So okay, great, thanks for having me.

So, my name's Tyler I'm the CEO of Clever and

what I want to talk today is about sales.

And I've a little bit of insight into this 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 at a hedge fund.

And at the last second, a friend of mine roped me in to

join his startup, and asked me to do sales there, which was

something that I knew nothing about, and so, had to

figure out on the fly, and spent a couple of years there,

figuring out sales for this very early stage company.

And then, when it came to start Clever, you know,

we started Clever, and I did it with two co-founders who

are very technical, and one very product-oriented, and

we wanted to build this product for schools, and I

thought that experience would have no relevancy whatsoever.

But it turns out that some of the things that I picked up at

the, this previous job, where it was figuring out sales,

have been huge parts of what's made Clever grow so

quickly today.

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.

And we started it about two years ago.

And so sales have been a be, 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 most,

how I used to perceive sales.

And a lot of people see sales as having this, you know,

a lot of mystique around it.

You know, it's people who are you know,

really articulate and impossibly charming.

And they have these, you know,

killer closing lines that they use.

And I think this is how I saw sales, and I think this is

how a lot of founders I talked 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.

And what I've learned is that hire the salespeople,

as a founder, the reality is that's you.

And 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.

You're either talking to your users or

you're building your product.

And that talking to your users part, that's selling.

And so.

You know, this is intimidating to some people because

they're like, I've never done sales, and I don't,

wouldn't even know where to begin.

But it turns out that as a founder,

you have some unique advantages that make it,

possible for you to be really, really good at sales.

And one of those is your passion for

the product, and what you're building.

And the second is your industry knowledge of what

your, 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, this is actually my cofounder, doing sales.

This is what sales,

looks like in the very early stage of a startup.

It's not Don Draper.

It's a lot of calls like these.

But this is something that 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 one founder,

which was me, to peel off and say,

okay, Tyler you're going to go figure this out and and work

on this full time because it's so important to our business.

So, couple things that I've picked up about sales along

the way and in, 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 funnels and you, of,

of the funnel and you move your customers through it.

Pretty common categories.

There's this prospecting category where

you're trying to figure out who's even interested.

Then you're having a lot of conversations,

which is the second level of the funnel.

Then you're finding out who's really serious and

you want to close them and sign the deal.

And then of course,

you're in the promised land of, of revenue.

And what I thought would be interesting would be to talk

about each of the stage, a couple strategies that

we've used at Clever that have, worked really well.

So that these aren't abstract things but

things that, you know, you can hopefully use at your startup.

So, prospecting.

So, prospecting is the process of

figuring out who will even take your call.

And you know, one of the things that I

realized early on, so there's this guy Everett Rogers who,

who's created this technology life cycle adoption curve.

And he describes it as bell curve where you've got you

know, your innovators and who will try new things, and

you've got your early adopters,

your mid-stage adopters, your late adopters, your laggards.

And one of the things that was really helpful for

me in understanding sales in an early startup is he's

quantified the tail of this bell curve and this part over

here, the innovators, those are your potential customers.

And it might seem discouraging that only 2.5% of companies

are your potential customers that would even consider

buying from a startup that has no users and no revenue.

But actually, I found just the opposite.

I found it to be extremely helpful to have this frame of

mind, because you realize, when only 2.5% of companies

will even take your call or consider using your product,

you realize what a numbers game this becomes.

So if you want to reach that 2.5% and

you want to get some early sales, you, you've,

if you're starting to do math, you're hopefully starting to

realize you have to do a lot of calling.

You have to do, talk to a lot of people.

So early on in the early days at Clever, this was my job.

You know, in the,

in the 2 months the first two months of YC,

I reached out to over 400 companies trying to get them

to take a call and and talk to us about what we're building.

There's, there's three ways that I

have found most successful in, in prospecting and

getting these people, one is your personal network.

That's obvious.

I'm not going to spend any time there.

Another one is conferences,

which is surprising to a lot of people, and then the one

that people are most familiar with is cold email.

And when I say conferences, this is what people think.

They think I'm talking about CES or, you know,

E3 or something.

And actually, the kind of

conferences where sales happen look more like this.

And we've got, we would in the early days would go to a lot

of these because you've got to where your users are.

And if they're, if you're selling to CIOs and there

happens to be a gathering of them at a hotel in Milwaukee,

guess what, that's probably where you should be.

So we go to conferences like these.

We get the attendee lists in advance.

We email every single person in advance, and, and try and

set up meetings so that when we get there,

every single minute of that trip was, was well spent.

And this was huge in Clever's early days.

These, this was where we met all of our earliest customers.

The second thing I mentioned is cold email.

A lot of people don't know how to write cold emails.

It's actually really easy, and the key is not to write a lot.

Should be really concise.

This is an email template that I used early on and

you're welcome to copy it, but it's really short.

Here's who I am, here's what I'm building, and

I'd love to talk to you about this.

Could we find time tomorrow?

It's really easy and, and you can customize this and

find out for

every business you want to sell to who's the right person

to send it to and you can send out quite a few of these.

So all right, that's prospecting.

And the reason this is so important is because you've

gotta build that first layer of the funnel.

Then you get them to take your call.

And this is another place where a lot of

founders I think just have a lot of

questions about what to actually do.

And the biggest thing to take away,

in fact if you only take away one thing from this

presentation today, the number one thing you should remember

is when you get them on the phone, remember to shut up.

And that's really surprising to people.

So many founders, when I help them with

their first sales pitch, they finally get somebody on

the phone who wants to talk to them about their product.

And they're so proud of this thing they've been

building for the last three months that all they want to

do is get on the phone and talk about every feature and

talk about all the different things they can do and

talk about why it's the greatest thing in the world.

And I have that temptation too.

It's just part of being really proud of something.

But it turns out that if you watch the best salespeople,

like the best salespeople in the world, the top 1%.

And you have a chance to listen in on a call with some

of those people, like I have,

the most surprising thing is how little talking they do.

In fact, I've seen calls where the,

where the salesperson told me their goal was to

only spend 30% of the call talking, and

have 70% of the call the other person.

And they would ask a lot of questions.

They'd say things like,

why did you even agree to take my call today?

This problem that we're talking about solving for you,

how do you solve it today?

You know, what would your ideal solution look like?

And they're not, they're not doing the talking.

They're finding, they're doing everything they can to find

out what this person needs, and hopefully understand their

problem even better than they do.

That's what really great sales is and in fact this is

something I, I, I, I drill into everybody at Clever.

It's a really important part of sales and

there's actually now if any of you use Uber Conference,

they have this amazing feature where when you hang up

a call it sends you an email automatically and tells you

how much you talked versus how much the other person talked.

And looking at one of those emails you know,

if someone doing sales at Clever, I get one of those

emails, I can tell immediately how likely the sale is

based on how much talking we were doing.

So, you got all these people, now you got on the phone,

do a lot of listening, really understand their problem.

And then the other part of this stage that surprises

a lot of people is follow up.

So here's a lot of different steps that you

can imagine going through.

You know, emailing somebody, not getting a response, and

emailing them back.

Calling them, leaving a voice mail, having a pricing call.

You know, there's probably like you know,