One of the most common things I see founders struggle with is:

• Sales

• Marketing

• Building distribution

• Building sales funnels

I’m a big fan of 4 things:

• keeping it simple

• starting small

• focusing on solving your customers problem (it's easy to lose focus in a world that wants your attention to be on other things)

• building distribution from day one

Your business idea doesn’t have to change the world.

But… Nothing ever sells itself.

So if you’re building a business, you need to become great at SALES.

That's a fact.

Hope this tips will help you on your way.

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Here’s how to get your first 100 customers

🔥 1 - FIRST STEP: START WITH FINDING YOUR FIRST 10 CUSTOMERS

Ask friends, colleagues and family. Look around you.

Who do you have in your closest network?

Who can open doors for you?

This is a common way to get started.

Use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.

I got my first client from LinkedIn.

It wasn’t a friend though.

They reached out when they saw my content and wanted to book me for their kickoff.

I got the email when I was here in Greece..

My content wasn’t very good back then but I posted every day and provided value to people.

That produced results.

..and 3 weeks later I showed up at their kickoff in the Stockholm archipelago.

They booked me because of my experience of building the sales team at Remote, and leading a team of 90 people across 22 countries and building a unicorn 🦄 ($30M ARR in 18 months).

It CAN be this simple.

Start leveraging your recent employment.

Focus on getting 1 customer at a time.

“But I don’t want to sell those things”

I haven’t worked for any company in my career that started out with the perfect offer, found a product market fit instantly and had a product or service that sold itself.

You start SOMEWHERE.

You start with SOMETHING.

And gradually you become better and better at selling and finding the right offer and the right customers.

Finding product market fit, is ITERATION.

You don’t find it in a book.

You can’t get a person to tell you how to find it.

You find product market fit by speaking to customers, and getting yourself out there and lots, lots of trial and error.

Focus on finding the first 10 customers, and then learn from that and see what you want to double down on to get the next 90 customers.

→ The second thing I sold was my personal branding program.

I started getting requests from CEOs and entrepreneurs around the world about helping them build their personal brand online.

Then I built that program.

Today it's grown into a whole ecosystem of services I sell.

The third thing I sold was go-to-market advisory.

You get my point…

Start where you are.

↓

Monetize your knowledge.

And gradually package things into programs, courses, services and products.

🔥 2 - REACH OUT TO TARGETED STRANGERS

This can be through:

• personalised outreach

• building your personal brand and audience and having conversations in the DMs on LinkedIn

As you know, I’m a BIG FAN of building trust and reach at scale through audience growth. And provide loads of value to people and then let them reach out to me when they are ready to buy.

I have been very lucky and haven’t needed to chase people.

Maybe I will in the future, but right now I'm doubling down on what works well.

It’s changed my life completely.

🔥 3 - GO WHERE THEY ALREADY HANG OUT ONLINE/OFFLINE

Grab eyeballs where they hang out:

• Sponsor a newsletter with the right subscribers

• Etsy

• Gumroad

• Reddit

• Events (personally I don’t feel events do much, I go all in on online activities, it's much more scalable)

• Social media platforms (Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc)

So much online is free these days, so you don’t need a budget or VC funding anymore.

The gatekeepers are GONE.

🔥 4 - GET FEATURED

This can be hard but definitely worth exploring.

I’ve worked at so many startups and managed to get them press really early on.

Reach out to newspapers, magazines and pitch them a good story.

Or someone who has a newsletter, they might be interested in interviewing you. Say YES. This way you tap into their network.

More eyeballs is what you want.

I said yes to everyone and everything who wanted to feature me in the beginning.

And this is how I also grew my own LinkedIn newsletter fast. I interviewed cool people.

Remember:

People remember stories up to 22 times more than facts alone.

Read about this HERE:

Do things that doesn't scale.

Things that will make you stand out from the crowd.

And a funny thing: when you have learnt how to grab 👀 online, the media will start reaching out to you.

That’s how me and my clients are getting featured on Entrepreneur, CXO, Inc (dot) com, and Forbes.

🔥 5 - AIM TO GO VIRAL ON SOCIAL

“That’s hard”

Of course it is 😃

Do you know the best way to go viral?

It's by by being consistent on social media..

Start posting 5 times per week.

Spend 2-4 hours on engagement (commenting) per day.

Alex Hormozi talks about this here:

forward.usa

View more on Instagram

Then I guarantee you will go viral.

“I don’t have that time to spend online”

Then you outsource it.

Find someone who can be your voice online.

We are rewarded on these platforms for consistency.

But most people are not willing to put in the work to do that.

Or want to learn how.

→ Grab my guides to learn HOW here

When this post went viral for me, it was insane. It was hard to handle the inbound lead flow.

Can’t complain though 🤣

🔥 6 - FIND WAYS TO STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD

Where are your customers?

Where do they spend time?

This can be:

• sponsoring an event or conference

• a competition

• communities

• a magazine

• sports

I sponsored a tennis court in our local summer community last year.

I haven’t done anything like that for my company before.

Why did I choose to do that?

It’s a place where a large part of my target audience spends their summer.

For all my global clients, they find me online.

And I love what this company did.

They got several well known faces in go-to-market (I was one of them), audience growth and entrepreneurs to have their face on Times Square.

OK, ok..😄 probably not something you do in the beginning.

But you should find ways to be DIFFERENT.

→ Start ONLINE.

An inbound asked me the other day: how do you automate these emails and responding to people?

I don’t.

I really think we have seen so much automation in B2B in the last 10 years, that we’ve gone tired of it.

Don’t automate relationship building.

He was impressed so today we’re meeting.

That’s it for this week.

Hope you’re learning stuff from this newsletter.

I hope it makes you THINK.

Until next time,
Hanna 👋