everyday and searching for a solution is a lower level employee who must have approval from the higher ups to purchase new software, do you do cold outreach to them or to their higher ups?

[Nadyusa]

Agree the most useful thing I’ve seen so far. And I reckon the strategy can be applied for landing a high profile job as well ;)