Never done sales before? Meka Asonye shares GTM playbooks from Stripe, Mixpanel and First Round

 So you made it a year. You're still here.

 It is, You've had to deal with me for, uh, 11 months and we're still here. 

 miracles do happen. One of the, one of the unique, um, aspects I think about, uh, when you transition from company building to investing is you often go from depth, uh, to breath and you get to meet so many founders who are all different. Uh, the companies are different, the cultures are different and, uh, you get to work with many of them.

 Um, and so I thought an interesting place to start my B some of the patterns that you've seen now that you've been, uh, working closely with a number of different companies, um, particularly around go to market and bringing first products to market. Um, what are the types of things that you've, you've kind of seen.

As recurring themes or patterns kind of in this first year of investing and partnering with founders. 

 I think, uh, first I'd say a lot of people face the same problems and whether it's a consumer company, whether it's a vertical SAS, whether it's B2B to C a lot of the founding problems are the same.

 Um, I think many founders are facing hiring challenges. How do I hire the right people? What do they look like? Where do I find them? How do I get more people using my product top of funnel demand? Um, how should I be measuring success? What is really most important right now. how do I know when I've hit product market fit?

Um, and for people who are starting to think ahead, they say, what story do I need to tell if I want to raise the next round of funding? What are these key milestones that I'm looking for? And, as I reflect across all the investments that I've made and I've seen the other partners around the table make, I think all of these companies are facing very, very similar challenges.

 And so maybe we could take a couple of those in turn, um, and potentially start with some of the early go to market stuff that call it as kind of a proxy metric, getting your first a hundred K and then a million dollars in recurring revenue. Um, what sort of the playbook that you've developed or the ideas that you tend to share in these working sessions with founders?

 I think for a lot of people, this is the first time they're really in the driver's seat of putting revenue on the table. Um, you see people coming from technical backgrounds who all of a sudden are forced into founder led sales. So I always try to simplify what they're doing in terms of key steps in the process.

So can we really take the sales funnel and split it apart and say, you know, there's four key areas here, awareness, discovery, I kind of group evaluation and tenant purchase together and then loyalty. And for some founders, there'll be a couple of things where, okay, we've got this, we have no problems here for others.

They'll say, okay, I have an awareness issue. Where do I start? And so I like to try to diagnose things by splitting it up into the chunks of the buyer journey or the chunks of the seller journey, and then start to sort of problem solve and troubleshoot 

 How do you, what does that diagnostic look like?

Is that just based on your own pattern recognition or, you know, for a founder who you haven't partnered with, that's listening and says, you know, I don't think my go to market in the early days is firing on all cylinders. How do I know across those handful of, of parts of the funnel where the problem is?

 Yeah, it really depends on which work they've done. So I'll often just say, Hey, do you have a series of dashboards or do you have a Excel sheet with the key metrics that you're looking at? And I'll usually try to start there, look at the 30,000 foot. And for some people they'll have a clear funnel. They'll know what their stage gates are.

They'll know what their conversion rates are for other people they'll say, oh, I don't even have one. Or I have this word document where I've put a couple of customers down, but I haven't really thought in that way. And so you need to understand, like, are we starting from square one or are we it starting from second base and really start to, to troubleshoot from, um, from really where the founders are beginning.

 And so for a founder that, that sort of, uh, just has sort of a Google doc with a few different steps in it. And they want to put together an NVP of like, they're getting to a million in recurring revenue dashboard. W what should be in there? What should they be tracking? 

 Yeah. I mean, I think at the highest level you can track, if you essentially know what your average contract value is and, you know, sort of, um, how many customers you hope to.

have, And then you think about roughly how many conversations do I need to have, like, do I think I have a product that has a 5% success rate of first hearing about the product to actually purchasing, or is it closer to 15 or 20%? And so just doing some rough back of the envelope, math around, what does that look like?

If I have a couple of large users or if I'm a self-service and B product, and then we're going to expect to have hundreds of really small users paying me a lot more. 

 One of the things you mentioned is, is a lot of the founders, you tend to partner with their product or technology oriented versus sales oriented, and I'd be interested.

Do you think that most people from any background can get exceptionally good at sales or is it, there are certain people that are wired for it and certain people that aren't. 

 Yeah. I mean, so I, I almost think about this as a intercept versus slope. I think there are some people who start on a higher intercept. They've done this before. Um, But I think anyone and especially founders, I think any founder can be a good early salesperson for their product. And I say this because as a founder, you've got a couple of superpowers. One, you probably care more deeply about this problem than many people that a customer I've ever met with before to you have some pattern recognition, you probably can go to a person and say, I've talked to five or six of your peers, and I can educate you on how they've tried to solve the problems, what things they've tripped over.

And so that value add of being able to share with someone, what everyone else in their same shoes is doing, I think can be incredibly valuable. And for me, for many of these startup founders, they're trying to solve the problem in a new way. And I think for most curious, people who have hair on fire problems, they would love to talk to somebody who's really deep on the problem and can start to educate them about different ways they might solve it.

Mecca as academy for technical founders that have not sold before. what are sort of the parts of that experience? What are the important concepts that maybe as a director of engineering at company X transitioning into a founder that has to bring a product to market, what are kind of the pillars that you would sort of coach them on?

 Yeah. So I think One is process, And I think this should be an easy one, be very, very process-oriented and measure. So create your funnel, make sure you understand how many shots on goal you're having. Make sure you're categorizing why folks are excited, why they're not excited. So make sure you walk out of every meeting and you have a concrete takeaway of this was good because of X or this was bad because of Y Um, I think for many people to like sales is part art and part science. And I truly believe that you can get 1% better each time. So in addition to understanding what you're hearing from your customers, you should be taking. a, A real in-depth look at yourself and saying, what did I do well on that call? Um, I think there's this other piece where many founders, their company is their baby.

They wake up it's all that they think about. And I think oftentimes you can be in front of a prospect, you can be in front of a customer and you just really want to talk about your baby and what you've built and how beautiful your baby is. And what I think is really important as you step back, take off your founder hat and make sure that you're coming, coming to this conversation from a customer centric landscape, and really you're understanding you're listening to their problems.

No one cares what you do. They just want to know, can you solve their problem? And sometimes you need to step away from your business and really put yourself in their shoes and start to speak. their language. 

 so, I mean, you're sort of hinting at this. What does a great first conversation look like in the context of an early product?

 Yeah. I mean, ideally I think if you're on a 30 minute phone call, you're talking for less than 25% of that call, um, you should be doing deep discovery. So for me, I'm setting an agenda at the very beginning, I'm doing some bit of small talk to build a relationship.

I'm doing a little bit of informing this person where I'm coming from, why I'm passionate about this, why I think I might be able to help them. And then I'm spending the next 25 minutes asking open-ended questions to do deep discovery, to really understand how problematic is this, what have they tried before?

What solutions have worked, um, to really help inform sort of what angle I'm going to pitch my product or how I'm going to build my product. And then usually at the last couple of minutes, you try to make sure that you're saving times for next steps. And next, next steps, you basically want to say, Hey, it sounds like, you know, I took these things away from the conversation, summarize it and make sure you're on the same page. you always want to make sure that in every conversation you're walking closer to a, yes, this product may make sense for this customer or no, this does not make sense. And I'm going to save that person time and I'm going to save myself time. The yeses are great. The no's are great. The maybes will absolutely kill you over 

 why is it so important that you do lots of discovery in the sales process versus just explaining to someone why this widget is so ingrained?

 I don't think you can properly explain why a widget is so incredible. If you don't know someone, imagine you're a realtor and you have a health. you think it is the best house on the market. You probably need to know whether or not that person works from home. How many kids they have, or if they have their in-laws live with them.

 to have the audacity, to have never met someone before, not know much about what they're looking for. And to just say, I have the best thing for you. You've lost all credibility because you don't know me at all. And so trying to jump directly into my company is the best because of XYZ.

 It just shows a lack of awareness that the hardest problems are very much nuanced. And you need to understand. The situation that that person is coming from the context with which they have in order to truly have a solution that solves a problem for them 

 on that note. How do you think about if you in the early days have, have a product problem or you've just picked the wrong customer customer segmentation?

 That's hard because it's funny. You can have a beautiful product, but if you're selling it to the wrong audience, like it's going to look like you have a horrible product. And so, you know, there's a little bit that goes in it upfront of, you know, I'm always telling my founders to do less or do more for fewer. people. And so getting really, really targeted on sort of that red hot core of what you believe your customer is, and you can always work your way out from there. But the common failure mode I see is someone just wants to get to five customers or someone just wants to sneak by a hundred thousand dollars and error.

So they're having a conversation with everyone under the moon. And while I think that as companies grow and as they're more successful, they can take on more. I think at the beginning, you want to be very, very focused on a laser-focused ICP. You want to understand, you want to be able to say, my customer looks like X, they hang out, in Y places they have this problem, their company's probably this big, like, you need to be able to draw four or five criteria and, and. Tell someone articulate, this is what my customer looks like, and this is how I'm gonna sell to them. 

 You mentioned a minute ago, sort of this, the compounding benefit of obsessive, trying to get better at sales every day. How of you're the only person on the call? Do you sort of diagnose what went well and what didn't and what you're going to change in the future?

 Yeah, I mean, first you can make sure you're not the only one on the call. There's a number of tools that will, transcribe some of these conversations. Uh, there are a number of products that sales organizations use that will actually kind of tell you about the responses that, uh, folks on the other side of the conversation are having to things that you say.

Um, but even if you don't leverage any of these things, like the second, you see someone multitasking, probably a sign that you're not talking about, something really, really important. And so, you know, I think it takes some EEQ to just see where do people's ears pick up. I think the other thing too is like, where are people asking you a ton of questions if they're just nodding their head?

Yes, yes. And you're not getting much engagement. Probably not a good sign. If they're asking the next layer of detailed question, it's probably a sign that whatever you're talking about is perking up their ears for some reason. 

 What do you think about the role of charisma and selling? Is it over-hyped under hyped?

 I mean, I'd rather have charisma than not have charisma, but I've some of the most successful sales rep. I've seen like you see them into archetypes. There is definitely the person where everyone loves Cindy. And, you know, she could have a conversation with a brick wall and the warmth and energy just exudes.

I've also seen the person who is like the genius who, you know, cut straight to the chase. But when they start talking, they know so much about that. Customer's unique problem. They don't know so much about the product. that. the success comes from their expertise. And well, there's some level of product knowledge that you have done, you have to have, and there's some level of charisma You cue bedside manner that you have to have people still buy from individuals.

And so while the age of relationship selling, I think is gone away and people aren't selling over steak dinners and golf rounds, I do still think people do tend to buy from people that they enjoy their conversation with. And that enjoyment usually comes from learning something. And also just like having a decent person on the other 

 So if you're in that second bucket, do you think they should work on to becoming more charismatic or they should just lean into their strengths of being, you know, a subject matter 

 I mean, I say you always lean into your strengths, but if you have a huge deficiency, it probably helps to try to work on it a little bit.

Like you don't want to work on it so much that you, you lean away from the things that you're really good at. but, I got some of this feedback from a customer who was talking to one of my founders who said, wow, they're really, really bright, but man, they just jumped right in. And it felt like a transactional relationship.

And with early stage selling, many times you are asking these people to put their faith in you, the businesses, essentially, you, maybe a few other people. And getting someone over that line to trust a two person company, I think it really does take some courage from. and some people's skills.

And so I, I I would focus on building some relationships, um, upfront. 

 Switching gears slightly in you in all the different reps and AEs that you've worked. What do you think tends to separate the good people from the truly exceptional ones?

 This is easy, and it's going to sound so cliche, but it's about hustle. in sales, you can always prepare a little bit more for your conversation. You can always send one more outbound email. You can always obsess over a detail. You can always try your pitch on a colleague or someone else before you get in.

And actually, have the game time situation. And So it's so hard. There are certain things that everyone like, there's a baseline level of intelligence. There's a baseline level of product understanding that matters. But I think so many of those bars are, are actually pretty low. And what I've seen really differentiate people is it's just hustle.

 I think the hustle actually oftentimes comes out in the preparation for the. meeting. You see somebody who spends five minutes getting ready. who just does a quick LinkedIn search. And you see somebody else who like listens to the podcast that their buyer was on and uses that. Or they think about sort of like what technology stack that company is on and figure out like, how is my product gonna plug in there?

 There's no shortage of preparation that you can do, before a meeting and then after a meeting too, and how quickly you follow up, how detailed those follow-up actions are. Like I say that that sales is a science, because so much of this is it's easy to do. It just takes time and effort and some attention to detail.

 You talked to just a second ago, a little bit about this, but I assuming you have somebody that has an unbelievable amount of drive, but they don't know where those inputs are. Efforts should be focused around the sales process. Can you walk through some of the, some of the areas when you look at the top 1% of sellers.

And maybe an interesting way to kind of go about it is kind of the story of the life of a customer. What is that person doing or what coaching would you give that 1% person around the life cycle of an opportunity?

 So I think that 1% person is good at every step in the process. I've seen some salespeople who are really good at the contract negotiation, which is a really important part. I've seen other salespeople who are exceptional at discovery. I've seen other people who are really good at like the evaluation and an intent, or they're great at crafting the solution and showing how this product will fit into what's happening at the company right now.

And I think those 1% people, they are really great at every step. They are great at awareness. They a great evaluation. They're great at the negotiation. They're great at setting the 

customer up for success and loyalty down the line. And You know, what I've seen is that the people who are best, they try to learn from others.

There's no one pathway to success. And I think a lot of people become hybrids. of some of the best people that they've seen in, you know, each little format and their sponges, they're just absolutely trying to figure out, oh, I saw you use this line with this product and it worked really well. I'm going to jot this down.

I'm going to start using that when I get that objection. And that's how I handle it. Or I saw the way you talked about our competitor and how you just tweak the framing. enough that, you know, made a customer's eyes light up. And some of that you can get by just doing it over and over again and again, getting 1% better every day.

But I love people who get 5% of bread here every day by learning from people. Who've been doing this for a while. 

 And so kind of maybe to pick one of those apart, what is top 1% prep look like before a first call?

 So I think obviously you not only prepare for the people who are going to be on the call, but you also prepare for the people who you believe will be stakeholders to that purchase. Um, So imagine you're selling a enterprise security product. There's probably going to be someone on legal as well as someone in procurement.

And so even if someone on it just shows up, you've also thought about those other people who they're going to have to Convinced that this is the right solution. And whether it's the followup materials from call one, but you're sharing things that not only help you convince the persona you talk to, but the two other people you know, they're going to have to talk to, even if they don't come up in the conversation.

And so it's almost like looking around a corner and saying, not only am I really good at this step in the process today, this discovery call answering these specific questions, but I can almost do a little bit of inception and say, I'm going to leave you with all the stuff that we talked about, our action items.

And I'm also going to leave you with these other two things that I think are really interesting. And I know that you're going to use that internally to help, to help move this conversation down the line. 

 I'm curious as we're talking about this, how your set of experiences around sales and go to market have translated to your first year as a VC.

And so do you think about that top 1% rep behavior, as it relates to trying to sort of behave as a top 1%? Like w what are the, the sort of rituals or habits that you've brought over that you feel are serving you? Well, thus far, 

 Yeah, I mean, I I think at, at, um, an early stage venture, because of the fact that we invest in.

So few of the opportunities that we see, it looks a lot like in enterprise sales pipeline, where you need to have a lot of people who are in the awareness bucket who are in the discovery. In order to get one to two sign contracts or founders who want to partner with us. And anytime you're in something that has such a low success rate, again, I think you've got to be incredibly focused on the process and not just the outcome.

So what are the frameworks that I'm using on a day in day out basis? Um, I think you need to take as much pride in a first meeting that goes nowhere as our first meeting, that, you know, as a second time founder, who's going to have their choice of five different venture firms to choose from. You need to bring your, a game to every single meeting.

And I think about this we used to always talk about these, um, customers who'd come in, you'd be taking a demo call and you would think that at best, this probably isn't going to go anywhere. And if it does, it's a really small ACV contract. And sometimes out of nowhere, this person says, oh, I signed up with this email address, but I actually represent Microsoft, Right. I actually represent Uber and.

uh, What you saw here was, you know, just my personal side project. And so because of the fact that you never know when these diamonds in the rough are gonna come out of nowhere, I think it behooves you to prepare for every single interaction. Like it's your Superbowl. Like this is a, there's a million dollar contract hanging in the balance.

And, you can never slack off. You've got to bring 120% to every single interaction. Um, you know, another thing I think about as an investor that I thought about on sales is the selling process and investor starts on email one. you just emailed me with a deck. I've never met you before, but ideally I'm responding as quickly as possible in an amazing tone.

And we're getting a meeting set, you know, right away on the first call, rather than just sitting back and having you pitch I'm, I'm giving you more information about why I think myself and first round are an amazing partner to the most ambitious founders. And so you can't start selling Halfway down the line, every single interaction, every single process is this truth seeking exercise where both people are getting to know each other better, and figuring out.

Is there something unique here in special here? 

 So have you found that the mapping from the last chapter of your career is surprisingly similar? 

 Yeah, I mean, honestly, and, uh, you know, maybe it's just the unique way that we practice venture at first round, we have a ton of metrics. Like we've been doing this for a really long time and we measure everything and we try to get better every single day.

And I think if you talk to any SMB or mid-market sales leader, they're thinking the same way they know what their best reps sort of like first call to close ratio, is they know sort of what the talk time should be. on an, on an average meeting, they know exactly how much pipeline they need to create in Q1 in order to make sure that they're sort of meeting their Q4 goals.

Like They're thinking about everything as a machine there's inputs and outputs. Anytime something is off, or there's an anomaly, they're trying to understand, okay, why is this good anomaly happening? Why is this bad anomaly happening? And so, you know, I spend a lot of time looking at. 

my funnel of opportunities and what things I invest in.

 you know, in the sales world, every quarter, you're, you're looking at all of your losses and you're seeing who did I lose to? and Why, what product feature, what can we do differently? And so, you know, I feel lucky that all of the founders that I've wanted to partner with today, have chosen to work with, you know, first round and myself, but I guarantee you, after that first loss, I'm going to obsess over what could I, and should I have done differently in order to make sure that that ended up in the win column? 

 So looping back to one of the first things we were talking about when you were mentioning a bunch of the areas or patterns that you've noticed across all the companies that you've been working with is hiring. And I know one of the areas you spent a lot of time on is that, uh, first go to market or first sales hire.

I feel like on a weekly basis, there's a founder that's been, uh, doing founders led sales, and they're trying to figure out, uh, who they should hire, or maybe they hired somebody. And they're asking you to give feedback on the person. What, what are your frameworks or lenses for that founder that has gotten their first hundred K 500 K a million dollars, whatever, uh, in revenue.

And they want to make their first hire. 

 So there's a couple of things here. Um, I think the first one is make sure you hire someone who is stage appropriate. And so I can imagine as a founder, it might be tempting to say, I have this VP of sales. Who's been at Salesforce for 10 years and I'm selling I'm in a B2B SAS world.

This person is going to be great to be my first salesperson or be my first sales leader. And I think more often than not, that would be a huge mistake. And that's because that VP probably has been a manager of manager of managers and hasn't closed a deal themselves in a really long time. And for most of these early sales hires, what they need to be is somebody who's going to go out and actually be closing business for 80% of their time.

And 20% of their time, they're starting to think about the system, the organism, what we can do to make this thing repeatable. And so you really want somebody who's actually either been an exceptional. life. And who has spent a bunch of time coaching and mentoring and spinning up new people, or you want somebody who maybe they've had their first manager gig, or maybe they're still in the player coach world, where They're responsible for a team quota, but they also have an individual quota. You just want somebody who's going to be excited about and really good about the things that are mission critical today. And oftentimes also found her like, okay, obviously you could hire lots of different people. What's the one thing you need this person to do.

Sometimes they'll say it's like set up Salesforce, think about our yearly planning, but most of the time it's like close business. And so when you think about that, you probably would want to have somebody who recently or still is on the frontlines closing business. 

 So let's say you, you sort of nailed that spec how do you help, uh, a technical founder, product oriented founder? Know what good looks like? And the difference between, let's say a sales rep that has seven years of experience, um, at a similar type of company to yours. So the shape of the deal that you do is somewhat. 

You plot all those people out and their stars in there are weak performers.

And if you've never hired for it before, it's hard to know what great looks like. 

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One year after transitioning from GTM leader at Stripe and Mixpanel to early-stage investor at First Round, Meka Asonye dives into the playbooks and sales coaching advice he shares with the technical and product oriented founders he invests in.

Early GTM playbooks for technical founders — Lessons from Stripe, Mixpanel, and First Round

After transitioning from GTM leader at Stripe & Mixpanel to early-stage investor, Meka Asonye shares playbooks for technical and product-oriented founders.

Never done sales before? Meka Asonye shares GTM playbooks from Stripe, Mixpanel and First Round

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Four Pieces of GTM Advice Early-Stage Founders Need to Hear