Sales is one of the most critical steps in growing a startup, yet many founders lack sales experience and are unaware of the skills and tools available to make it easier. Led by the Center for Regional Economic Advancement and the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and funded by the Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology & Innovation (NYSTAR), Sales for Startups was launched as a pilot program in May 2021.

The program is designed to help founders align their startups’ value with their customers’ needs to generate revenue. The ideal participants for this program are startups with seed funding that have identified their initial customer market and are ready to immediately apply the curriculum covered in the course.

Through practical, real-life examples, and role playing that puts theory to practice, participants walk away with tools and scripts to:

• Attract attention through targeted LinkedIn, emailing, and calling outreach
• Structure a sales meeting with a prospective customer
• Create and manage a sales funnel

Participants in the pilot program were highly engaged and many participants were able to directly apply what they learned in the program to sales within their startups.

“The most valuable thing we learned from the sales training was what a successful sales process looks like and how to apply a structured framework that will yield an overall increase in success rates,” said Frank Bruckner of Meltek Inc., a participant in the pilot.

The program is led by an experienced team of entrepreneurs, successful startup founders, and entrepreneurship faculty from the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. During the pilot, founders completed seven sessions covering:

• Sales Strategy
• Prospecting for Sales
• Qualification and Discovery
• Meeting Role Plays, Sales Process
• Proposal, POC, and Negotiation
• Legal and Post-Sale
• Negotiations for Sales

“I learned the significance of having a clear meeting plan, asking open discovery questions, determining the customers pain point, and explaining how your product or service can solve for it,” said Karen Smith of Feedback Solutions. “Also, identifying the difference of making an enterprise sale vs. selling to a less complex organization was really important to learn and think about as that type of organization represents a significant portion of our total available market.”

Going forward, the participants will be able to integrate smarter sales techniques into their business model to fuel their growth and develop relationships within their industries.

“After this training, I’ll be incorporating more research and discovery before prospecting into new contacts on LinkedIn and social media,” said Andrew Herr of EagleHawk One Inc. “It’s building more of a relationship than going straight for the sale.”