Founder-led Sales: From Customer Discovery to Your First Paying Customers

Most early-stage founders are still their company's best salesperson, but few have a process they can repeat. Discovery calls turn into friendly feedback instead of qualified pipeline, and pilots drag on without ever turning into paying contracts. In this session, founders work through exactly these problems with a sales leader who has built sales processes and teams from the ground up.

Mike Pinkel is the founder of P.S.I. Selling, where he helps B2B SaaS companies build sales processes that prove value and sales teams that can execute. He founded the Mid-Market Sales Team at Coursera, where he was named Manager of the Year and helped grow the enterprise business from ~$3M to ~$180M ARR, and later served as VP of Sales at a Series A startup, leading a team of 13. Before sales, he graduated from Yale Law School and worked as a litigator.

Mike shares how he approaches it, then we work through the questions and live deals founders bring and close with takeaways for the room. What founders share stays in the room.

What you'll take away:

• How to run customer discovery that actually qualifies buyers, and when to walk away

• A simple, repeatable founder-led sales process: stages, next steps, and where deals get stuck

• How to structure pilots so they convert into paying customers

• How to audit your current sales process before you hire your first salesperson

Please come with one concrete question or deal you're working on.