How Startups Sell Without a Sales Team

Before you automate sales, understand your human customer

It’s every founder’s dream, right? You wake up in the morning, go to a dashboard, and bask in the sweet glow of how much product you sold yesterday.

But it’s more likely that a company’s leadership team wakes up in the morning and waits for the customer relationship management (CRM) system to get updated. And waits. And waits. And then, by the end of the day, they realize nothing was closed. Or maybe it was and it will all come cascading in on Friday afternoon.

One of the most difficult functions for any company to put trackable numbers around is the sales funnel. How many prospects are in the funnel? How many of those are actually qualified prospects? What’s the likelihood the prospects are closed at each level? Have any of them closed? Why aren’t they closing?

The usually vague answers to these questions are even more vague when your company is a startup. That lack of clarity screams for automation.

All selling can be automated, but not automatically

If car dealerships can replace salespeople — and I’m looking at Carvana, TrueCar, and the like — any startup can automate the sales process of any product. But automated…