Lecture 19 - Sales and Marketing; How to Talk to Investors (Tyler Bosmeny; YC Partners)

Keep talking. Okay, great. Um, so, okay, great. Thanks for having me. So, my name is Tyler. I'm the CEO of Clever, and what I want to talk today is about sales, and I have a little bit of insight into this.

Um, I graduated college. I actually studied math and statistics, probably like some of you here in this room, and thought I was destined for this world of finance. I was about to go start a hedge fund, and at the last second, a friend of mine roped me into joining his startup and asked me to do sales there, which was something that I knew nothing about.

So, I had to figure out on the fly and spent a couple of years there figuring out sales for this very early stage company. Then, when it came time to start Clever, you know, we started Clever, and I did it with two co-founders who were very technical and one very product-oriented. We wanted to build this product for schools, and I thought that experience would have no relevancy whatsoever.

Um, but it turns out that some of the things that I picked up at this previous job, where I was figuring out sales, have been huge parts of what's made Clever grow so quickly today. A quick background on Clever: we build software for schools. We are an app platform used by developers, and it's used today by about one in five schools in America. Um, and we started it about two years ago.

So, sales has been a key piece of that, and I want to use this time to just share some of the things that have worked for me along the way. Of course, there's a million ways to do this, so you'll find what works for you.

So, first, I want to start about how I used to perceive sales. A lot of people see sales as having this, you know, a lot of mystique around it. You know, it's people who are, uh, you know, really articulate and impossibly charming, and they have these, you know, killer closing lines that they use. I think this is how I saw sales, and I think this is how a lot of founders I talk to see sales because they say things to me like, you know, "We're just going to work on the product and build a great product, and then when it's finally finished, we're going to hire the salespeople."

What I've learned is that hiring the salespeople as a founder, the reality is that's you. So, you know, Paul Graham likes to talk about how there's two things you should be doing at any point in time when you're starting your company. Uh, you're either talking to your users or you're building your product, and that talking to your users part, that's selling.

So, you know, this is intimidating to some people 'cause like, "I've never done sales," and "I wouldn't even know where to begin." Uh, but it turns out that as a founder, you have some unique advantages that make it, uh, possible for you to be really, really good at sales. Um, and one of those is your passion for the product and what you're building, and the second is your industry knowledge of what you're, of the industry and the problem that you're solving.

And those two things actually totally trump sales experience, from what I've seen. So, uh, this is actually my co-founder doing sales. This is what sales looks like, you know, in the very earliest days of a startup. It's not Don Draper; it's a lot of calls like these.

Um, but this is something that, uh, even as a founder who's never done it before, it's very easy to do. But you have to commit yourself, and what we did at Clever was we dedicated, uh, one founder, which was me, to peel off and say, "Okay, Tyler, you got to go figure this out," and, um, and work on this full time because it's so important to our business.

So, a couple of things that I've picked up about sales along the way in trying to figure this out: you know, the first thing that everybody knows about sales is they say, "Okay, it's a funnel," and you have these different stages of the funnel, and you move your customers through it.

Um, pretty common categories: there's this prospecting category where you're trying to figure out, uh, who's even interested. Then you're having a lot of conversations, which is a second level of the funnel. Then you're finding out who's...