Welcome to Decoding Sales. A podcast, we're an engineer. that's me, Alex, and a salesperson.

That's me, Peter.

Talk about the art and science of sales as relates to life and business.

In this episode, I'm really excited.

We're going to talk about something that I think is going to really matter to a lot of founders

who are looking at this call. Specifically, what they're doing wrong?

A. K. A. What are the top mistakes that Peter is seeing early stage founders make in their sales process.

How are they losing deals, wasting time, and leaving money on the table?

So Peter, I'm really excited for this because I feel like you have your pulse on really the heart of early stage sales and that's why people love working with you and hearing from you so just kick us off like tell us a little bit about maybe like is there a great anecdote you can share of like

somebody who really hit a wall here and what was the blocker and how did they ever come?

Yeah, so I'll actually if you don't mind I'll just lay out all three at a high level right now. I'll just name them and then we could dive into each one.

Let's do it. Let's give that TLDR for folks who are just diving in. Exactly. So the most common things I see is first of all treating outbound as if you're a known

brand so I think a lot of founders are over explaining their product not investing a ton into their personal

brand, and it shows in generic outbound messaging.

So that's the first thing.

Second thing I see a ton of is not disqualifying bad fit leads early enough. So a lot of founders I talk to are

spending way too much time on deals that are never going to close. The last thing that is a big mistake

is a lot of founders I think end up negotiating against themselves

With regards to setting the price point and understanding what the true value of their product is there's a lot of assumptions being made around what

specific companies can afford and not a lot of proactive work around this is the

price because of XYZ reason and I'm confident in the premium nature of that price.

So those are the three at a high level that I see commonly in my coaching sessions, things that I need to coach into founders as a mentality shift to get away from

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