Well — who else is there?
I was somewhat terrified of sales in both my start-ups in the early days. I was OK at “business development” but was not trained in sales and was a bit intimidated by it.
But what are your choices? You can go hire a “sales person”. But that almost never works in the very early days:
- How can you hire someone to sell something that no one has sold before?
- How can you train someone to sell something you’ve never sold before?
- And when it’s hard — and boy, it’s hard to sell a brand-new product with no brand equity — how will you identify the root cause?
If you truly can’t sell as the first salesperson, yes go hire someone. But usually, you have to close the first 3–5–10 customers yourself to know anyone, and prove enough, to bring someone in to help.
