TL;DR: Airtable, Calendly, Zapier, Gmail

When you’re in the thick of building an MVP, standing up a corporation, and raising money, the tooling you use to bring your product to market is certainly not top of mind. Doing so in a composable way that enables sustainable growth and flexibility for the future needs to be prioritized early to avoid GTM debt that will hinder your future sales and marketing hires’ progress. I will eventually break this out into separate pages but for now enjoy the consolidated version. Please send me any feedback you’re willing to share - I’m always happy to dig in deeper if there are things you’d like to discuss, questions you have, or more specific guidance I can provide.

Importantly, the stack I describe below is basically free.

Table of Contents

• Marketing Funnel

• Sales Framework

• Account Management

• Tech Stack Breakdown

  • CRM

  • Lead Capture

  • Automation

  • Outbound

In writing this I’m pulling from my experience selling into SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise businesses in technology and financial services. This isn’t meant to be GTM advice, because the question of “how” you bring your product to market will vary depending on your product and growth model. That said, there are a few basic selling tenants and supporting tools that I believe every business can benefit from:

1. Eliminate universal sources of friction in your funnel

2. Make it easy for prospects to become customers

3. Get as much feedback as you can

You will eventually get to the point where you need to start defining your ICP, sales motion, and marketing strategy, but until then you should be laser focused on talking to anyone that will listen and gathering feedback from anyone willing to use your product. While in early stages, there are some basic funnel definitions and sales frameworks you can use to simplify the process of going to market.

Basic Marketing Funnel

At a very basic level while searching for product market fit, you can define your sales and marketing funnel as follows:

Marketing Accepted Lead (MAL) → Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) → Opportunity → Customer

Marketing Accepted Lead (MAL

MAL is the top of your funnel, it is every lead that comes in that is not thrown out. For example, some companies will ignore inbounds from gmail or other personal email domains, creating a natural definition of MAL. Others will accept any and all leads to ensure no value is lost at the top of funnel.

Sales Qualified Lead

SQL is a lead that you believe is capable and willing to pay for your product. They are not necessarily your ideal customer, but pre-PMF, any SQL might be your ICP. Eventually you will determine exact qualification criteria (company size, geography, industry, etc.) but for now it is about listening to the market and reacting to individual needs.

If you want to dig deeper into marketing funnel definitions and construction, here’s a short overview or longer ebook from Marketo

Basic Sales Framework

Opportunity

Opportunity is a SQL that has “converted” into a potential customer. While a lead is typically a person, an opportunity is typically linked to a company, assuming a B2B sales motion. Even in the case of developer tools or other community-driven platforms, security constraints often necesítate building a relationship with the developer’s organization in order to win the deal.

Opportunities can be easily determined using the BANT framework, which is an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, Timing, by answering the following questions during your first call or once a lead is qualified:

Budget: Does the company have budget for your product?

It’s easy to be flexible on price when you are pre-PMF, and you should use your first 10-20 customers to determine a pricing model that is acceptable to your market.

Authority: Does your contact have the authority to get the deal done?

In many cases you may end up interacting most often with your “Champion” (the person who will go to bat for you and your product) but your Champion won’t be the one approving the spend or signing the contract. If your contact doesn’t have the authority, you need to understand who has budget authority and ensure to get them on a call to make your case. Building relationships with multiple stakeholders in an organization, while time consuming, is critical to winning deals quickly with little internal friction.

Need: Does your contact or their company actually need your product?

This is likely going to be the most useful information you document during your early sales exercises. Understanding who “gets” your product and determining if they need it will be critical in informing whether you are on the right track towards PMF or if you need to make some adjustments.

Timing: Will this deal close this quarter?

Like it or not, the B2B deal cycle lives and dies on the calendar or fiscal quarter. You can strive to get deals done on a monthly basis (<4 weeks), but decision making is typically reserved for the end of the quarter. Understanding what quarter cycle each of your prospects adheres to (ie when does their fiscal year end?) will allow you to coordinate deal execution and incentives to minimize your deal cycle.

For more information on BANT, see this blog post from HubSpot (one of my favorite corporate blogs)

Customer

Your sales cycle doesn’t end once the MSA is signed. Once you have a customer, you are now responsible for making sure they have an amazing experience using your product, that they feel heard by you and your team, and that they are deriving value from using and recognizing the value of using your product.

Happy customers renew quickly and easily, with lots of opportunity for upsell. Creating a repeatable renewal motion early in your GTM motion will help your future sales and customer support teams (I don’t subscribe to the customer success model of support) succeed faster. This could mean building a simple automation that creates a new opportunity record in Airtable 90 days before a customer’s renewal so that you remember to touch base with them (if you haven’t been in touch recently)

Simple Tech to Make This Happen

1. CRM

2. Lead Capture

3. Automation

4. Outbound

CRM

Although we’ve come a long way in enabling a composable data stack (aka Modern Data Stack) that enables you to house all of your data in a warehouse/lake and transform and access it via other SaaS apps, your CRM will be your “revenue source of truth” for a long time. It’s where you manage your leads, opportunities, and customers, it’s where your sales team will spend the vast majority of their time, so naturally it’s where you will access critical business information on your revenue and related metrics.

Selecting a CRM is a luxury that most early stage companies don’t have the time or funding to do. Candidly I’ve always used Salesforce because the companies I joined had recently chosen to implement the software (one of the primary reasons they were hiring a guy like me 🙂) but you should absolutely not engage with the folks at Salesforce until you are run-rating for $1M of new business per year. The software is extremely expensive and time-consuming to implement and you should be spending that time talking to prospects and customers. In many cases, your company’s knowledge base (whether ClickUp, Notion, Coda, Confluence, etc.) will be your first CRM, but I implore you to quickly move to a slightly more scalable solution - I recommend Airtable.

Airtable is an extremely flexible database platform whose technical execution exceeds Notion for CRM purposes. For tactical guidance on quickly implementing an Airtable CRM, see here.

Note: I’ve recently looked into implementing HubSpot for marketing automation (not CRM) and was surprised at how expensive it gets once you are in their enterprise tier. If you have previous experience using HubSpot products and are willing to commit to their ecosystem, go for it, although you will limit the future composability of your GTM stack.

Lead Capture

So many opportunities have been lost because a contact wasn’t created in the CRM. At a very basic level, you need a tool that will automatically capture contact info so that you can load it into a CRM (an easily automatable task that will cut down on hours of manual data entry as you scale).

Rather than relying on landing page forms or an inbound email inbox, I’ve found Calendly to be far and away the best lead capture tool available. Calendly serves the dual purpose of eliminating scheduling friction while capturing key lead information. By integrating with your recipient’s calendar, it makes it very easy for them to schedule without having to switch back and forth to check their availability. It’s a small but meaningful way to put the prospect first.

This is not to say that more sophisticated tools like Chili Piper don’t serve their purpose, but I firmly believe that it needs to be as easy as possible for leads and prospects to get on the phone with you so you can start selling.

It’s easy to customize events and embed Calendly links into your website, outbound email, blog posts, and other marketing assets that make their way around the internet. As an early-stage founder, your sales responsibility is to build so much pipeline that you literally cannot handle it yourself and have no choice but to hire a sales rep.

For tactical guidance on quickly implementing Calendly for Sales, see here.

Automation

Having spent hundreds of hours of my time and thousands of hours of my teams’ time manually entering data into a CRM, I know firsthand what a soul-crushing and thankless task it is. For this reason, I highly recommend Zapier to easily automate some of the manual data entry. Here’s a sample for Calendly and Airtable.

If you want to get a little more granular about it, you can create an automation that captures all email addresses from your outbound email into a Google Sheet for easy upload to your CRM. It’s amazing how many useful contacts (aka future leads) are lost when proper data hygiene isn’t core to your sales strategy.

Other companies I’m watching

• Bardeen

• Magical

Outbound

I saved the most controversial piece of the stack for last. While the goal of an outbound tool is simple (“I need a way to send information and content externally”) it can spark fierce internal debates about strategy, brand, and tactics. At the end of the day, however, your future market strategy will be dependent on your ability to accurately generate and segment audiences, distribute compelling content, and track its performance.

I’d like to sidestep the AI-enabled portion of this debate by taking a wild guess that whatever tool you do end up choosing will be easily AI-enabled, natively or not.

In order to set your company up for outbound success, let’s break down the key components of a successful outbound stack

1. Generate and segment audiences

2. Distribute compelling content

3. Track performance

Rare are the tools that can meet all three of these needs, and in keeping with the theme of cost and composability, you’ll need to prioritize.

Generate and segment audiences

I firmly believe that a strong sales motion is built on a solid data foundation. This is not to say you need to go out and buy ZoomInfo, Clearbit, 6sense, or the like. Those are extreme luxuries that can help accelerate your pipeline growth, not start it.

Crunchbase has been my preferred data vendor for a long time and for good reason: it was originally built inside of TechCrunch as their internal database on the companies they cover. The success of the site and demand for granular, accurate information on the technology industry led them to spin it out as a separate product, and since the team have raised over $100M.

Importantly in the early stages, Crunchbase can help you do a quick gut check on your TAM/SAM/SOM, while also being extremely helpful in filtering the known universe of technology companies to help you identify quality sales prospects.

Distribute compelling content

Even if you’re not sending cold outbound emails to build pipeline, you may want to distribute a newsletter, blog posts, webinars, or other thought leadership content to known and unknown contacts. It’s easy to allow your communications to become siloed as you add tools to your SaaS stack, but the simplest way to avoid that and maximize flexibility in the early stages of your sales motion is to use Gmail or your default email client.

Obviously the ability to distribute mass emails and create automated drip campaigns isn’t possible with Gmail. While you search for your ICP and PMF, living in the motion of researching a contact, personalizing an email with whatever content you think is relevant, and remembering to follow up is an important part of building a data and details-obsessed sales culture.

Track performance

Once you transition out of founder-led sales, understanding performance at the campaign and rep level will be critical to efficiently growing your sales org. Until then, tracking Lead Source and Opportunity Source as custom lookup fields in Airtable should suffice. This will require you document and segment your outbound efforts, reinforcing a data and details-obsessed sales culture early on.