It can be hard to sell an impossible product

I’ve been reflecting on my time at QDX since leaving, and the things I learnt. I joined QDX to lead GTM, and my role naturally evolved to cover product and ops, as roles at early stage startups do. I primarily joined QDX for two reasons:

1. At my first startup, I felt I had figured out how to build software, recruit and manage a team, get funding, manage suppliers, and do PR. One major piece of building a company I felt I hadn’t figured out was sales. GTM at QDX was an opportunity to sit across both B2B and B2C sales, and experiment.
2. To be frank, there aren’t many truly world-class, highly ambitious teams building novel technology in Australia. This startup was led by a CEO with $1.8 billion in previous exits, and a Head of Science who had broken 4 world records by 1000x for the fastest and largest quantum chemistry simulations ever performed. Despite knowing nothing about chemistry or sales, I jumped on the opportunity to work with them.

(I should say that they did know I knew very little about sales before hiring me - the CEO had watched me operate in my first startup, knew that I was scrappy, ambitious, and high agency, and trusted that I would figure it out).

This was a pretty tough gig initially. I was a twenty-something year old with no background in biology or chemistry trying to sell quantum chemistry software to extremely smart scientists with PhDs who have been in their industry for 20+ years and who have no background in computer science, and therefore very little concept of how our software could help them do their job. One of my early sales calls (as in, first couple of weeks on the job) I managed to get with a guy with a PhD in quantum mechanics, who did understand quantum chemistry. Because the technology was so frontier, and had broken previous records so thoroughly, and because scientists are (validly) skeptical by nature, he told me straight out that what we had built was impossible. I didn’t have the confidence in my own knowledge at the time to tell him he was wrong, but he was in fact wrong.

So, I found myself needing to educate a market on a product that they either didn’t understand the use case for or had previously thought what we were doing was impossible, as someone who had zero qualifications to be telling the very smart and experienced people I was selling to what was what. For the first phase of the job I felt like I was failing miserably.

I found out later that two people, both of whom had very successful previous careers in business development/sales/growth marketing, had tried to do my job previously. They had both left pretty quickly because they realised how hard it would be (and went on to continue to be successful at BD/sales/growth marketing in easier industries). I stuck around, organised a product pivot based on the feedback I was getting from customers, and with the improved angle built out a B2B sales pipeline that took 250k of pilot deals to the point of signature in a single quarter (representing 1 mill in potential ARR on conversion to long-term agreements, and the first path to profitability for the company).

Some of my takeaways from the process:

The first thing I learnt is that I strongly dislike B2C marketing, by which I mean I dislike social media marketing. Strongly. This was useful information for me because I’ve always been a generalist - there’s a wide range of things I find interesting/exciting, and I love work that is interdisciplinary. Finding something that I didn’t like was actually pretty novel for me and very helpful to know.

The second thing was that the people doing the selling have the best source of information on what the product should be out of anyone in the company.

The third was how to quickly establish competence on a sales call (tl;dr ask questions until you find the limit of the person’s knowledge in your area, and then make damn sure you know more than them).

The fourth was that amazing tech doesn’t sell itself. In fact, the more complicated and impressive the tech, and the more benefits it provides, the harder it can be to explain the benefit and the mechanism clearly. I learnt to drastically scope down what benefits I focused on based on the audience.

The fifth is that PR is a key unlock when you’re trying to sell a product people don’t know they need.

The sixth is don’t use a deck. Have a deck, but don’t use it.

The seventh - I tried a bunch of ways of getting a follow-up meeting booked in the first call, which is the conventional sales wisdom. I found that rarely worked, at least in this industry, and usually made people defensive. The method I found worked best was “We’ve talked about a lot and I’m sure you’re going to have questions and want to loop in your team - I’ll send through some times my team is available next week and you can let me know which works best” and then to put something in their inbox straight after, and follow-up repeatedly if they don’t come back with a time that suits.

The eighth is to find something you can be very transparent about that they don’t expect you to be transparent about, because that will make them trust you. Also tell them you’re not sure if you’ll be able to help them. Also derisk their initial interaction with you as much as possible. All surprising and comforting to hear from a person they expect to be salesy.

I’m sure a lot of these are pretty obvious sales stuff, and there’s also a lot more I could pull out from the experience if I kept brainstorming - but these are the things that come most clearly to mind. Writing about this is making me sort of miss the B2B grind.