Notes At the beginning, he boot strapped his company which gave him more room to learn and make mistakes. He recommends this route to new entrepreneurs as when you do go to get investment down the road, you will get a better valuation as you will know your numbers and know your cycles. B2B companies have a tendency to really take off in years 5-7. In Europe there is less VC money and smaller amount of exits for VC’s. This means that it is harder to get funding and you will get a smaller amount as well when compared to the US. Two things that are important to know for a new company. The first is knowing the cost to acquire a new customer and the second is knowing how to upsell/cross-sell to existing customers. Many times companies are only focused on acquiring new customers when you can obtain more revenue by upselling your existing customer base. When creating marketing material, do not only create it for the new clients. Also create content for your customers on how to better use what is available to them, this will help with upsells. When creating new content, you need to keep in mind what the goal of the content is as well as who the persona is that you are writing it for. The biggest challenge TJ finds most founders have is focus. As a founder, everywhere you look is an opportunity and everything is possible. But to be really successful, you should focus on one thing and bring it home. Feature selling is the worst methodology to sell. To be a great enterprise sales executive, you need to be a great team player. To assess this, they give the interviewee the task to sell to a few people from the company. The candidate is given several days to prepare and they look to see if they use all the resources available (call/email and speak with the company, asking for help/insight) before the presentation. Time kills all deals, keep on the pressure. Final Five What is your favorite sales or leadership book? The Challenger Sale Do you have someone that you follow/read for sales/leadership ideas? Aaron Ross Are you available 24/7? Do you have strict personal time boundaries? Works all around the world, 24/7 What is your favorite tool used for sales? Salesforce and insightsquared.com What one piece of advice do you have for all the founders/CEOs/VP Sales out there? Keep the energy going! Links TJ's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjeerdbrenninkmeijer/ Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/springeradam/ Training: https://startupsales.io/training/