Welcome to Decoding Sales, a podcast where an engineer, that's me Alice, and a salesperson, that's me Peter, talk

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

In this episode we're going to talk about founder-led sales mistakes.

Mistake number two, not disqualifying bad fit leads.

Peter, I'm really excited for this topic because this is, I think, as you put it,

one of the most important things people can get wrong.

So tell me a little bit when you're talking about this, what are the kinds of situations you're thinking about?

Yeah, I think there's a few situations.

One is founders who are trying to chase the shiny logo and get enamored by that without

realizing that maybe the paint point isn't a good fit or your solution doesn't quite

address what they're looking for.

I think that's really dangerous because no matter

how notable the logo is, if they're

going to suck up a lot of time

and ultimately not procure your platform,

that's going to eat into your resources and you don't have a lot of that as a startup, right? your even if you're not dealing with like a Nike or Home Depot, you could also waste a lot of time with smaller

companies too, because you have this thought that your product is a fit when it's not.

So I think it's just really important when you have limited resources and that's a lot more of an acute pain point when you're a startup to ensure you're working with people who have a high chance of closing and that align with your way of thinking about the world.

That makes sense, that's great.

So for those two examples, what are the signs that you're in a deal process with someone that you should be getting out of.

Yeah, I think there's a few signs. One is, you know, we talk about this in the pitch deck episode

as like the pitch deck being a qualification tool versus a pitch deck and so when you're asking

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