Bowery Capital’s Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Ellen Lobiondo. I'm the Director of Growth at Bowery Capital and I've spent my career in sales. I started as an SDR at a company called Rocket Trip where I was the first SDR to be promoted into an enterprise account executive role. I then went on to be an AE at a variety of different companies and I most recently led and built the STR function at a company called Catalyst. Barry Capital is a New York and San Francisco based VC firm. We invest in B vertical and horizontal sass. We focus on precede and seed stage funding. Bowery Capital's philosophy when it comes to what most VC's call the platform team is a large emphasis on go to market. So we look at the data year over year, but what we found is that a lot of founders and startups really struggle to go raise a successful Series A because they haven't hit the right revenue milestones. So it's really intentional. That we built out what we call the acceleration team to have a primary focus on all things go to market, that's sales, marketing and customer success. I work with our founders across all things go to market. And so there are certain founders who have never sold before. They are technical leaders, they are product leaders. And so they don't have that muscle built. And so I can layer in at a really strategic level and a hands on level with these founders to make sure that they're setting up the right processes to be successful. And really staying focused on what is really critical and raising that successful Series A, which is revenue. So there's four things that I recommend founders really focus on. One of them is a go to market playbook. So you should begin documenting your processes as early as possible, starting with who you're selling to, how you plan on getting in front of these folks, what your sales process looks like, what qualification framework you're going to be using, and you really want to be running through your sales process. As consistent as possible so you can actually begin to iterate on what the right process looks like for your organization. The net result is a training material. So there's a certain point in time we're going to be ready to hire a salesperson and you want that person to be successful, right? So you're spending your time as a founder trying to create this repeatable process. If you document early on, you're going to save yourself so much time in the end and have a really amazing training material. They also keep yourself super focused during those early stages of selling. Another thing that I think is really critical founders focus on in the early days is your first 10 customers. So being really particular about your ICP is important for multiple reasons. But if you have an enterprise ICP, for example, that can be thousands of companies and it should be. But your first 10 customers become part of your story, right? So whether or not you're signing them on as design partners or full annual contracts, you want to make sure a those companies align with the vision of your. Product and what you're building towards that you're going to be able to retain those customers and then they're not gonna take too much away from your team. From a customer success perspective it's also really important that you can get in front of these organizations. So do you have a path can you break in through network introductions or through cold outbound? We want to make sure that you're not. Overdoing it on the go to market side, right? I think founders can actually waste a lot of time trying to get as many introductions as possible doing cold outreach. Take your time, be intentional. If you focus on these organizations, you're going to be able to break in. Many founders think that they need a robust tech stack in the early days to support volume and to keep them organized. You do you need specific tooling in place in order to be successful. CRM, of course, being the most. Important one, with the introduction of AI, it is really overwhelming out there with how many tools can actually be very impactful in your go to market efforts. But you want to be really intentional about how you use AI. I highly recommend not using tooling that's going to impersonate you. You want to have control over your voice as well as who you are as a founder trying to get net new leads and really build relationships with your ICP. So you wanna more so lean on tooling that's going to help expedite your processes. Things like clay or ocean IO that really focus on ICP and account building. Think about tooling is going to help expedite your research, that you can be really thoughtful in your outreach efforts. Another area for founders to be really thoughtful and intentional with is building up your advisory network. So having a diverse advisory group where you have industry experts, you have seasoned leaders, but then you also get really creative here. So think about the advisors who potentially are going to be able to tap their network. And made the introductions there. You can structure your advisory agreements to be specific to pipeline generation. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity within your advisory group. Again, the the main things I'm trying to get at here is to diversify that and really think about what you're building towards and why and where you have gaps within your current team. The theme of all of this advice is to be really intentional and thoughtful. So in a lot of ways you wanna slow down to speed up being a founder and doing founder LED sales is really stressful and it takes a lot of time. But if you're able to spend more time upfront, you're going to see those gains and be able to really scale a lot quicker. So take your time, be very intentional and thoughtful about how you're building.