Conquering Seed Stage Sales at a Deep Tech Startup: Insights from a CRO turned VC

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Seed to Sequoia

Silverwood

22 episodes

1 week ago

Practical advice on go-to-market from leading investors, founders, and advisors. Host Alex Shartsis has been it all–founder, employee, investor, even the guy at the big company whose job is buying little companies. Learn what works and what mistakes to avoid. Hear unvarnished stories of the tough times, the pivots, and the big wins. But mostly what to avoid. Whether you’re hiring your first salesperson, or preparing for your next financing round, you’ll learn something useful you can use right away.

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Conquering Seed Stage Sales at a Deep Tech Startup: Insights from a CRO turned VC | Nate Williams of Union Labs

Seed to Sequoia

1 hour 16 minutes 27 seconds

1 year ago

Conquering Seed Stage Sales at a Deep Tech Startup: Insights from a CRO turned VC | Nate Williams of Union Labs

Nate Williams is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Union Labs - an applied DeepTech seed fund focused on building and backing leading seed-stage startups in Climate, PropTech and Mobility.

Nate is a hands-on serial entrepreneur having previously played roles as an EIR at Kleiner Perkins, CRO & Head of Business at August Home, Inc. which became a leader in Smart Home Access, later acquired by Assa Abloy in 2017. He was also the CMO & Head of Business at Greenwave Systems and Senior Director of Marketing & Business Development at Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility.

Join Host Alex Shartsis in this episode as Nate shares about the different stages of sales in a startup's life, from day zero to a scalable product, and the importance of a team approach to sales efforts.

He shares his advice on creating a channel map to reach customers and markets, and talks about the risks of customer concentration. This channel mapping approach brought huge success when he was heading the business at August Home.

Nate also talks about the significance of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) title and the shift in funding trends towards mitigating technical and go-to-market risks early on.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

9:38 Startup Sales Stages: From Jungle to Highway

11:17 Team Approach to Sales: Beyond Founder-Led Selling

15:23 Channel Mapping: Strategic Market Reach

21:11 Early Client Engagement: Setting the Deal Clock

23:38 Customer Concentration Risks: Balancing Goals

35:13 Targeting Influential Profiles: Building Key Relationships

40:23 CRO Role: Signaling Structured Sales Growth

49:52 Funding Trends: Balancing Technical and Market Risks

Guest: Nate Williams (linkedin.com/in/nathandwilliams)

Host: Alex Shartsis (linkedin.com/in/shartsis)

Audio Engineer & Video Editor - James Fixx (fixxmusic.com)

The Seed to Sequoia podcast is created by Silverwood Advisors to help founders with practical advice on building successful startups.

If you would like to get expert advice for your startup reach out to us on:

Website: silverwood.ai

Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/silverwood-advisors