Supercharging Founder-led Sales with AI

How to speed up your founder-led sales process using Coda's AI features

AJ Asver

When I started a new AI startup

Parcha⁠

, I knew that there was a new skill I would have to learn straight out of the gate to become successful: founder-led sales. We’re building AI agents that automate manual workflows in fintech companies and we’re squarely focused on serving growth-stage fintechs that require a top-down sales approach. Today, the company is just my co-founder Miguel and I along with a small team of engineers. While Miguel who is CTO is focused on developing our AI agents and enterprise offering my job as CEO is selling to prospective customers, or “design partners” to help us shape the first version of our products.

Problem: Running a sales process without a sales team

Selling isn’t new to me and many founders are familiar with the process of pitching customers, listening to their feedback and honing in on the value your product can provide them. What many founders probably have less experience in is running a sales process. At seed-stage it doesn’t need to a be complicated process either, and in fact YC has

a great video⁠

worth watching with some very helpful tips on how B2B founders can get their first users. The biggest takeaway for me from YC’s advice was that you need to talk to hundreds of potential customers in order close a handful as your first users.

Getting a potential list of companies is pretty straightforward using a tool like Crunchbase or Apollo, but tiering, qualifying and then reaching out the right companies is a time consuming process when you’re doing it on your own. And let’s face it, if you are a founder time is something you never have enough of. And then there’s keeping track of all the meetings, customer feedback and next steps too. That’s why I created this template and enlisted the help of Coda AI to automate the parts of the sales process that are most time consuming and tedious, so I can focus on the part I enjoy the most: talking to customers.

This template includes the following features to supercharge your sales workflows using AI:

🎯 AI-powered Qualification: Use AI to automatically qualify target companies based on the information you share about your company.

✉️ Personalized outreach emails: Use AI to generate outreach emails based on information about customers and your product’s value proposition.

🧠 Research insights: Use AI to extract customer insights from your call transcripts so you have a better understanding of what to prioritize when building your product.

I’ve split the template into three sections to make it easier to use: