[10-2025 / English / 1917 words]

Looking back at the last 12 months feels surreal. I have learned so much about selling, it’s insane. As a technical founder with a background in programming and design, nothing about this has come naturally, but it’s surprisingly rewarding. It all started when I realized that the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of paying customers, and that this should therefore be my number one priority from now on. After lots of experimentation in the LinkedIn B2B space, I became so obsessed with revenue generation that I even ended up cofounding Ibex, an agency/SaaS hybrid that helps other businesses find clients.

While there’s still a long road ahead for us, it’s the first time in my life that I’m seeing a realistic path to actually building a sustainable company. I’m by no means a sales expert, but I thought I’ll nevertheless share my learnings while they’re still fresh, especially since there aren’t that many guides about this topic written by non-business people.

Why do I even need to do sales?

When looking specifically at bootstrapped (self-funded) SaaS startups, this is a valid question. There are many profitable startups in the low-end B2B space ($10-$50/mo) that exclusively rely on marketing. These are the perfect lifestyle businesses that the indiehacking community is dreaming of. But they’re very hard to pull off, and leave a lot of money on the table. From our experience, once we made the switch to a high-touch sales process, it became much easier to build strong relationships with customers. This includes doing video calls, sending many 1:1 emails, and in some cases even building tailored versions of our product. As a result, our customers got to know us, and felt that we’re invested. And we were also able to charge much more per customer, which is especially important when starting out.

If you have the ambition to grow a product-based startup (as we do), something to be aware of is that this can also go too far. By working intensely with individual customers, it’s easy to lose focus and build a series of super-customized solutions, eventually becoming an agency that bills by the hour. This is also - somewhat dramatically - called “the agency trap”. While it’s something to keep in mind, I personally think that it’s not as big of a problem as the VC-influenced mainstream makes it out to be. I’m convinced that there’s an order of magnitude more startups that failed by just relying on (poorly done) marketing and a self-serve onboarding flow vs. actually trying to sell their product or services themselves.

Who’s my ideal customer?

Coming into the sales space without much experience, I was confronted by a multitude of acronyms. ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a very important one. Once I started doing cold outreach to individuals, I suddenly had to put a huge amount of manual effort into 1:1 communication. Therefore it became really important to be picky about the people I chose to invest my time in. Finding an ICP is basically a formalized version of answering the question “who is a really good customer for me?” In our case, this meant thinking systematically about who would: 1) benefit from our service, 2) have a high willingness to pay, and 3) be realistically open to becoming our customer.

Surprisingly, none of these points were easy to establish. We did lots of iteration cycles, and took on many unpaid test clients to find out who’s actually a good customer. A very important part of this process is also to iterate on your offer. It’s an order of magnitude easier to find people willing to talk if you have a kick-ass offer - so I would recommend being generous, especially when starting out. We ourselves haven’t 100% nailed our ICP, which probably means that we don’t have product-market-fit yet. To eventually get there, we’re running multiple small-scale experiments every month where we A/B test different groups, offers, and fetishistically track every step of the sales funnel.

What’s a sales funnel?

That brings us to the next step: despite me pouring ungodly amounts of attention and energy into sales, the vast majority of prospects ghost me at one point or another. The image of a funnel is so apt, because at every step of the process, there’s a significant drop-off, and only a fraction of people move to the next step. To give you an idea, I’ll discuss the main stats from the last 30 days of our main acquisition channel, LinkedIn cold outreach. I’ll break our funnel down into three sub-stages that have different characteristics in terms of numbers and time investment per prospect.

TOFU (Top-of-Funnel): Numbers Game
•487 Connection requests sent
•175 Requests accepted (36%)
•43 Replied (25% of accepted)
•15 Interested (35% of replies)

The people who are interested enter our actual sales pipeline, and we count them as opportunities. We follow up several times with them, answer questions, and are trying to be helpful. The goal is that they book a discovery call where we qualify them further. Before I did sales myself, I always thought that this notion about being a fit for each other was just performative. But it’s actually a real thing: we genuinely want to make sure that our opportunities can benefit from our service, because otherwise they will simply churn later in the pipeline, after having taken up much more of our resources.

MOFU (Middle-of-Funnel): High-Touch Qualification
•11 Discovery calls booked
•8 Calls held (2 canceled, 1 no-show)
•5 Second calls (2 disqualified, 1 ghosted)
•4 Signed agreements

We decided to let our opportunities sign a very non-committal and friendly-worded 2-page agreement that clearly lays out the terms of our 1-month free pilot. This is our gating step to filter out people who are serious about our services, and are worth the 10+ hours of manual setup, scraping costs, and AI credits we invest in a pilot.

BOFU (Bottom-of-Funnel): Conversion & Success
•4 Clients onboarded
•2 Pilots finished (2 stopped early)
•2 Paid clients

We invest more than half of our sales effort into the people remaining at this stage, which makes it so important to qualify them properly at an earlier time. What we’re doing here is actually more accurately described as solutions engineering, because we’re not just doing multiple video calls and many emails, but are also collaborating on copywriting, setting up automations and configuring AI agents. This is an expensive way to acquire clients, but we have found that it significantly increases trust, and so far every client that we have managed to drive results for ended up signing up for the paid plan.

How to get leads?

A sales funnel is worthless without leads coming in. Traditionally, in a high-touch B2B context that means cold emails, and optionally also cold calling and/or LinkedIn outreach. Cold email is great for a few reasons: 1) it is highly scalable and you can easily send out thousands of emails per day, 2) it’s a fairly “democratic” form of outreach where you can achieve great outcomes with good offers sent to the right people, and 3) there’s no platform risk. The problem, however, is that people’s inboxes are saturated, and reply rates are at an all-time low. To improve the odds, it’s more important than ever to find people with intent (those that need your service right now).

While this is hard to do for email, it’s fairly easy on LinkedIn. There’s an abundance of public data on people’s interests (their comments and reactions to posts), which we evaluate with our in-house AI agent to build high-intent contact lists. A second advantage that LinkedIn has compared to cold email is its comparatively high level of trust. Since the platform is engineered to make it easy to connect in a business setting, most audiences are quite receptive to a high-quality invitation. However, the downside is that LinkedIn is the best-protected social network on the planet, and it requires lots of experience to safely automate outreach. Nevertheless, even when used completely without automation, LinkedIn is still a great tool for early stage B2B founders. Just put yourself out there and you’ll be able to at least find a few potential customers to talk with, and refine your offering.

How to do calls?

If you manage to book a few calls with your target audience, that’s a good indicator that you’re onto something. But you’re still only halfway at a deal (actually, way less than that), and you’ll need tons of emails and calls to make that happen. I personally was always very comfortable with emails, but the idea of calls still used to make me nervous at the beginning of this year. I just didn’t know what was normal in an online B2B sales context. For example, I made attempts at small talk about the weather and other random things because I thought that would create “rapport”. It often felt awkward. I was also unsure how sales-y I was supposed to be.

Over time I realized that the best way for me to connect with my prospects is just to be real. That’s how I found my “sales persona”: Just being my slightly introverted self, talking knowledgeably and honestly about my product. And of course: Asking lots of questions! A great trick that I use every time I’m starting a call with someone new is to ask the prospect about their business, industry, and ICP. It’s quite interesting to talk with so many different entrepreneurially-minded people from all kinds of verticals. I get exposed to different business models, strategies, and random facts that I would otherwise never learn - from the financial structure of private equity firms to the economics of an immigration consultancy, or a roofing business.

On the tool side, it became invaluable for me to use an online calendar where prospects can book calls at pre-approved timeslots (e.g. Calendly). This removes a lot of the back-and-forth to find a date and time that works, and creates automatic call links with reminder emails. I also experimented with several AI transcription tools that create meeting summaries so that the participants can fully focus on the call. However, this never really worked for me, because the summaries were often too long and focused on irrelevant details. Instead, I like to use an A4 (letter-sized) piece of printer paper, and simply jot down some notes. And after the call I just enter this data manually into our sales CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

Sales is a real-world feedback loop.

It’s a cliché but nevertheless true: as a technical person I’d rather write code than put myself out there and talk with complete strangers. To a degree, this is still the case for me, but it does get easier every day. Over the last 12 months, I’ve developed quite a thick skin, and learned to see rejection just as a data point and not taking it personally. What motivates me the most to keep doing sales is that I’ve come to appreciate how powerful it is to get direct feedback from the market through personal interaction. This is the fastest business optimization loop that I know of: just talking with people, and trying to solve their problems so they give you money.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful! If you have thoughts or questions, feel free to send me an email to fd (at) fabiandietrich (dot) com. Always happy to connect with like-minded people :)