Startup and Small Business Sales

Learn to create core differentiators and build a personal brand that resonates with your target audience.

A Small to Medium-Size Business is smaller, savvier, and has less time to waste than larger companies. Here's how to navigate the SMB sales process.

Sales forecasting is all about having the right information and foresight to drive continuous growth. Learn about 7 sales forecasting strategies for startups.

Looking for a startup marketing plan to drive traction? Don't leave success to chance! Our guide offers 9 steps to build your winning strategy.

Everything you need to know about sales hiring for startups—the stages of hiring, a 5-step recruiting process, and key strategies to develop a high-performing sales team.

Selling to SMB companies is a useful skill, especially in 2024. More businesses exist today than ever before. Here’s how to sell well!

Maximize your potential with this comprehensive guide to startup sales. Learn from Close's founder about what it takes to achieve long-term success and scale up.

To validate your business idea, you'll need to define a goal, experiment and refine your hypothesis, and develop a plan.

Fast-growing SMBs and startups need revenue intelligence to forecast based on facts and react to early warning signs in your pipeline.

If you’re starting your own consulting business, avoid common consulting mistakes like being afraid to say no, trying to be good at everything, or forgetting to ask for referrals.

New client onboarding can be a challenge. How do you make your consulting onboarding process smooth and easy? Learn from 8 top consulting pros.

What does it take to be successful in startup sales consulting? Learn from 8 top-tier sales consultants who regularly work with startups at different stages.

If you're looking to grow your sales skillset and gain more revenue, free sales training is the way to go.

NEW Calling on Sequences in Close. Get ready to optimize your team's workflow, remove decision fatigue, and put your best processes on repeat.

Kevin Ramani went from building Rovers for Mars to building startup sales processes for hungry founders. Learn about his story & top tips for startups who are ready to scale.

When should you hire a sales consultant? Learn the key signs your team needs one, plus 7 mistakes to avoid for a smoother process.

Ready to take your startup to the next stage of growth? Learn how Scott Leese took 5 startups from $0 to $25M ARR in <3 years.

Discover how a top RevOps consultant helps startups grow revenue in 4 actionable steps, including process optimization and leveraging the right CRM.

Driving revenue growth is the major goal of every sales and marketing strategy. Find out the 12 effective ways how to maximize revenue by reading this article.

Learn how to validate your business idea by focusing on paid customers. Charging early reveals true demand and helps you avoid common startup pitfalls.

The role of the sales manager has shifted and transformed at a faster pace in the past two years than ever before. At the same time, some fundamentals remain true: Like Peter Drucker's famous adage that management is doing things right, and leadership is doing the right things.

In today’s competitive market, you need to rely on a variety of approaches to ensure you have a competitive edge. Sales collateral enables you to create content and resources that connect your prospects with your brand and help speed up the sales process.

Convincing strangers to give you money isn’t easy, especially in these times. To help startups pitch to investors successfully, this article will discuss common mistakes startup founders should avoid, what investors look for in an investor pitch, and how to create a pitch deck that sells.

Learn how lean startup experiments, like hiring humans instead of building tech, helped test ideas faster.

Discover how EdTech startups adapted to meet the growing demand for remote learning tools, supporting teachers, students, and parents during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has hit nearly every industry and has forced businesses to make radical shifts. We sit down with three customers in different industries to discuss how they’ve adapted to current times.

I transitioned to remote work 4 months ago, and I’ve had the opportunity to make plenty of mistakes (and learn from them). Here, I’d like to share those mistakes (plus the successes) with you and provide actionable tactics for your own WFH approach.

Learn how to recruit top talent for your startup by building relationships in small steps. Discover proven strategies to hire the un-recruitable and grow your team.

Here's how a tiny company started closing huge deals with federal government agencies—and how you too can get started in B2G (business-to-government) sales.

Salespeople are an ambitious group. We want to close more deals. Blast through quotas. Beat the competition. But it’s not just sales ambitions that we set our sights on. We’re also ambitious about moving up in our careers.

Regain control in investor meetings by focusing on mutual fit. Learn how to approach investors with confidence and authenticity for long-term success.

Learn how to create a killer startup pitch with practical tips to clearly explain your product, demonstrate value, and close deals effectively.

Every year, hundreds of startup founders move to Silicon Valley. But even if you’ve had success elsewhere, it’s a risky move.

Learn how to confidently overcome the "your startup is too small" objection by highlighting the unique benefits your small business can provide to enterprise clients.

Discover the inspiring story of how an intern turned into a co-founder through hustle and initiative. Learn why taking action without asking for permission leads to success.

When your car has an alignment issue, it’s difficult to stay on course. The same is true for your company. If everyone isn’t working toward a common goal—if one tire is tilted even slightly—you might just end up in a ditch.

Boost your startup's success by asking for advice from C-level executives. Learn how building relationships can lead to sales and market validation.

This is it: Demo Day. The day you’ve been waiting for, and the day every moment in your incubator was preparing you for. Are you ready?

Smartly.io is a fast-growing Facebook ad optimization solution for agencies and performance marketers. I joined them as employee #32 in the summer of 2015. A few months later, our team had grown to double that size. Now, we’re almost 120 people, and we’re looking to hire 80 more.

Is Y Combinator worth it? It’s funny: You can ask two totally different YC alumni that question and get two totally different answers, even if they both attended the same batch.

Interviews are like first dates, where the candidate and the interviewer try to pass off the best versions of themselves. Candidates sell you on their immaculate resumes, and some canned responses. You sell them on unlimited coconut water, and a foosball table.

Learn how startup culture is harming sales teams and how to strike the perfect balance of friendly competition for better performance. Insights from Steli Efti!

Discover the 5 essential KPIs B2B startups need to scale from 100 to 1,000 customers, including churn, lifetime value, and acquisition cost.

Discover why startups can't thrive without marketing. Learn how strategic marketing drives growth, funding, and long-term success.

Learn three essential steps to land your dream job at a startup, from embracing the startup mindset to doing thorough research and effectively hiring yourself.

You finally did it. After all that time spent on design, development, and testing—you’re ready to launch your startup. Now it’s time to figure out how to launch it.

No one worries more than a first-time entrepreneur, and it’s not hard to see why. From fundraising to product demonstrations to initial hires, it seems like there’s always something to worry about.

Discover how to turn economic downturns into opportunities for growth. Learn strategies to thrive even when the economy is tough and make your startup resilient.

Learn how to transform happy customers into successful ones and drive long-term growth for your B2B startup with these actionable steps to improve customer success and retention.

We recently took on an intern fresh out of college—an overachiever who knows how to take care of business. She’s ambitious, hard-working, and smart as hell. At school, she didn’t just meet her goals—she blew them out of the water.

Learn how to avoid common customer development pitfalls that can derail your startup. Discover strategies to refine your product-market fit and drive real business growth.

Learn the top mistakes to avoid in startup fundraising with Steli Efti's insights on the '7 Deadly Fundraising Sins' webinar. Essential tips for securing investments effectively.

Discover how Flavio Rump, a founder with a million-dollar exit, became a junior sales intern and mastered the art of closing deals at Close. Learn from his journey to sharpen your sales skills.

The path to success is paved with clear outcomes, good or bad. Most startups fail not because of their failures, but because of being stuck in the middle; what I call the maybe zone.

Learn how startups can re-engage past demos and close lost prospects with these 5 actionable steps to drive sales and win back opportunities.

Learn how to unblock bottlenecks and empower your startup team with a simple deadline system that boosts productivity and keeps momentum high.

Here's a post we originally published back in 2012 on our ElasticSales blog. We're republishing it because many people are still asking us how we got into YC.

Explore essential strategies for resolving startup conflicts and maintaining team morale in high-pressure environments.

Discover effective sales strategies with Steli Efti as he explores charging for future product features in startups. Learn to secure early customers and achieve product/market fit with insightful tips and real-world examples.

Inspired by the latest essays from Paul Graham urging startups to Do Things That Don’t Scale and followed up by 37Signal’s Jason Fried’s excellent post about why their newest product is launched using lots of strategies that don’t seem to scale, the Close Team wanted to share some of our most...