This afternoon a podcast host asked me to share the most important sales fundamentals founders often get wrong when they start doing sales for the first time.

In no order, here's my top five...

1/ Not understanding your target customers (audience) well enough.

19 out of 20 "sales" problems I help founders with are actually "I don't understand my audience well enough to sell to them" problems in disguise.

2/ Not checking that reward > risk for all CTAs.

It's so common for founders to not even consider whether - from the prospect's perspective - the expected reward of taking an action outweighs the perceived risk.

If risk > reward for *any* step, you won't make the sale.

3/ Not understanding *why* you didn't close a sale (and using it to improve your sales process).

Founders often feel like they've failed when a sale falls through... but they shouldn't.

You only 'fail' when you don't learn *why* the sale didn't happen, so you can improve.

4/ Not creating a situation in which the *default* outcome is that the prospect buys your product.

As a founder doing sales, you want to work with the prospect to create a shared success plan (story) of how they will get from where they are today, to being a happy customer.

5/ Going into sales conversations with the mindset of "how can I get this person to buy my product" (bad) vs "how can I help this person achieve their goals" (good).

Helping founders with sales can be awkward... you often have to 'nudge' them to care more about their customers.