From Zero to Hero: Selling from the Ground Up!

The sales process has been broken down, rebuilt, and rebranded more times than I can count. Whole industries have been built on dissecting how to get someone to buy something. So yeah, writing another post about selling feels a little... tired. But here’s the thing: I’ve never been all that interested in the mechanics of selling alone. I care about why we sell the way we do—and what it says about where we are in the life of a business.

As someone who deeply believes in applying the scientific method to the sales process, I don’t see selling as a one-size-fits-all set of tactics. I see it as a living, breathing experiment. Sales isn’t just about getting to “yes”—it’s about learning, iterating, and evolving as you go. When you combine experimentation with execution, selling becomes a way to build and grow, not just close deals.

But let’s zoom in. What does selling look like when you’re starting from scratch?

Maybe you’re at a big company, and you’ve been handed a brand-new product with zero market traction. Maybe you’re selling something established, but you're trying to break into a vertical that’s never heard of you. Or maybe you're in the trenches of a startup, staring down the barrel of zero customers and no proven path forward.

In all of those cases, one truth holds: you need to approach growth with clarity about where you are and a purpose in how you move forward.

When I built my own sales motion from zero, I realized something that changed how I think about selling altogether. There isn’t just one way to sell. There are seasons. And knowing which approach fits your current moment—your market, your product, your team—is what separates founders who figure it out from those who flame out.

So, what are the core selling styles I turn to when I’m trying to help people buy things they don’t even know they need?

I think in three modes:

• Relationship Selling: Leaning on the trust you’ve already built to get that first “yes.”

  
  

• Networked Selling: Turning customers into connectors—getting the people who’ve bought from you to introduce you to others because they trust you delivered.

  
  

• Structured Selling: Scaling your motion through repeatable process—whether that’s a sales team, channel partner, product-led growth, or something in between.

  
  

Let’s break each of these down. Not just what they are, but when they matter most.

Relationship Selling: Start with Who You Know

This is the oldest play in the book—and for good reason. Before you have a product roadmap, a formal pitch, or even a working website, you’ve got relationships. And when you're trying to get your first few sales, that’s often all you need.

At its core, relationship selling is about selling to people you already know—those you’ve worked with, done business with, or built trust with over time. You’re not cold-calling strangers. You’re calling someone who already knows your name and, more importantly, knows what you’re about.

Now, plenty of sales books knock this approach. They’ll say it doesn’t scale. And sure, if your only tool is a dusty old Rolodex (yes, I’m dating myself), you’re going to run out of runway fast. But when you’re at ground zero, relationship selling isn’t just convenient—it’s strategic.

Why it works early on:

• Speed: When someone trusts you, they’ll take your call—and often take a chance on what you’re building.

• Patience: That trust buys you breathing room. Your buyers aren’t expecting miracles overnight, which gives you time to get things right.

• Foundation-building: A handful of early believers can give you the momentum (and the revenue) to keep pushing forward.

• Unexpected upside: Relationships have a funny way of opening doors you didn’t know existed. A conversation today might lead to a deal—or a referral—tomorrow.

  
  

But like all good things, it comes with limits.

Why it won’t carry you forever:

• It doesn’t scale: Eventually, your well runs dry. You can’t build a big business on a handful of friendly faces.

• It can send you sideways: Selling to whoever will say yes—just because they trust you—can scatter your efforts across too many markets with no clear path to growth.

• It slows you down: Strong relationships can create strong expectations, which sometimes means custom work, one-off features, or paths that feel productive but distract you from your true go-to-market.

• It can skew your learning: Relationship buyers are kind. Too kind, sometimes. Their feedback is colored by trust, which means it might not reflect what a stranger—or the broader market—really thinks.

  
  

So, is relationship selling a bad idea? Not at all. It’s the smartest—maybe even the only—place to start when you're at ground zero. Too many companies die on the hill of premature scale, chasing big growth before they’ve nailed the basics. This first phase isn’t about domination. It’s about survival. You need data. You need fast wins. You need safe spaces to fail and conserve capital while you're figuring out what exactly you’re building. Relationship selling gives you all of that. It buys you time, trust, and a financial beachhead while you chase the one thing that matters most early on: product-market fit. But make no mistake—like training wheels, it’s only useful if you know when to take them off. Wait too long, and you’re not scaling. You’re stalling.

Networked Selling: Selling Through Who Your Customers Know

If relationship selling is step one, networked selling is the bridge most people skip. And that’s a mistake.

What usually happens? People land a few early wins—some warm intros, a handful of trusting customers—and then they get excited. Too excited. They jump straight into structured selling: build a sales team, crank up the marketing engine, hire, hire, hire. And sometimes that works. But more often? It burns time, money, and morale, all while skipping the critical phase that gives you real momentum: networked selling.

So what is it?

Networked selling is about asking your early customers to introduce you to people they trust. It’s that simple—and that powerful. You’re not cold-calling. You’re not building a demand gen machine (yet). You’re leveraging the goodwill you’ve earned and multiplying it. If relationship selling is about who you know, networked selling is about who they know.

And yes, it takes guts. You’ve got to be willing to ask. But done right, this is where you start seeing actual growth—not just sales, but patterns.

Why this phase matters:

• It’s fast and scrappy: Building a traditional lead-gen funnel takes time and cash. This doesn’t. It’s direct, low-cost, and high-potential.

• You’ll find your clusters: When customers refer you, chances are those new prospects live in the same world—same job, same vertical, same problems. That’s gold when you're trying to identify your Ideal Customer Profile.

• Use cases start to repeat: Your original customers become living proof. Their peers want to know what’s working for them—and suddenly, your message resonates deeper. You’re no longer pitching ideas. You’re sharing stories.

• You build trust (by extension): Warm intros may not be handshakes from best friends, but they carry weight. You’ve still got to earn the sale—but the door opens a little easier.

  
  

Of course, it’s not all upside.

Why networked selling has limits:

• It’s a half-warm lead: You’ll still have to prove yourself. These are not layups. It’s more like starting halfway down the court—better than nothing, but still a hustle.

• It thins out over time: The further you go from your original network, the colder the connections become. One degree of separation helps. Three or four? Now you’re just cold calling with extra steps.

• It scales slowly: This isn’t a blitz. It’s a methodical build. That’s its strength and its weakness—it’s strategic, but not built for speed.

  
  

But here’s the kicker: this is where real learning happens.

Networked selling is the petri dish where you test your early traction. Do your customers trust you enough to put their name behind your work? Will their peers take that leap of faith based on a referral alone? Can you see early signs of product-market fit, not just in sales but in patterns—who’s buying, what they need, and how they respond to your evolving pitch?

Ignore this phase, and you risk scaling too soon on shaky ground. Embrace it, and you get the data, confidence, and signal you need to step into structured selling with your eyes wide open.

This is where you pressure test your message. Where you fine-tune your ICP. Where you figure out whether the market is ready—or still warming up.

Next, we’ll talk about what happens when the patterns are clear and the foundation is strong. That’s when it’s time for structure. Let’s get into it.

Structured Selling: With Knowledge Comes Sensible Scale

This is the part of the post where things start to feel... familiar. Structured selling is what everyone pictures when they think about "real" sales. It’s also the part of the journey where most companies think they've made it. Product is humming. A few dozen customers are in. You’ve got some logos, a pitch that lands, and a CRM that doesn’t feel like a joke. Now it’s time to scale.

But here’s the catch: just because you’re ready to scale doesn’t mean you’re ready to scale well.

Structured selling means using what you’ve learned—through relationship selling and networked selling—to build a repeatable, predictable, and scalable sales machine. But it’s not plug-and-play. The decisions you make here will either accelerate your growth or blow up your budget. So let’s break it down.

Sales-Led Growth: The Classic Playbook

This is what it sounds like: you hire salespeople, give them tools and targets, and point them at the market. But even within this approach, you’ve got to choose your flavor. There’s the gatling gun version—high volume, high touch—and the big game hunter model—slower, more strategic, and geared for whales.

Gatling Gun Sales: When Simplicity Scales

This is best when your product is easy to explain, priced for volume, and built for repeatability. You don’t need closers with 20 years of enterprise experience. You need curious generalists who can hustle, handle objections, and follow a process.

Why it works:

• High-touch, high-frequency: Your team talks to more prospects in a week than you did in your first six months. It creates an invaluable feedback loop between sales, product, and marketing.

• Cost-efficient scaling: Junior reps are cheaper, easier to hire, and can be molded to your motion. If one doesn’t work out, you haven’t bet the farm—and you’ve probably learned something anyway.

• Fast learning cycles: With a high volume of activity, you’ll quickly see what’s resonating and what’s not. Patterns emerge faster, and those patterns guide your messaging, your ICP, and your roadmap.

  
  

What to watch out for:

• Mistakes get expensive, fast: If your ICP isn’t locked in, this team will be pitching the wrong people all day long. And that’s not just wasted money—it’s misdirection. You’ll be scaling the wrong hill.

• Strong operational discipline required: You’re managing dozens of conversations a day. Without a tight sales process, clean lead hygiene, and someone keeping the trains running, this becomes chaos.

• Hire for range, not just polish: The best reps in this model are flexible. They can pivot industries, tweak pitches, and stay cool when the market moves. You’re not building a static team. You’re building a squad that can evolve with you.

  
  

Big Game Hunters: When You’re Chasing Whales

This is enterprise territory. Long sales cycles, high-touch engagement, and big potential payoff. If your product requires deep buy-in, customization, or heavy internal lift from your buyers, this is the only real option.

Why it works:

• Big wins, big impact: A single deal can justify a quarter of runway. If your product justifies the complexity, this approach can be transformative.

• Seasoned operators: True enterprise reps bring more than sales acumen—they bring playbooks, relationships, and pattern recognition. They know what landmines to avoid and what it really takes to close a $500K deal.

• Autonomous execution: These folks aren’t looking for scripts. They want to own a territory, a vertical, a segment—and they’ll tell you what they need. You don’t manage them, you empower them.

  
  

Why it’s risky:

• Wrong timing = wasted money: Big game hunters are expensive and impatient. If your product isn’t ready, or your market isn’t buying, they won’t stick around. And when they leave, they take your budget with them.

• The “flim-flam” effect: Lots of reps talk a big game. Fewer deliver. I’ve seen it too many times—slick resumes, great interviews, but zero results. My rule? If they can’t close any deal within two quarters—fire them. If they can’t sell your product at any level, they’re not the right fit.

• Experience ≠ adaptability: Founders often chase “industry veterans,” assuming they’ll fast-track growth. Sometimes they do. But in a shifting business, you often need athletes—people who can flex, pivot, and thrive in ambiguity. Specialists can get stuck when the playbook changes.

  
  

Structured selling works when you're ready—and only when you're ready. It’s not about guessing. It’s about taking everything you’ve learned from those early relationships and network wins, and scaling it with intention. It’s about choosing your path wisely, hiring strategically, and staying grounded in what’s actually working.

You earned your way here. Now the question is: will you scale with purpose or stumble through the motions?

Channel Sales: Farmed-Out Scale (Buyer Beware)

Ah, channel sales. The mythical land where someone else sells your product, at scale, and all you have to do is share a slice of the revenue. It sounds like sales nirvana, right?

And on paper, it is. The idea that you can partner with a bigger, well-oiled sales machine—tap into their relationships, their reach, their infrastructure—and skip the hard parts of scaling your own team? That’s the dream. It’s also why founders love to talk about “channel strategy” early on, before they’ve even figured out direct selling.

But here’s the truth: I’ve rarely seen channel sales work well—especially in early-stage companies. More often than not, it’s a shortcut disguised as strategy. A lazy attempt to outsource sales before you've done the hard work of understanding your market, refining your message, or building the operational muscle to scale. And while I’m not here to say it never works, I am here to say tread carefully.

Let’s break it down.

Why It Could Work:

• You’ve reached scale enlightenment: If you’re truly at the point where your product sells well, your message lands, and your GTM motion is tight—only then does channel selling even become a viable option. If a partner wants to sell your product because the value is obvious, congrats—you’ve built something rare.

• It’s a beautiful concept: In theory, it’s a win-win. You gain reach, they gain revenue. You leverage their distribution, they get a differentiated offer. When it clicks, it’s a force multiplier. It should be in the conversation—just not too early.

• You tap into their machine: Channel partners have teams, systems, relationships, and muscle memory for scaling. You’re hitching a ride on their infrastructure. But remember, it’s a ride—not a free one.

  
  

Why It Usually Fails:

• You lose control (fast): It’s hard enough to get your own sales team aligned. Now imagine trying to get someone else’s team—who doesn’t report to you, doesn’t sit in your meetings, and doesn’t share your urgency—to carry your banner with care. Good luck.

• Their comp plan rules everything: If your product isn’t aligned with how their reps get paid, forget it. You’ll be a footnote. Reps sell what makes them money. If that’s not your product, you’re dead weight.

• Process, process, process: You need airtight training, documentation, enablement, and follow-up to get an external team to sell for you. Most early-stage startups don’t have that. They hand off half-baked materials and wonder why nothing closes.

• You don’t own the politics: Channel partners have their own turf wars, fiefdoms, and shifting priorities. One reorg and your “strategic” alliance can disappear overnight. If your internal champion leaves, and you’re not embedded across the org, you're done.

• Partnership ≠ relationship: Founders often rely on a single point of contact. But real partnerships require depth—multiple connections, shared goals, mutual investment. If you don’t build real cross-org muscle, you’re always one resignation away from irrelevance.

• The bigger the partner, the worse the friction: As partnerships grow, complexity grows with them. Politics surface. Competing interests emerge. What started as an agile alliance becomes a bloated, bureaucratic slog.

• And yeah... It’s kind of lazy: Channel sales often get pitched as a clever growth hack, but more often, it’s just a shortcut founders take when they’re unwilling to do the hard work of building their own sales motion. It's the “set it and forget it” of GTM strategies—and it rarely works out that way.

  
  

I’ve spent years building and managing partnerships, and I’ve learned this the hard way: channel sales are not magic. They’re messy, political, high-maintenance relationships that might pay off—if you’re big enough, stable enough, and resourced enough to manage them properly.

For early-stage companies? Channel sales can be a trap. Unless you’ve got traction, process maturity, and real resources to throw at enablement and alliance management, you’re probably better off sticking to direct sales until the foundation is rock solid.

Could channel sales work for you someday? Maybe. But only after you’ve proven you can sell it yourself first.

Product-Led Growth: Sales Scale Nirvana

In the last decade, Product-Led Growth—PLG for short—has become the stuff of founder fantasy. It’s the Ronco Rotisserie of sales: Set it and forget it! The dream is seductive—people find your product, fall in love with it, swipe their card, and boom—revenue shows up while you sleep.

But here’s the thing: it’s a dream that has wrecked a lot of otherwise promising companies.

Yes, PLG is absolutely where you want to end up if you can get there. But getting there requires more than a good idea and a Stripe integration. You need the right product, the right market, and the right infrastructure humming quietly behind the scenes. And if you’re dealing with complex technology, high-touch onboarding, or anything with a long-ish sales cycle? You should pump the brakes.

I’ve had more founders than I can count tell me, “We’re gonna launch and people will just buy it!” Most of them never even sniffed PLG success. It’s one of the reasons why only 4% of startups make it to $2M ARR—too many teams get lured by the siren song of PLG and steer straight into the rocks.

Am I saying don’t do it? Not at all. I’m saying: do it on purpose. Build toward it with clarity, data, and a real understanding of what it takes to make it work. Because this isn’t just a sales strategy—it’s a company-wide operating model.

Let’s unpack why PLG is powerful—and why it’s also hard.

Why It’s Great:

• True frictionless growth: When PLG works, it’s a beautiful thing. Prospects discover your product organically, onboard themselves, fall in love with the experience, and convert—all without ever speaking to a salesperson. You’ve essentially automated your top-of-funnel, qualification, and even closing. That’s not just efficient—it’s transformative.

• Capital efficiency: PLG lets you scale without scaling your headcount. Instead of building a large, expensive sales org, you invest in product, UX, and automation. That means more growth with fewer people—especially important when resources are tight and every hire matters.

• Rich product insights at scale: When thousands of users are engaging with your product directly, you unlock an incredible dataset. You can see exactly how people use your product, where they drop off, what features drive conversion, and which touchpoints create confusion. That level of visibility is impossible in traditional sales and gives you a massive edge in improving both product and go-to-market strategy.

• Lean teams can win big: PLG doesn’t require a massive go-to-market team. You can build a powerful growth engine with a small, focused group—smart product people, sharp marketers, and responsive customer support. Done right, you create a self-sustaining system that runs lean but punches well above its weight.

  
  

Why You Should Be Careful:

• It requires deep, cross-functional expertise: PLG isn’t just a marketing trick or a UX polish job. It’s a full-stack growth model that blends product design, behavioral psychology, onboarding strategy, pricing, data analytics, and more. Few people have that complete skill set, and hiring someone who only understands one piece of the puzzle can lead you down the wrong path.

• It demands a bottoms-up build, not top-down vision: PLG isn’t something a big-name CMO swoops in to deliver. It starts with a scrappy, data-driven operator who obsesses over funnel metrics, tests relentlessly, and slowly builds the engine piece by piece. If you bring in a big-picture leader too early without the data to back up their strategy, you’ll burn cash and get nowhere.

• A/B testing won’t tell you “why”: Data tells you what users do—it rarely tells you why they do it. If you rely only on dashboards and metrics, you’ll miss critical context. Sometimes the biggest insights come not from analytics, but from picking up the phone, watching a user onboard live, or listening to someone struggle through your UI. PLG still requires human touch to shape the right product story.

• Growth channels can be expensive: Yes, PLG promises organic growth—but getting there isn’t free. Driving traffic, optimizing funnels, and experimenting with viral loops all take time, money, and ongoing investment. If you bet on PLG too early and cut corners on market research, customer development, or channel strategy, you’ll spend more cleaning up the mess later.

  
  

PLG is the promised land of sales—but it’s not a shortcut. You don’t go from MVP to PLG in one leap. You have to earn your way there, step by step, through iteration, insight, and operational maturity.

As someone who believes deeply in the scientific method, I see PLG as the byproduct of a thousand small experiments done right. You build. You test. You learn. You adjust. And you do it again. That’s what gets you to frictionless growth. Not wishful thinking and a “Buy Now” button.

If you can pull it off, PLG is a beautiful thing. Just don’t let the dream of scale distract you from the discipline it takes to get there.

Wrapping It All Up: Know Where You Are, and Sell Accordingly

If there’s one thing I’ve learned building and scaling sales from zero, it’s this: you can’t skip steps. Everyone wants to get to the endgame—automated growth, hands-off revenue, a funnel that runs itself. But getting there requires knowing exactly where you are, and more importantly, what kind of selling your stage actually calls for.

Start with trust. Relationship selling is your first lifeline. It’s how you get your earliest wins, gather feedback, and buy time to figure out what you’re really building. Don’t underestimate how critical this phase is—not just for revenue, but for clarity.

Expand through connection. Networked selling lets you test your early traction. If your initial customers trust you enough to make introductions, and those referrals start turning into deals, you’ve got more than a product—you’ve got early product-market signal. It’s not scale yet, but it’s direction.

Add structure when you’ve earned it. Structured selling is where things get real. This is where you put process behind what’s working and build a machine around it. Whether you go with a high-velocity gatling gun or a slower-moving big game hunter model, this only works if you’ve done the homework. Guess here, and the burn will hurt.

Partner with eyes wide open. Channel sales are tempting—but they’re also treacherous. If you don’t control the incentives, the messaging, and the relationships, you’re not a partner—you’re an afterthought. Make this move only when your house is in order and you’ve got the muscle to manage it.

And finally, aim for frictionless. Product-led growth is the holy grail for a reason. It’s efficient, scalable, and beautifully self-sustaining. But it’s also the most misunderstood. PLG doesn’t start with launch—it’s the output of every lesson you’ve learned along the way, distilled into a product that sells itself. That doesn’t happen by accident.

So where does that leave you?

Hopefully, with a framework that helps you answer the most important question in any go-to-market motion: What kind of selling do I need right now? Not eventually. Not someday. Right now.

If you get that part right—if you sell with purpose and evolve with discipline—you give yourself the best shot at building something not just sellable, but scalable.

That’s the real goal. Not just sales. Sustainable sales.