The 0→1 Sales Kit

Permission to Do Less, Close More

📚 Important Context: This is an 80/20 sales course designed to give you the absolute minimum necessary to be effective at founder-led sales. It's meant to get you excited about sales, help you do less (but accomplish more), and start conversations that lead to early traction.

❌ What This Is Not:‍
- This isn't a graduate-level, exhaustive sales program.
- This is not a lesson in enterprise sales.
- This is not a declarative, singular approach to sales.
- This is not a silver bullet.
- These are frameworks and ideas you can adapt to sell in most situations.

🎥 How to Use This Content: This curriculum is designed to be consumed via video. The written content serves as a framework and reference guide, but the nuance, examples, and deeper insights live in the video content. Use these documents as your roadmap and reference, not as standalone instruction.

Module 0: Introduction to Sales

• Intro to Sales for Founders
• The Founder's Sales Mindset

Module 1: Sales Foundations

(Dispelling Myths & Setting Expectations)

• What You Actually Need to Sell
• Outreach Math: Setting Your North Star

Module 2: Generating Conversations

• Building Your Sales Experimentation Framework
• Messaging Fundamentals
• How to Manage a Pipeline (Pre-Meeting Booked)

Module 3: Demonstrating Value

(The Founder-Led Sales Call)

• Part 1: Qualifying with Questions
• Part 2: The "Show, Don't Tell" Demo
• Part 3: Presenting the Offer
  
  • Step 1: Choose a pricing model
  • Step 2: Set your price & defend your value
  • Step 3: Package the experience

Module 4: Closing the Deal

(And Ensuring Customer Success)

• The Simple Close & How to Get Paid
• Founder-Led Onboarding (How to Reduce False Positives)

Intro to Sales for Founders

💡 Key Idea: Founder-led sales means building a system that uses your natural strengths (whether you're a builder, expert, or problem-solver) to help customers succeed. You don't need to become a different person.

✋ Permission Slip: You have permission to not love sales. You can be incredibly effective by building a system that works for you, rather than forcing yourself into a role that feels wrong. Focus on getting results, not loving the process.

📊 Outcome

By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:

• See sales as "helpful problem-solving" instead of high-pressure tactics
• Understand the idea of a "seller type"
• Understand that sales is learnable skills, not personality

🎯 The Founder's Sales Dilemma

"I built this product because I'm good at building things, not because I wanted to become a salesperson."

A technical founder of a B2B SaaS startup told me this. It sounds familiar to most founders. Building a great product is only half the work. The other half (getting people to pay for it) feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

Going from builder to seller is one of the hardest mental changes founders face. But here's what successful founders figure out: You don't need to become someone else. You just need to build a system that uses who you already are.

✅ Reframing Sales: From Pushy to Helpful

First, let's change how you think about "sales."

Traditional sales makes you think of aggressive tactics, manipulation, and pressure. But modern founder-led sales works differently:

Good sales means helping people solve problems they already have, using your solution.

When you've built something that delivers real value, sales becomes:

1. Finding people with the problem you solve
2. Helping them understand how you solve it
3. Making it easy for them to start getting that value

You're not manipulating anyone. You're connecting your solution with people who need it.

✋ Permission Slip: You have permission to stop thinking about "closing" and start thinking about "helping." If you genuinely believe your product helps, your main job is to make that help easy to get. This changes a pressure-filled conversation into collaborative problem-solving.

🛠️ Sales as Learnable Skills, Not Personality

"I'm just not a sales person."

This assumes sales ability is something you're born with. But sales is actually a set of learnable skills and processes. Your background as a builder, creator, or expert helps you, it doesn't hurt you.

What's Your Founder Sales Type?

None of these founder sales types need to have a sales background. Instead, they built sales systems that used their natural strengths while learning specific skills to cover their weak spots.

🎯 The Product-Sales Reality Check

If you're consistently pulling out every sales trick, offering massive discounts, creating complex pilot structures, and still struggling to close deals after multiple iterations, that's usually a product problem, not a sales problem.

I've been involved with companies where despite all the sales gymnastics - the discounting, the pilots, the custom demos - it remained incredibly difficult to sell. The real question wasn't "how do we get better at sales?" It was "are we building the right thing?"

This doesn't mean sales is easy when you have a good product. You still need to:

• Find the right people
• Communicate value clearly
• Handle objections professionally
• Make buying easy

But if you're consistently hitting walls despite good execution, step back and ask: "Is this solving a real, urgent problem for people who can pay to solve it?"

Your job as a founder: Build something people actually want, then make it easy for them to get it. Sales becomes the bridge.

🚀 What's Next?

In the next module, we'll dig into the founder's sales mindset. You'll learn the mental frameworks that keep you resilient, curious, and focused on the right activities. Think of it as the the mental reframe for everything else you'll build.

After that, we'll get tactical. You'll figure out what you actually need to start selling (spoiler: it's way less than you think), then build your outreach math so you know exactly how much activity leads to results.