Early stage sales tools deep dive

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Early stage sales tools deep(ish) dive

Before I dive in, I’ve really enjoyed building this newsletter on Beehiiv. I’m testing out their ads functionality and was approach by the service highlighted below. I’ve never used it, but I am a believe that tools like Artisan will become increasingly prevalent over the next 12-18 months. If you’ve used Artisan or products like it I’d be curious to get your take!

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Thanks for bearing with me on this experiment, now for this week’s post!

Early stage tools: what do you need and when?

Before we start talking about actual products, the biggest question you should ask is “what do I need?” Often that’s based on the stage you’re in as a business. If you’re just starting out at the company’s inception and your goal is to do customer discovery to validate a problem, you can get by with a pretty simple stack. As you mature and start to get to $10-30k MRR you’ll likely want to add tools and processes to help you scale.

Here are some recommended stacks based on three different startup stages:

1. The idea stage

2. Your first handful of customers

3. $20k MRR

The idea stage

You really don’t need much at this stage, the top priority is finding people to talk within your hypothetical ICP. The best way to do this is combine Apollo and LinkedIn. You can consider the paid plans for both, in particular Sales Navigator for LinkedIn, but you can get pretty far with the free plans.

My recommendation is to store your early “CRM” within Google Docs, Notion or Airtable once you start building out your initial target list. There’s no reason in my mind to adopt a proper CRM at this stage.

Lastly, I’d recommend Fathom or Otter for call recording and notes.

Your first customers

Once you’re in “selling” mode in the sense that you have a product that works and you are working with early customers that are paying you, you can start to professionalize a bit more.

You will probably want to transition to Apollo’s paid plan and you may consider paying for Sales Navigator if you are continue to do a lot of cold outbound. If you’re taking more of a PLG approach these are likely less necessary once you’ve formed conviction on the idea and early MVP.

Even if you’re PLG, at this stage a CRM is definitely helpful. You’ll want to keep track of self-serve customers that want to convert to paid in a CRM and you’ll benefit from tracking deals in a proper CRM, among many other benefits, if you are taking an outbound approach. My go to is Hubspot, but I’ve heard good things about Attio.

You can probably continue to get by with Fathom or Otter, but if you could check out Attention for call recording although it makes more sense if you have at least 1-2 sellers.

$20k MRR

At this stage you’re going to continue with many of the products mentioned above.

If you aren’t using Apollo for sequencing you may consider a dedicated product like Outreach or Salesloft. I would recommend sticking with Apollo as their free and lower tier plans are quite comparable and the product is very solid.

For additional enrichment and email personalization, I’d recommend checking out Clay.

If you initially chose Attio, you may consider a switch to Hubspot for your CRM. You can also consider Salesforce, but Hubspot is phenomenal as CRM for this stage and far beyond.

You’ll likely want to have a proper paid Zoom account for customer calls. If you haven’t purchased a call intelligence product you can probably still get by with Fathom or Otter as your notes and transcription tool.

You can optionally consider paying for Docusign for customer contracts and proposals.

All in most of the products mentioned above have free plans with generous usage tiers so you can get pretty far with an early stage tech stack without paying a ton.

Three interesting articles

1. How are AI sales agents going to change SaaS sales?

That quote is from Aaron Levie, the CEO/Co-Founder of Box. I don’t think we’re close to this being a reality yet, but it is an interesting thought experiment for founders and early GTM hires. My belief is founders and those GTM hires are going to leverage agents to drive early revenue vs. completely replace the human component of sales.

2. Current trends in SaaS sales performance and hiring

I think RepVue has one of the best datasets on SaaS sales performance, hiring and sentiment. Seems like things are improving, but there is not going to be a return to 2021. To be fair, 2021 was an aberration in terms of software sales performance and market conditions.

3. “Krishan-led-growth”

I loved this post from the CEO and Founder of Apollo about Krishan Patel who went from SDR to their VP, Product. It’s a testament to the potential for career advancement in early stage startups and for early GTM hires.

First GTM Hire Jobs

• Poggio is hiring their first sales hire. Also their AI-powered account planning tool is very slick.

• Twelve Labs is hiring a founding AE.

• Overview is hiring a founding AE.

Closing thoughts

Thanks again for reading, if you liked (or hated) the ad let me know. If you think any tools are missing from the stacks listed above, I’m all ears!