one of the best sales advice we picked up during YC is the "McKinsey Model" a lot of deals at early-stage startups die for the same reason: your champion is afraid to advocate for your product if they push for it internally and it doesn't work out, their job is on the line so they never come back to you and hit you with the "we need to align internally first" that's why you need to be their McKinsey consultant: instead of them pitching, you personally take the blame after every demo, send them: - a one-pager - a security doc - an ROI calculator with their numbers - useful context/overview of your industry that can help with what they're struggling with right now - a pre-written slack message they can forward make it as easy as possible for your champion to forward your material without them feeling responsible for integrating your solution or "fighting" for it

We just hit $4M ARR. This was the hardest $1M marker we've reached so far. 5 key lessons learned from this journey: 1) Prioritize recruiting - Our team is spread thin now due to hiring slowly. So, spending more time on recruiting great engineers and GTM talent. 2) Be proactive with current customers - We are just over a year into launch and now have to deal with churn. So we need to ensure customer happiness and awareness of new products. 3) Build faster - We know what customers want, focusing on that will reduce churn and increase satisfaction. 4) Keep focus on top of funnel - We have 5-6 sources of leads. The goal now is to get better leads rather than more leads. 5) Never slow down when you have momentum - It seemed like there was less urgency due to July/August malaise. This cannot happen again. Momentum is very important for a startup.

we just renegotiated our Slack Enterprise upgrade with Salesforce instantly understood how Salesforce is valued at $150B after that call their AE used the exact same tactics every enterprise sales org uses: 1) "our quarter ends Friday, so I can get you a bigger discount if you sign by then" and kept pushing: "if I send over the proposal today, would you be able to sign by Friday?" 2) gave us two pricing options where the bulk purchase was designed to look like the obvious choice 3) used our own growth number against us, "you're adding X users/month, so you'll need these seats anyway. why not lock in a better price now?"

this is exactly why we decided to adopt a "Palantir" model for sales seeing more and more YC companies doing the same: there is a massive shift right now toward wanting to build products in-house but despite all the hype around replacing SaaS, there are still some blockers companies have: they: 1) don't know where to start or what "it" should look like 2) don't know how they should go about building 3) lack the resources to build / maintain it taking all that into account, we've decided to adopt a Palantir model for sales and will be testing: what if we still sell our data/APIs, but also take care of the building end-to-end? the results so far of some of the products that came out of it: - fully automated TAM building and email sequence platform for a Big 4 company - automated "warmest path" for intros to founders for a private equity fund and others that are basically a manifestation of the question: "what's your dream state for X?" (X being sales, marketing, investing, etc.) It's a lot to promise, but we're excited about the early potential. if you are interested in building your dream state for sales, recruiting, or investing - drop a note and we'll reach out!

our entire sales team is now claude pilled, they all use a claude skill we made called “pre-call research” everyone of them connected their Claude to Google Calendar, the Crustdata MCP and Slack before every call it automatically: - looks at who's attending - pulls the company's page + domain data - checks the inbound booking context - fetches enriched real-time profiles of each attendee via Crustdata - creates a full brief: company snapshot, talking points, prospect assessment you can also schedule it: "every morning at 8am, run pre-call research on all my calls for the day and DM me the briefs" its pretty insane that this workflow alone could have been the main feature of a sales saas not even 1 year ago and now its just something anyone can run on claude

one of our investors during YC shared this sales advice on how startups can sell to and close big enterprise companies: it’s the same method we used at @Crustdata to close a 6-figure deal: help your champion run an internal hackathon 1) we used to say this: "what if we ran a half-day workshop with your team where they build agents? we would love to sponsor it with our data" 2) let THEM discover the use cases 3) the agents they build become your business case your champion, just like everyone else, wants to have internal wins to show their boss imagine running a hackathon with marketers, sales ops, finance people… and after the hackathon, everyone has built agents using the Crustdata API that help them with their day-to-day work our champion estimated that the agents built during that hackathon would save them at least 6 figures in vendor costs. you can now use this number and the success of the hackathon as a case to progress the deal you are working on

something I noticed during YC that both the top sellers (and the top job applicants) are doing: the "oops, forgot to mention" follow-up it’s a very simple way to break through the noise 1) they send an email with the main info 2) if they don’t get a response, they send a second one with a "forgot to add this" subject line very underrated way to get your open rate higher if you struggle with this metric. works every time someone does it on me

one of the best pieces of sales advice we got during YC is what we call the "one workflow pitch" most AI startups walk into sales meetings and say "we're here to solve all your problems" then they ask: "so... what are your problems?" was speaking with a customer last week who is getting pitched a lot by AI startups, and this is what he told me about how this lands on the buyer side: "i'm not giving you all my use cases so that you know what to build and then i'm going to pay you for it" you're asking them to be your free design partner, which is a red flag if you don’t have a good relationship with them already how to fix this: 1) before the call, pick ONE workflow you know you can solve (not four, not "whatever you need") 2) open with: "we've been working with teams like yours on [specific workflow]. here's exactly what we do and what we don't do" 3) let THEM expand the scope, never start wide and ask them to narrow it the more open-ended your pitch is, the more it sounds like you don't have a product yet buyers want to hear "we solve this one thing really well" and not "tell us your problems and we'll figure it out"

one of the biggest deal-killers we've seen selling a usage-based product is the "shadow spreadsheet" your prospect is sold on the product. but before they can buy, they need to justify the cost internally so they build a financial model in google sheets. they estimate usage, guess at pricing tiers, and calculate annual cost the problem is they always get at least one assumption wrong. and that one wrong assumption can double the projected cost overnight you will never see this spreadsheet. you will never get to correct it. the deal just dies and you don't know why the fix is what we call the "pre-built business case": 1) after every demo, send them YOUR version of the cost model, pre-populated with realistic assumptions based on discovery (this is why it’s so important to get discovery right) 2) include a tab that shows cost-per-outcome and not just cost-per-credit 3) add a comparison tab vs. their current solution or vs doing it manually if someone else is building the spreadsheet that decides your deal, you've lost control of it

one of the best pieces of sales advice I got during YC is the "decision-making" framework If a prospect tells you: “i’m thinking of switching to you, but we have to evaluate if the engineering cost is worth it” you should avoid arguing why it is worth it and instead ask about their decision process: “sounds great, if you don’t mind me asking, can you help me understand what that process usually looks like?” they will explain the steps, and your goal should be to address every part of that decision-making process

how to get a warm intro to any sales account you want using Claude: everyone is connected to everyone. most of the time, it is just a matter of not knowing who knows who this is how our sales team solved this problem to book more demos: 1) go to your LinkedIn => Settings => Export your connections (CSV) 2) ask 2 to 3 colleagues to do the same 3) connect Claude with the Crustdata MCP to enrich every contact: titles, companies, seniority, buying signals, emails, phone numbers, etc. 4) ask one question: "Give me ONE path to break into [Account Name]" that's it Claude will use the data to map your entire team's network and surface the exact warm intro path you did not know you had

obviously will sign, happy slack customer

if there is one thing we learned during YC about taking sales calls, it’s this: proactively mention a "downside" of your product early compare it to other solutions on the market and make it clear where you stand: 'i’m sure you are aware that there are a lot of data providers in this space. I wanted to give you some insight into where we stand, which has been a key driver of our growth over the last few months we are primarily used for [X] by [Target Group A], whereas others focus more on [Y] for [Target Group B]" providing industry insights and numbers that your lead can then take and share internally has been incredibly huge for demo-to-customer conversions

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this how you can help your champion sell your product internally: we were on a call with a prospect who loved the Crustdata API, used it every day during the trial but when it came time to sign, he said "i need to figure out how to get this approved" so we asked: "which tool in your stack are you using the least right now?" he thought about it for a second and named one we said: "most of our customers redirect that budget to us in month one. net zero impact on your spend" your buyer already knows they want to buy. what they don't have is the story to tell their boss so give them one: 1) ask what tool they'd cut 2) frame it as a swap vs an addition 3) now the convo with their boss is "i'm replacing X" instead of "i need new budget"

I can’t remember how many sales deals we saved during YC just by summarizing the blockers “just to summarize, it sounds like problem x and problem y are currently the blockers. is that fair to say?” and if they agree, you work on both many prospects don’t have a clear overall picture, so your goal is always to summarize the conversation for them and give direction on where the call should go next