How to Crush Founder-Led Sales for Your B2B Products

My name is Chris Phelan. I'm the founder of SellSig, and it's my pleasure to be here with you today. This webinar is for AI startups and founders that are selling B2B products, and hopefully it's helpful for you and your business. I want to start by going into today's agenda. So first, we'll define what sales is on an enterprise level from someone with the perspective of 20 years plus experience in enterprise IT sales. Then I'll go into a little bit about why founders struggle. What are the challenges that founders face? And what are some of the wrong diagnosis and wrong advice that founders are getting today? And I'll go into the sales landscape, what it entails, what are the different verticals, and what is sales adjacent to? Then I'll talk about where founders need help, and I'll do a live demo of SalesSig and show you how the tool works and how it can help you with your business. And I'll show you how the tool achieves many different things on a sales coaching level and also on an implementation level, an execution layer. And I'll tell you what the advantages are for founders to use SalesSig. And then we'll do some Q&A. Sounds good? All right. So what is sales really? Sales is much more than just persuasion. It's a discipline and it's a practice. It's something that you can learn and get coached in and become better at. So if there's a skills gap between you and where you need to be, that's what we're here to talk about, how to close that skills gap. So the number one thing that sales really involves is knowing your customer and understanding what your customer's problems are. Understanding the reality that your customer lives in and their challenges and how to help them overcome those challenges. It's about managing variables. And in B2B sales, there are many variables. The customer's industry, the customer's company, the customer's department, all of the different layers of organization that they have to deal with. The law, the environment, the legal environment. There's many different things that the customer has to manage. Knowing what they are and helping the customer manage those is a really important part of the sales job. Another thing that sales involves is reading signals. So in a busy world, we all speak in shorthand. We use different concepts. We use different jargon. And being able to understand your customer quickly and understand how they communicate in their reality is very important. And they're giving off signals all the time, but we miss a lot of them. It's really important, and this is a big part of the sales job, is reading the signals and understanding how to use that information to move deals forward, to close, and win business for your company. That's a process, and it's something that we'll also talk about, which is how to lead that process and how to guide the process and manage the situation. It's managing the customer's expectations and getting buy-in from the customer. And from the term buy-in, let me talk about building relationships with clients and leveraging those relationships. at least 70 percent of their research before they reach out to vendors these days so we have less time to build relationships with clients that means we have to start at a very high level and really achieve a lot in a very little bit of little amount of time so building relationships and leveraging relationships in the sales process is a big part of what we do as professional sales people In the IT world, we like to talk about our tech stack. We talk about functions and features. We talk about how things work. But it's really important to be able to communicate value. And that's an important part of sales, being able to explain to customers why a product or a service is valuable to them and how it helps them achieve their business goals. So we'll focus on that a little bit later. Also, understanding. Politics and helping customers navigate politics is a big part of the sales job. Our buyers have to deal with corporations. They have to deal with many different departments and many different layers of bureaucracy. Some of it's legal, some of it's government, some of it's competitive and understanding how that works and interacts with the customers purchase decisions is a part of the job and part of what we want to accomplish today. I want to finish off this definition of sales slide by with a good quote from Sam Altman. He was asked on how to be successful and his response was get good at sales and very good advice directed to the point. I love it. And I think that's why everybody's here today. So let's get into the next slides. So why do founders struggle? One of the big reasons is that they have. what is considered a low value conversation with the client. They're maybe not asking the right questions, not understanding what the client's pain points are. They're not using the kind of language that the customer's familiar with. Those are the kinds of things that lead to low value conversations and low value conversations obviously don't lead to sales. So it leads to frustration with sellers actually. Founders, They are not experienced with sales, so they sometimes have a weak sales process. They don't have a good way for qualifying the pain points that customers are experiencing. They're not able to align their solution with the customer's problems. Maybe they don't have a good success outcome defined before the start of the sales process. And one thing that's really important to remember is that The customers are judging you and they're judging your ability to deliver based on how you're selling to them. So they start analyzing and assessing whether you'll be a good vendor based on the strength of your sales process. So it's really important to have a good, strong sales process that leads the customer. Founders struggle with sales friction. Now, probably some of you have heard of sales friction, but I'll give it a little bit of definition. Sales friction is anything that the customer is going through which hurts the sales process and creates some kind of unseen or unspoken about. problem for the customer. Maybe it's a poor go-to-market experience. Maybe it's an outdated tactic that you're using. Maybe it's weak proof points, like too many logos that don't have real meaning to the client. A common source of sales friction is when you're selling features or capabilities or your tech stack instead of really talking about the customer's problems and their challenges. So finally, one of the things that founders struggle with is, and I struggled with this too, is the changing buyer and the changing buyer environment. And it's changing very rapidly right now because of AI. And it's disrupting traditional business cycles. So buyers are using different kinds of teams, new buying teams, much more expanded buying teams. Maybe you would even call them buying networks. Some customers are over relying on AI before they get in touch with vendors. They're doing research using AI and not identifying strengths or weaknesses or products that they should be looking at. So it creates a sense of false confidence sometimes. And buyers are arriving at meetings and conversations with a pre-decided vendor. picked out in a lot of cases so they've done a lot of research search before they get in touch with you and this can lead them to have an opinion before they've even done their due diligence and i just want to point out that right now buyers are initiating 80 of conversations that lead to sales so this is a a very incredible statistic it means if a customer is reaching out to you that's a very good sign and you need to be able to act and close on those customers right from the get-go, right when they get in touch with you. If you're reaching out to customers, you're in the 20%. Makes it really critical and important for you to be able to talk to the customers and speak their language right when you first initiate contact with them. So what are the sources of founders' struggles? Well, sometimes it's technical confirmation bias. Maybe the founders have some resistance to selling. fear of rejection or not they're just not comfortable knowing what to do in a sales meeting. So these are things that can be trained and taught to founders and that's good news because you can improve your skill set. So here's some of the common wrong diagnosis or misdiagnosis that founders might be hearing. I'm sure you've heard some of this. One thing that's being sold to founders now is the idea that more pipeline, more contacting, more cold outreach will lead to more meetings. Now, this is what I call the generic outreach trap that any kind of outbound is good outbound. That's not true. And more outreach will not lead to more meetings. If you are in. A space where the total addressable market is just a few thousand companies, for example, semiconductors. There's really only about 400 large global fabs that you can sell to. And so a really poorly executed outreach campaign can burn a large percentage of your target market very quickly. So automated outreach is, it sounds good. And it might look good on paper, but it can deliver terrible results. And it's quite costly and takes a lot of time and energy to run an outreach program. There's so many different variables. You end up swapping in tools, swapping out tools, and never getting better results. So that's one of the things that I think is being sold to founders right now that is a wrong diagnosis. And a second thing that founders might be hearing about is that you need better scripts or you need in-meeting AI cues that are telling you what to say. This points the focus on the wrong direction. It points the focus back at the founder instead of towards the customer. That's my biggest problem with this kind of advice is that oftentimes the founders do a great job presenting and it's not really. their ability to present that's the problem, it's that they're misaligned with the customer. So when a customer is speaking to you in a meeting and saying something that you've never heard before, it's actually the wrong time to go to AI for cues about what to say next. If a customer is saying something you haven't heard before, you could be zeroing in on a true pain point and a true customer request. This is valuable information, super valuable for founders that are building a great product and want to bring the best product to market that they can. So don't ignore that feedback. Look for it. And don't use AI in meetings. It'll come across as inauthentic. A third misdiagnosis is that you need to hire a sales leader. hiring a sales leader too soon can be really a disaster you're talking about a great expensive cost that uh perhaps is a startup you don't want to spend unless you absolutely have to and um sales leaders can be disruptive uh i'm a sales leader so i i don't want to say things too negatively but sales leaders expect a product that can be scaled and sales leaders target that scalability immediately. So it can become a layer of noise in between you and finding a better product market fit. This puts a communications barrier between you and your customer and founders can lose touch with what the customers really want. So I don't recommend that you hire a sales leader too soon. It's a very, very costly route to go, especially if your product is not fully ready for market. So what are the real problems that founders face? Well, you're maybe talking to the wrong buyer and you're asking the wrong questions. You're proposing the wrong solutions. Maybe you haven't identified the correct pain points or you haven't found who can be your champion. internally on the customer side. There's perhaps a lack of decision process, perhaps a lack of clarity about what next steps are and how to get aligned with clients. I mentioned before, buyers arrive pre-decided. They have a bias when they show up for a meeting because they have a favorite pick, a favorite product that they've already researched. So if you're that product, great. But if you're not, you need a way to turn the customer's mind around and founders can send themselves on a a wild goose chase focused on chasing new tools that promise too much and what they really need to focus on is their ability to articulate value and to spot the signals to eliminate their blind spots and not be the bottleneck so i know everybody here is looking looking to do that and make sure that they're running a purpose-built sales organization rather than something that's come together accidentally through ad hoc trial and error so this slide i want to talk about what the landscape is there's really kind of three vertical parts to sales and you're probably dealing with these one is inbound and this is kind of related to marketing you have a marketing message you have a product fit you have a content strategy you're trying to tell customers i have this product and it can solve your product problems in this way and this is about attracting customers to contact you and it's really the domain of marketing and it's really uh for experts in marketing or revenue uh or growth and uh that's one part of sales it's more sales adjacent than actual sales though. If you're getting good inbound prospects, that's fantastic. That's great. And the second column, prospecting, is about outbound and cold outreach. And this is where a lot of sales efforts are failing because automation is failing. Automation is following some of the same paths that we saw decades ago with email where The attraction of email was super cheap and super easy to send out to millions of people. And that basically turned into spam very quickly. And email became ineffective for a long time. People wouldn't read their email even. And senior executives today, especially at Fortune 1000 companies, they don't spend a lot of time reading their email. So it's still pretty ineffective if you're reaching out to the wrong targets. And LinkedIn is going down that same path. There's a number of tools out there that promise to reach out on LinkedIn and find customers for you. They definitely have limits. Some of the limits are imposed by LinkedIn themselves, where they'll block you and restrict your access and throttle your ability to contact customers. So be careful. There's a lot of gimmicky solutions out there. Some of them are. even kind of fraudulent where they promise things that they can't deliver but it's attractive to founders uh because it sounds great you know what if i could buy a software package or a subscription service and it reached out and found me a bunch of great leads but clients are getting smarter and they're getting better at recognizing what is ai slop and what's going to work what's not going to work so be careful um the third area is what happens when you're in meetings and in conversations with customers and this is where CellSig really is strong and where we're really focused on helping you manage the conversations with your clients, helping you do qualification and discovery and learn about your clients. understanding sales methodology, understanding the science behind sales and the psychology behind sales so that you can progress your deals and understand how to talk to your clients and build relationships with them. And this is super important. It's more than just having a great product. Fantastic products fail all the time because the communications is not there. The alignment isn't there. So SalesSig is about helping you build your skills as a founder so that you can deliver when you're in the moment. So where do founders need help? How do you get traction and go from having an accidental ad hoc sales process to an intentional sales process? Well. with know-how and with the right frameworks. So I've built CellSig with proven sales methodologies and proven sales qualification frameworks. These are skills that I've learned through various training I've received at some of the world's best sales organizations like Oracle and Dell Technologies and NTT Data. But I've also worked at some great startups. They're just as practical and useful for startups as they are for the big corporations. So understanding how to qualify deals and get the right information from clients and make it look natural is really important. And SalesSig teaches you how to do that. SalesSig also teaches you how buyers think and how buyers behave in a sales process. And it teaches you how to read the signals from your customers and understand which customers are moving towards you and moving towards a purchase and which customers are maybe moving away from you and it's very important that you understand buyer psychology because people behave in repeatable patterns and recognizable patterns and if you can identify what pattern they're going to behave in you have a much higher probability of closing business with them so that leads to conversation management knowing what to say Knowing what the timing is and setting that timing in advance, right? So that you're not flying blind, that you have an actual cadence that you're sticking to and that you can get the client to buy into and align with so that you're actually working together towards a deal. Sometimes buyers put up resistance because they feel like they need to push back. But if you do the buying properly. They'll start to join you in the sales process and become your partner in getting a deal closed. And this, again, can be learned. This is a skill that you can acquire. You learn stage by stage coaching and you get real advice on your real deals. This will help you speed up your research and speed up your data capture, which is a huge time consuming effort. Understanding a client before you talk to them takes hours and with the right tool, Salesig. You'll be able to do that in much shorter periods of time. And you'll know what your actionable next steps are. Whatever stage of the deal you're at, CELSEG will be there to tell you, here's three steps that you can take immediately to get something done and move the deal towards the finish line. So it's much better than just Gen AI advice because it's not generic advice. It's tailored from a specific sales viewpoint. with all the kinds of know-how and frameworks built into the model, you'll get much higher quality results. So I'm going to move right now on to a demo and let me know if my screen is sharing properly. Can you guys see the model? Did I just switch to CELSEG? Yeah, we see it, yeah. Okay, great, thank you. So this is what the sales coach looks like. It's a very familiar kind of an interface, very easy to use. And you can see at the top, there's a coaching tab. And right next to it is a doing tab. And this keeps you in context when you're working on your deals. The coaching tab is where you get your advice and you put your inputs in. Could be something as simple as a LinkedIn thread, or it could be a series of emails. or it can be a call transcript or notes so there's a lot of different kinds of inputs that you can use and i i really like the coaching tab because it gives you a very very sales centric advice right so it's not trying to do everything it's just trying to do sales really really well and that's why i like using it with call transcripts so much because it takes your call transcripts and looks at it from a completely sales perspective The doing tab is right next door to the coaching tab. You can jump over the doing tab and it will help you schedule your next steps. So, for example, you can send emails, you can do research, you can put files into your CRM, you can send notifications to Slack channels to keep your team informed, you can put notes up. back into your CRM or create new clients or contacts in your CRM and you can put files onto Drive or complete spreadsheets on Drive. So there's a lot of things that you can do with the doing tab and rather than jumping from tool to tool and scattering your already busy mind over different tools, it keeps you focused in the same interface. I don't know about you guys but whenever I'm Whenever I switch to an email client, I see an email that I want to respond to. This prevents that kind of distraction from happening. And also it saves you a ton of time because everything's right here, right where you need it. It's easy to execute. It writes fantastic emails as well. So this is what the interface looks like. And over on the left side of the screen, you can see your chat history where. you've had your previous conversations and you can go right back to those same conversations and continue on so right now uh i'm gonna go and grab some text from an email uh an email thread that i've had with a client it started off as a linkedin thread and switched over to email and i'm just going to paste it here in to the chat box and hit the enter button and we'll get some advice from the sales coach. And right now it's thinking and it's reviewing everything about the conversation. It's looking at risks. It's looking at urgency. It's looking at a timeline. It's looking at the information you've gathered in your communications with the customer. It's analyzing their personalities and looking for ways to appeal to those personalities based on the individuals that you're dealing with. So it's doing a lot of homework for you. And it's lining up some next steps for you. It's going to tell you, here's some options about how you can move the deal forward right now. So after giving you coaching, it gives you some actual suggestions on what you can do next. So, just go back up to the top here. Look at all that good detail. And right at the very top, we have one sentence of truth. And this is a summary of all the information that you've put in your inputs. And it gives you an assessment of where you're at with this customer and with the deal. So, in this case, it says you've got a live, well-aligned opportunity where ops want change and infra wants safety. incumbent vendor that has sold into this customer and you've got a technical session lined up which is make or break because they want to know if you're a serious alternative. So this conversation is based on real deals that I've worked on in the past. I worked on cloud clustering technology to provide high availability. I know it's a bit jargony and technical. But I wanted to use a real example. And this is, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, but this is based on real deals that I've worked on. And after the one sentence of truth where you have a good summary that tells you where you're at, it goes into personality profiling of the buyers. So right at the very top, we have someone named Marcus, who is a VP of operations. I'm using DISC profiling, which is a psychological profiling model that gives you some very basic snapshots of a buyer's personality. And the D in DISC stands for dominant. So Marcus is a dominant person. He's a decision maker. And the model has some evidence to back this up. The evidence is that Marcus is making decisive responses. Marcus is setting up schedules. Marcus is looping in co-workers that are going to be important for the conversation and he's proposing times and dates and next steps. So this is very much a decision maker and that's good to know. That could be your potential champion, someone that will lead the selling when you're not in the room on the customer's side. Then the second main person in the conversation is someone named David who's a VP of infrastructure. And David is a C type of a person. C stands for conscientious. And conscientious people are often in charge of infrastructure or technology because there are people that run through a checklist and make sure that everything's working correctly. There are people that do due diligence. There are people that do due testing and create requirements documents. So it's very good to understand that the person in charge of their infrastructure. is a highly conscientious person and this person has also given us some hints and signals about how they want to buy or what's going to motivate them to buy. He's used the term non-negotiable to talk about some requirements and he's given a reliability target of 99.99%. Now that's a number that we hear a lot so it might sound like a generic number but any number that is on record is super valuable to you in the sales process and the implication of all this is that David needs some kind of detailed proof some kinds of precision answers and he wants to make sure that he's not making a mistake that's his job and he probably doesn't want to get blamed if something goes wrong so this third piece of advice down here a founder note this is my personality i'm a high i which stands for influence and a lot of founders are people who like to influence others you have a great idea you have a great product you're pitching your idea and maybe even you might say your dream so you're going to be influential and that can be a misalignment with somebody who's highly conscientious you might be excited and overselling the future capabilities of your product Whereas someone who is a VP of infrastructure cares a lot about the present day and the reality of their environment. So the coach is pointing out a potential warning that can prevent you from doing something that would be negative in the future. Right. So it's proactive advice, giving you a heads up before something goes wrong. This gives you the ability to manage the sales process and manage your relationship with the client. Now that you know. the personality styles that you're dealing with, you can sell effectively to these people. So I'm just looking here at some of the signals that are extracted. We've covered some of the stuff about people. Next is the competition. It's pointed out that EMC is the incumbent. And it also points out that David may have been the person that implemented EMC. So When you're selling to somebody who's implemented the previous technology, that's good to know because they might be very proud of their implementation. So even when you're talking about replacing a system, it's good advice to know who implemented it. And you want to find out what the incumbent has done well and where the incumbent has maybe disappointed the client because that might be their pain point. So urgency. It's mentioned in the email thread that there's an EMC renewal process. This shows you that they're on a timeline. Now, you might not have that timeline yet, but if they're marching towards an EMC renewal process, you want to get your selling done before that time expires, right? So this is a good hint and a good signal. It tells you that you can get more information about the timeline they're working on in the next meeting. Again, it points out some risks about replacing an old system. So there's a political split. Marcus is a move fast and innovate kind of a person. And David is someone who values stability. So that's on the client side. You want to make sure that when you're selling to these two different types of people, you're not creating conflict. on your client side right and so very good to know that proactively then it's got some comments about the rep behavior and what the rep has done well in this case the founder is the rep you you are founders and you will be getting advice about how you behave and how you sell and it'll be pointing out gaps uh in your delivery gaps in your thinking and things that you need to close in the next meetings, gaps that you need to close. So very good advice for founders. Often when we're doing the selling, it's hard to pay attention to what we might be missing. So this is paying attention. The AI sales coach will let you know where you may have dropped the ball before the next meeting so you can do something about it. Now I mentioned the frameworks that are built in. One of them is called MEDIC. And MEDIC is an acronym that stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, and champion. That's kind of a lot of terms in a short period of time, but each one of these is very, very useful to know as a qualifier. So it tells you how to qualify your deal, how much information you have that is helping qualify the deal, and where the gaps are, what you still need to achieve. So we've got about a five out of 10. on a medic score so you're about halfway there in terms of what you need to know and it tells you which parts are missing so if we look up here we don't yet know anything about the client's decision process does it take them two weeks does it take them a month does it does it determine is it determined by how much the price is these are all important things to know about how the client will approve a deal If it's a big ticket item and very expensive, the process tends to become more complicated and there's more due diligence steps. So it's good to know what those due diligence steps might be. If you can cover those earlier in the sales process, it kind of has a way of accelerating your deal and accelerating buy-in from the client. So one bit of advice from the coach is decelerate the deal slightly. Initial contact through LinkedIn and email has gone quickly and it's gone well, but now you're getting into a due diligence phase where you need to maybe slow things down and do a little bit less hand waving and more actual technical proof points to demonstrate to the buyers that you're going to tick off all the boxes on their list of requirements. Now, this is quite useful. This is a reverse timeline. This tells you based on where the client's future dates like the EMC renewal are, what you need to do in the next two, four, six, eight, and 10 weeks. So depending on the timeline, you'll get different advice, but this helps you build a cadence in your head about where you need to be, what you need to be achieving and when you need to achieve that. So a reverse timeline will really help you with scheduling and getting your team internally aligned about what you need to do next. And it's important that you lead the sales timeline and you lead the cadence, because if you leave it up to the customer, they'll lose confidence in you as a supplier, right? Don't forget, they're judging your ability to deliver based on how well you're doing in the sales process. And next, the sales coach is recommending some moves that you can take in the doing tab. You can put these new people into your CRM. research these people using a research agent that's built into the tab. You can understand and research your competition and you can pull context from your CRM. So if you have a mature customer base and you have some data about them, you can pull out missing information from your CRM using the doing tab. You don't need to go in and start clicking around and hunting for that information. It'll retrieve it for you. And it creates some suggestions about how to schedule the next meeting and get that calendared. You can use the tool to do that. And then it even gives you some email suggestions and drafts them for you about what you can say to the client and how you can get the information from the client. This is a highly sales aware tool. And you don't need to bring all that awareness yourself. The tool will give you that advice. So very helpful if you're trying to figure out what your next steps are. Okay. And this at the bottom, it gives you a closed probability, kind of a gut check so that you can know where you're at. At this point, this deal is about 30 or 40% of the way through. You've still got 60 to 70% more activity until you get to close. This is really valuable because it helps you become realistic about what you still need to do. It prevents you from becoming overly optimistic or thinking that you are in more control than you're actually in. So using this kind of close probability is based on the information you're providing to the model and It's very helpful for people that are not used to the sales process and helps keep you on track. So let me go over to the doing tab. I'll just do a quick demo here. Please create new customer contacts in the CRM for this client. And I'll hit the return button. Let the model think about it and it'll come back and, oh, it wants some more information from me. So I'll quickly paste that in and it will actually go and create these records in the CRM for you. If there's no company record, it will recommend that you create a company record. It will create records for the key people that are mentioned in the email thread or CC'd. And it will allow you to even put notes into the CRM. So, for example, if you run a call transcript through the coaching mode, it will help you read through the coaching and understand what summary you can put in the CRM in case the deal goes cold for a few weeks or things slow down for a couple weeks. you're able to go back into the CRM and quickly retrieve those notes and quickly understand what the situation is for your next steps. So it's given me, I apologize, it's given me some of the same information again, but it will, at the end, summarize this and give us a list of the names that it's put in the CRM. And don't worry, it won't take action until you approve it, and it'll help you save time by... uh dealing with the CRM issues for you so now uh I'd like to go and attach a call transcript that I've prepared and let me just see if I can find it here it looks like I have saved a call transcript for the webinar let me just double check something okay I'm going to use this call transcript here that I've prepared And it's based on a real transcript. Hit the submit button. Now, a lot of people have asked me if I plan to build a note taker into CellSig. And I really feel like there are so many different note takers out there already. And many companies are using a note taker already. Some of them are development-oriented note takers. Some of them are off-the-shelf free note takers. Some of them are built into other products like Zoom, for example. So rather than recreate the wheel, I want to use other companies' note takers and other companies' transcriptions. And this actually makes for a higher quality result for the founders. because you're going to get a second opinion on whatever note taker you have you're going to get a new view of those same notes and the cell sig model is built for sales and built for sales analysis so it's going to look at your call transcripts through that lens and it's going to give you feedback about your customers and your calls from a sales perspective so very interesting to use Celsig for this reason and it'll take any meeting note taker that you like to use so you don't have to swap out technology every time you're doing a zoom call or a sales call you can use your favorite note taker and use Celsig to evaluate the transcripts so I'm just going to scroll up here and move up to the top of the notes so in this scenario we were doing a demo and The one sentence of truth is that this is a high quality first demo where the buyer's whole technical and commercial committee are engaged and they're aligned on running a benchmark in your sandbox and clearly have split ownership between technical and commercial. So we have two contacts. One is the technical leader, Nadia, and one is the commercial leader, who's Arjun. And again, these are based on real sales and real deals, but this scenario is using Not using the real name. So, and as in the last example, this is giving you disk profiles. It's telling you about the personalities of the people involved and it's backing up, backing up these opinions with evidence, pointing out specific things that they've said in the meeting that indicate what they care about. And that's incredibly useful for you as a seller. It knows how you can sell to these people, how to approach them. from their specific individual personality. So nothing makes people feel better like when they're being talked to the way that they want to be talked to. And when you're dealing with their issues, you're telling them, I understand your pain. I understand how to be successful in your company's environment. And it goes through the signals. It talks about what kind of next steps you can take. Very similar to the last conversation that we analyzed. on the email level this is using your call transcripts and it's giving you good actionable next steps what you can do what you can do next and how you can manage your customers it's giving you a medic score and telling you who about the economic buyer for example so arjun is there any commercial questions loop me in directly so the economic buyer is saying up front if there's commercial issues contact me which is a very good sign. So you've got two out of two on the economic buyer after your demo. Scrolling down to the end here, there's a 35 to 45% chance of close and it tells you what you need to pay attention to, right? Benchmark actually gets executed on the timeline you just set. So you've made commitments to the client and the sales coach is reminding you of those commitments and telling you they're important. You might, I do this anyways, I might say something in a meeting and I think it's just a comment, but it's interpreted as a commitment by the customer. So it's good to have the sales coach there watching your back and reminding you of things that you've said, especially if they sound like a commitment. And the second bit of advice is drive a clear narrative that resolves Tom's customer experience fears. So the client has expressed some. some concerns that they have about customer experience and the AI sales coach is letting you know that that's important to them. So this is a really good opportunity, a real warm opportunity, and you want to make sure that you don't stall it out by over analyzing and doing too much technical proof points. But to do that, you need to lock in some dates and create some future checkpoints, and hopefully you'll be able to close this deal. So that is the end of the live demonstration. I'm just switching back to the slides here. I want to make sure I have time for Q&A. So what do you get with SalesSig? You get AI sales coaching, you get focused context, you get the curated knowledge base, and you get human in the loop validation, which is... I will personally validate any outputs from the coach, and I will personally back up any advice being given by the coach. If I disagree, I will help you find better results or a better way to get results. This is really the kind of support that founders need. They want to know that they're able to validate what advice they're getting from AI. And it's one of the things that's missing with AI is you don't know if you're getting a hallucination or if the model is just repeating what you want to hear. And we've all been there when we ask a question to one of the Gen AI models, and it tells us back exactly what we've just said. It says, that's a great idea. Not exactly what you need when you're in the sales process. You need to be challenged a bit. So I will be there for the founders and for my customers. and helping them get actionable advice and making sure that any advice is really solid and really going to help them win deals. So I've got the pictures of the white gloves up there because I am hands-on and I love being involved in deals and I love helping founders and this helps me make a better product as well. So I really want to be there for you guys and for other founders. right at those points where you have questions. You can email me or message me and I'll get back to you very quickly. I commit to 12 hours, but I'm really aiming for less than 30 minutes. So this is a guarantee from me personally. So beyond sales calls, what is the advantage that founders get? These skills, these sales skills compound and really help you grow to be a stronger executive. They're The sales coach is 99% cheaper than a senior sales hire, so it's a huge cost advantage. You're getting all that enterprise expertise in a very easy-to-use package and also a very knowledgeable and effective package as well. You're learning how to speak the language that the customers respond to. right? You're learning how to articulate things in terms of value and business value, value in their industry and value in their careers. So it's very important that you develop this skill because if you're speaking the language that the customer wants to hear, they're much more likely to buy. And the coach levels up your skills, it compounds, and that's super important because when you need to be a... be able to sell when you need to be there, that's when it matters the most. When you're talking to a client, when you're talking to a VC about closing a round of investment, when you're in a boardroom with senior people, you will know how to speak to them and show up and be there in that moment in person, right? It is super valuable and a great skill to focus on. And it will compound even further than that when you start building your sales organization. you'll know how to do sales you're you'll be better able to find recruit and hire senior sales people and you'll know how to manage them because you'll already be speaking their language you'll already have a background in it so salesig brings that kind of skill set to you that you can build into your future business so here we are at the q a section i hope uh you guys have some good questions I want to make sure that you know that you can set up a meeting with me and we can do a one-on-one session with real sales data from your business and I'll help you analyze and win your deals. There's no better way for me to show the capability to sales coach than to work on a live deal with a real customer. And that's a part of my strategy is help my customers be successful. And I'm looking for those breakout wins that will really propel my business forward if I help you propel your business forward. So let me open up the floor. Does anybody have any questions? So if there's no questions, I'll ask myself a question. And I know this is a common question. I get this from founders. They're in a good conversation with, oh, go ahead. Hey, sorry to cut you off there. No problem. It was great speaking with you last week. Thanks for taking the time. Just one quick question. Does this give you unlimited access to the service? Yeah, you get unlimited access to the coaching mode. And right now, right now I have the doing mode at 200 requests a month. I'm actually not that worried that people are going to, you know, overuse the doing mode. It's expandable, right? So I'm not going to cut anybody off if they hit 300 in a month. It's more of a guideline than a hard limit. And I just want to make sure that people understand that you're probably going to have more doing requests than you can actually use. 200 is a lot of requests. But if you're that busy at sales, then that's going to be great news. But yeah, you can use the coach in an unlimited way for $49. And you can send me as many messages as you want to help you validate the results of the coach as well. So I'm really... I'm really happy and willing to give early customers and founders that extra love and attention and make sure that they're successful. I see that as really tied closely to my success and this company's success. And I'm super interested in any edge cases as well. So I want to be there. I love closing. So for me, it just sounds like fun to be engaged with clients. And happy to take any questions about the model and the outputs or even how to prompt better and get better results from the model. Great. Thanks. My pleasure. Hey, Chris, can you hear me? Yep. Great. No question. Just wanted to say thank you. It was really informative. And I appreciate you kind of taking us through the different struggles that. can come up in founder-led sales. I know these are some of the things that I've struggled with learning, you know, how to do this over the last year. So just wanted to say thank you. My pleasure. And I'm probably going to have some future webinars and I'm thinking about, you know, interesting topics to work on. So if anybody has a specific topic that you think would be beneficial to you and you want to reach out to me, I will. build that into my future webinars i would say you know this is just an n of one so just one data point my biggest struggle over the last year was trying to figure out what the right channel to do cold outbound so whether i should be investing most of my time on linkedin or if i should be figuring out how to do cold outbound by email or if i should be indexing on in-person events and and personal relationships That's probably where I may have wasted most of my time over the last year. Again, that's just my experience. I'm also no longer in that position, so I don't need the help on that right at the moment. But, you know, for what it's worth, that's probably the biggest question that I had in my mind over the last year. Great to know that. And, yeah, I could definitely focus on that. And, yeah. I want to start now, but I'll hold off so that other people can ask other questions. But it's a great thing to work on for a future webinar. Thank you for that advice. Any other questions? I was thinking before this webinar that I would be happy to take someone's real sales data and do a real live analysis of somebody's sales data. And I thought, I don't know, that maybe people would not be comfortable sharing that customer information on a call like this. just for privacy reasons and respecting the customer. So I want to put this QR code up here on the screen. The one on the right, the orange QR code, that's to book a call with me, a one-on-one call. So if you have real-life customers and real-life sales data and you'd like to do a session, a bit of a deep dive to understand how to sell to your customer, please click that QR code and book a call with me. And it's free of charge. And I'll bring all my experience and expertise to the table. And you'll see how amazing the coach and the advice that you're getting about your real deals. It really is really quite incredible, especially when you're working on something that you know really well, because it will give you that extra insight. And I'm sure you'll have some aha moments where you're thinking, wow, this is exactly the kind of actionable coaching that I'm really looking for. So I would encourage you to click that QR code and set up a one-on-one appointment with me. And the other QR code, the link, it's straight to our website and our landing page if you want to sign up. That's the fastest way to do it. I'm offering a special offer to people who attended this webinar. Anybody who signs up, I'll give you an hour of coaching, one-on-one coaching that you can schedule anytime. So if you want to, you know, put that in the bank and use it when you're closing a deal, you can book an hour with me to go deep and really understand how to sell. This might be important if you're working on a big deal. and you're stuck or something like that, then this is very valuable. I have a ton of experience working on big deals and getting over sticky sales challenges. So I wanted to make this special offer available to all of you who attended today. And I really appreciate your time. I'm looking at the clock. It's 12 o'clock on the dot. This was one hour scheduled. So I will conclude the call right now. please reach out and schedule a meeting with me. And I look forward to seeing you all in the near future. And thank you very much.

Webinar Reply: How to Crush Founder-Led Sales for Your B2B Products. Hosted 04/15/2026 by SellSig Founder, Chris Phelan.

"You're a technical founder building an AI product. You know the tech cold. But when it comes to selling - qualifying buyers, running discovery, navigating buying committees, closing complex B2B deals, you're figuring it out as you go.

​That's not a weakness. It's a skills gap. And it's the one thing that separates founders who close from founders who stall.

​In this 60-minute live session, you'll learn:

​Why most sales advice given to founders - "more pipeline," "better scripts," "hire a sales leader" misdiagnoses the real problem

​How to read buyer signals, qualify pain, identify champions, and manage the decision process using proven B2B frameworks (MEDDIC, SPIN, DISC)

​Where founders actually lose deals, not in the pipeline, but in the room and what to do differently

​Plus: a demo of SellSig's AI Sales Coach breaking down a real sales conversation with framework-driven feedback, buyer intent analysis, and recommended next steps"