Top 5 Skills Salespeople Learn Working in a Startup

Salespeople are in high demand across all industries, but especially so in the startup world. Startups are always looking for talented, ambitious salespeople to help them grow, and a startup tour of duty can teach you things an established company never will.

But let’s be clear about the trade upfront: you’ll give up brand recognition, inbound leads, and mature support teams in exchange for speed, exposure, and skills that compound for the rest of your career. 

For the right salesperson at the right time, that’s a great trade. Here are the five skills you’ll build.

#1. Evangelical Sales

At an established company, you sell a product buyers already know they need, from a brand they already trust. At a startup, nobody’s heard of you, and half your prospects don’t know the problem you solve has a solution.

So you learn to evangelize: to articulate a new solution so clearly that a buyer who wasn’t planning to spend anything gets excited enough to find budget. That’s the hardest motion in sales, and it changes you. 

Reps who learn to create demand can sell anywhere for the rest of their careers, because everything after “no one has heard of us” feels easy.

And know what you’re signing up for, because this is the same coin whose other side is selling where buyer urgency has to be built rather than found. That’s a skill worth having and a hard way to live long-term. The startup years teach it; you decide how many of them you want.

#2. Range Beyond Your Job Description

At a startup, you’re one Slack message away from the product team and one hallway away from the CEO. Have product suggestions? Customer feedback the executives should hear? You’ll deliver it yourself, and they’ll actually want it, because early-stage companies are starving for signal from the field.

That access means you learn how the whole machine works: how pricing gets set, how the roadmap gets argued over, how marketing decides what to say. Reps who’ve seen the whole machine make better strategic sellers, and eventually better sales leaders.

#3. Capacity You Didn’t Know You Had

Startups will constantly challenge you to do more, and to do things nobody’s done at the company before, because there is no playbook yet. You might build the first outbound sequences, write the first battle cards, or figure out the first real qualification criteria.

Creating new roads where none existed is the fastest way to grow, and it builds a kind of resilience that carries over everywhere. After a startup, a bad quarter at a mature company feels like a light workload.

#4. Relationships with Key Executives

At a startup, you may go on calls with your CEO, and some CEOs are exceptional salespeople. Watching a founder sell their own company teaches you things no sales training ever will.

Those relationships are the career asset. The executives you sell alongside at 80 employees will remember you, promote you, and pull you into their next ventures. 

These opportunities won’t exist once the organization grows beyond 500 employees, and by 1,000, you’re a data point on a spreadsheet to most CROs. 

The time to make a name for yourself is at an early-stage company, where your effort, results, and drive get rewarded in multiples as the company grows.

#5. Resourcefulness

At a startup, you won’t have a multi-million dollar marketing budget. At first, you may not even have a sales engineer. You’ll have to find ways to make it work, and quickly.

Under pressure to grow and deliver results, many salespeople discover they’re more resourceful than they thought. 

You’ll learn to run your own demos, build your own business cases, and improvise when the deck doesn’t cover the question. Along with resourcefulness comes flexibility and creativity, and those travel with you to every future role.

Is a Startup Your Next Move?

Evangelize new solutions, build range beyond your role, expand your capacity, sell alongside executives, and get resourceful under pressure. Do a startup tour well and you’ll carry those five skills for the rest of your career.

Before you leap, do the homework: not every early-stage company deserves you, so learn how to tell if a new logo role is worth taking, and when you get in the room, avoid the five mistakes that kill early-stage SaaS interviews.

And if you’re weighing company size in general, here’s why smaller tech companies often provide more career growth than the industry giants.

Considering a change? Learn more about the in-demand sales roles we recruit for.