0-1 Sales Talent Doesn’t Exist — This is Why We Launched JJELLYFISH
We launched JJELLYFISH almost 8 years ago – and my co-founder, Justin Lawson, is the brainchild behind it.
Many have asked, "Is this some outsourced sales model?" ----- In short, NO.
So, here is some clarity around our obsession with founder-led sales …
++++++
The JJELLYFISH model is predicated on THREE facts that we believe will never change:
A startup's Day 1 market vision is (almost) never the same vision that takes them to product/market fit — iterations and speed of learning are critical.
Only a founder can see something forming in the market that they weren't in search of on Day 1 — 0-1 sales is visionary-led.
Only one role is incentivized to invalidate and figure it out amongst all the noise — the founder. Hint: sales folks are incentivized to sell.
That said, founders require a fast and structured way to test GTM assumptions, refine their vision, avoid common sales traps, and unlock repeatable revenue – the missing link to achieve this is the execution engine.
It's not more strategy. It's not more office hours. It's not more friendly referrals. It's not channel partnerships. It's more reps — i.e., 1:1 conversations and at-bats with the market.
This means the founder is involved in every early customer interaction. This means learning directly from the people you're building for. This means being open to being wrong and flawed early on. This means accepting rejection and leveraging it to be redirected quickly. And this certainly means not playing a game of telephone by putting someone between you and your customers.
This is how founders put themselves in the best position to "find the vein" on the road to product/market fit. They're the only ones that can inspire others and transfer that spark of enthusiasm. They're the ones who can commit to the social contract an early adopter requires of a startup.
Unlocking the first $1MM is truly akin to that of (almost) a religion. You must convince people to trust you up front, with little evidence supporting that you'll take them to the promised land.
The founder's job is to be tip-of-spear ... Turning non-consumers into consumers without brand equity, case studies/references, and proof – it's something only a visionary can do. Trust is built by direct access to you and the ability to be specific about the problem you solve (i.e., a subject matter expert).
However, a massive gap exists in understanding the sales/market activities needed to achieve this. Many founders don't consider the grave importance of the time commitment and the number of experiments they need to run to find a sellable market truth, the math equation behind sales activities that need to be achieved to unlock Series A, and the speed in making decisions regarding what to ignore/explore/exploit.
While they understand the importance of talking to customers (this is a truism at this point), there is a lag in understanding the required iterations and sales activity to unlock the first ten customers. Many founders are shocked when we reverse-engineer the math and path and what we must accomplish on a daily/weekly/monthly activities level in the next 12-18 months.
Why?
I think this gets lost amidst the meandering and fits and starts across product iterations, distraction with adding more features, hoping conferences do hard work, and marketing initiatives that fail to spark relevant conversations in the market—there is no shortage of things to do or be distracted or disillusioned by.
Sales activities are the aspect that often slips, partly because it sits squarely outside the founder's comfort zone, filled with numerous tedious tasks, and there's a false perception that the product accounts for 80% of sales efforts. It's easy to procrastinate in this area and avoid harsh feedback—but that's a fatal mistake.
This is how/why we designed JJELLYFISH to be the embedded execution engine behind the founders. We're the "behind the scenes" machine that drives:
Repeatable processes for generating cold, outbound demand
Capturing sales-based evidence from 1:1 target buyers
Iteration and tuning of the value proposition and pitch
Project management and attentiveness necessary to advance their buying process
Design/analysis of the GTM experiments that enable/unlock revenue
We take this work incredibly seriously; we have hard conversations about vision/market misalignment. However, with the pain that comes with all of this, we're always chasing the truth and "ah-ha" moments founders receive from customers. That's our adrenaline. That's our dopamine.
JJELLYFISH is not a magic wand; our secret sauce is in our process/number of reps we have, but most importantly, it's the accountability we bring to ourselves in achieving this work. Revenue cannot be pulled out of thin air; it's a byproduct of running a successful experiment, thus driving activity.
We have never been more excited about founders finally realizing the importance of founder-led sales. However, knowing what a founder still needs to own is critical – and you can't delegate the visioning
