Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Start-Ups

by Amos Schwartzfarb

Most startups fail because they can't grow revenue early or quickly enough. Startup CEOs will tell you their early missteps can be attributed to not finding their product market fit early enough, or at all. Founders overspend time and money trying to find product-market fit and make false starts, follow the wrong signals, and struggle to generate enough revenue to scale and raise funding. And all the while they never really knew who their customers were, what product they really needed, and why they needed it. But it doesn't have to be this way.

The ultimate guide for building and scaling any startup sales organization, Sell More Faster shares the proven systems, methods, and lessons from managing director of Techstars Austin and sales expert Amos Schwartzfarb. Hear from founders of multi-million-dollar companies and CEOs who learned firsthand with Techstars, the leading mentorship-driven startup accelerator and venture capital firm that has invested in and mentored thousands of companies, collectively representing billions of dollars in funding and market cap. Schwartzfarb and the Techstars Worldwide Network of more than 10,000 mentors do one thing better than help startup entrepreneurs succeed. They know how to sell, how to hire people who know how to sell, and how to use sales to gain venture funding-and now you can, too.

Genres: Business, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Audiobook, Leadership

Audible Audio

Published October 8, 2019

Reviews

[Jordan Wolff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent framework to get started in sales. Who, what, why

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It certainly had good stuff, but felt unorganized

There are a lot of random notes. I really like the idea of it and there are a lot of helpful things, but there were some things that were really hard to understand for me.

I wouldn’t read it again, but the biggest lesson I got from this book is to prioritize my customers through the entire experience of them working with me, and know that the vast majority of my revenue is going to come from existing customers at some point in the business so I should start planning for that now.

He’s also really helpful to hear what metrics the author thought that I should be tracking with my CRM, which I agree with, which were number of things entering the top of funnel and percentage of people going from one stage to the next with average closed time and average value for each customer, and more. I liked how he just took a very scientific view of the entire process.

[T. Laane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book from audible free category. The author is a role model as a person, very wise in that field (a lot of companies hyper-charged and sold) AND ethical - he is all about happy clients. The core of the book can be summed up (with each phase in detail): have the RIGHT costumers buying the RIGHT thing for them, measuring the VALUE in transaction and developing RIGHT repetitive sales processes and keeping up a customer-centric culture knowing how and why to engage with them. There. Read my sentence again :) And yes, the book gets detailed about every phase, with data heavy approach measuring and explaining everything. If You do all this correctly, it will also be easy to up-sell those clients. I took a lot of notes and will set this one as a re-listen in a few years.

[Ben Sydel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would highly recommend this to anyone considering founding a startup or working with the early members of a sales team. I found it to be a really clear and helpful playbook that I will definitely reference if / when I become a founder or early startup employee.

However, this book was more helpful to me than just as a playbook. I gave Sell More Faster 5 stars because I have worked with and around early stage startups, and this gives me great insight into what those sales teams (or just the founder who’s hat collection includes salesman) go though on a daily basis, and helped clarify what separates a great sales team from one that doesn’t match their company.

[Matthew Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sell More Faster is a must-read for anyone who is launching, or wants to launch, a tech startup. Backed by a tremendous amount of personal experience and the stories of others, Amos provides extremely practical steps to finding product market fit and scaling up sales in the startup context.

I know I will continue to refer back to this book in the future!

[Yong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sell more faster is a wonderful sales playbook for founders like me who has strong background in technology but lack of sales experience. It helps me understanding and slowing down our sales process. The book provides a clear and strong operability, showing the way for #startups to sell more faster, specially for a toB business like us. Great reading time! Highly recommended！

[Volodymyr Melnyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on describing how to build a well defined, articulated sales plan for early-stage startups. It points the importance of three Ws: (1) Who are you selling to? (2) What are they buying? (3) Why are they buying it?
It will be insightful especially for pre-PMF (product-market fit) startups, though might be less relevant to businesses on later stages.

[Fred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely some great ideas in the book, but it sort of assumes you are already a sales adjacent person. There is no stepping stone for a technical founder for example and instead the author goes straight to the nitty gritty. In a similar vein I felt like it was too practical and not enough big picture.

[Arjun Mahadevan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Practical book with some helpful sales tips. The part on setting up and actually using your CRM was very helpful to hear and I also really liked the focus on the three W's:

- Who are you selling to?
- What are they buying?
- Why do they buy it?

[Paweł Michalski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great entry-level book on start-up sales!

[Peter Kazanjy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the book had a solid description of the importance of customer development, but framed in a way that described it as something that gets done AFTER you build a product - which of course is backwards. Good customer research and product hypothesis construction comes before engineering resources are deployed to build features and product. Good commentary on how important it is for founders to do initial selling. A handy framing of early stage selling, with some good advice and some not so great advice (“get out of the way” of your first sales hire? - that’s the most critical point at which to train and embed in them your existing sales motion...). Could have been far more descriptive around how to do various things versus “You will need to do XYZ” - ok, how? In general a solid read for a founder trying to wrap their head around the broadest strokes of go to market.