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Welcome to the Sales Transformation Podcast, the definitive stop for leaders driving change in the sales world. Hosted by Collin Mitchell, we dive deep into the minds of Founders, CEOs, VPs of Sales, and Sales Development Leaders from trailblazing startups to industry-leading public companies.
Our mission is simple: to illuminate the path to extraordinary sales leadership. We explore a broad spectrum of sales territories, from the intricacies of Founder Led Sales and Outbound Sales to the transformative potential of Technology in Sales and Social Selling. Whether it's mastering your CRM, optimizing conversions, scaling sales teams, or engineering a complete Sales Transformation, our conversations are set to challenge the status quo and redefine sales success.
With a new content every day of the week, we bring you unfiltered interviews with the luminaries of sales, people who have not just succeeded but transformed the way we think about sales. Collin Mitchell also shares sharp, tactical sales tips every week, packing decades of sales wisdom into bite-sized insights.
So, if you're ready to rewrite the sales rulebook and learn from the best in the business, the Sales Transformation Podcast is your ticket. Write us a review, share the show, and join us on this journey of sales evolution. Let's transform the way we sell, together!
All right, welcome to another episode of Sales Transformation. I'm your
host, Colin Mitchell, and the show's brought to you by Ledium.
Today, I've got Feras Alhlou on. He is the co-founder over
at Startup with Feras, has scaled multiple businesses, exits,
I'm doing great. Thank you so much, Colin. I appreciate being here. Great content
Oh, appreciate it. And we were just chatting a little bit before and we're
Yeah, down South here. I've been here in the Bay Area for over
25 years now. Seen all the bubbles and all the bubbles burst
Yeah. It's been an interesting couple of years for
some new things going on in the startup world, but especially
with the rise of AI and lots of things changing very rapidly.
But take us back to where your entrepreneur journey started.
And you mentioned something before we hit record here that you were forced into
Yeah, so we'd moved from Florida in 1998, got into
the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. And then
that one dreaded day when the CEO walked
into my office and said, Feras, we have a layoff tomorrow, okay?
And then you're impacted. So that was a really hard moment.
That was a hard phase in my life. Maybe
we can dedicate a whole episode on what happens after a layoff. It
was a dry market, not very dissimilar from what we're seeing today. So
couldn't find a job, had a young family, a friend of mine wanted
to start a business. So we joined hands, we joined resources and
we kicked off our very first business. It was cutting
edge at the time, web design and search engine optimization. So
that's, in a way, I was always thinking of starting
a business, but that major life event really
Yeah. And what made you go
down that path of that business? Why web
Sorry, there was a pause. I don't know if there's a
Yeah. So what made you go down the path of web design and
Yeah, so go back to 2003, and maybe some
of your younger listeners, they don't remember, but it
was the dawn of the internet. We had Yahoo
and a bunch of other browsers, and then Google and Yahoo introduced this concept
of pay-per-click, search engine marketing. And
this was business owners had no idea.
Like when we go and walked with a business owner and say, here's, we can build
a website for you. Why do I need a website? Big companies need
it, not me. And then when we told them about pay-per-click and
we can get you to rank on Google, they wouldn't even buy. So
we figured it's a new industry. There's a wave here and
we got to ride this wave. And then I remember, this is maybe a tip for
your listeners in sales. we used to go and show the competitors.
When we show a competitor, this is a local restaurant owner, a local
dentist, a local attorney, your competition is
ranking number one and you're nowhere to be found. That was a
very good tactic to help them get business, but
Yeah. I mean, people were still trying to just wrap their head around the
Exactly. Yeah. It was not easy to sell at the time.
Yeah. And did you have any sales experience or
No sales experience. So I was in corporate for maybe about 10 years prior
to that, but I was not in sales, never sold, never asked
anyone for money, maybe except my dad. So that was
a pretty steep learning curve, Colin. And for the founders
out there who started a business or thinking to start and they don't
have a sales background, I'm gonna tell you, it's not going to be an easy
route, but if I did it, I think you
can too. There was a lot of learning. I think
there was a lot of CDs at the time. There wasn't a whole lot of YouTube videos on sale.
So this is a short funny story. My partner
had a set of CDs from this gentleman by the name of
Tom Hopkins, The Art of Mastering Real
Estate Selling. And we don't
want to pay money, another hundred bucks to buy another set of CDs. So I
actually ended up listening to those CDs on selling real estate and taking notes
and replaying the CD to capture how you handle certain objections.
So that's how I learned sales. And then I attended a few courses, in-person courses,
two or three-day courses. And you go out to the field. and
you still get rejections, and you still know what to
answer. But that's part of learning. And later,
we were selling six-digit contracts. So it's
just part of the program is you got to roll up your sleeves and learn
Yeah. There
No, no. I don't think we were cheap. We
were bootstrapping. We didn't have a lot of money. There's a good set of CDs. Why buy
Yeah. And I think the
interesting thing is there is you were willing to lean into
learning sales. Because I think sometimes founders struggle with
that where it's like, I'm a marketing person, I'm an operations
person, I'm a technical person, and I'm not a salesperson. And
they don't want to invest the time with its courses, CDs, podcasts,
you know, getting some help to master that
skill. How important do you think it was for you to
really learn and lean into learning sales to be able to
We couldn't have done it without it, Colin. I mean, I
had a young family, my partner, the same. We had to sell. And
I remember, and I've said this before, on our very first day
when we decided to go out and sell, It was really hard.
It was really hard. And where do we go? Well, let's
go to places where people know us. So, we went to five restaurants. We
ended up having to have five meals that one day. And guess what? We
had five rejections. I kid you not. I
can still name the restaurants. One of them, Athena Grill, right here down the street in
Santa Clara. So, It
took us three days to recover. But then, okay, what
were the questions that they asked us we did not have an answer for?
So that was our way to produce my own list of FAQs on
what to answer if someone says, I don't need a website at the time. So I
think that would be, today, if I go to a networking event and people ask me questions, I
just typically between networking, I go and jot down what they asked
me so I can go back home and come up with a better answer next
time. But there's no escape, I always tell founders, You got
to be out there. You can do a lot of things online these days. You can research, you can go
on YouTube, you can listen to these amazing podcasts, but there's no
substitute of going out there and meeting people
and practicing your pitch. The more you do it, the
better you're going to become at it. It'll be just a second nature over
Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it's, it's, uh, it's
even harder to do it in person, right? Really test your skills.
Then over Zoom, on a phone call, over
email, all the ways that people like to sell today. In person
is the real test if
you can handle those questions. But I think that the important learning lesson
there is that You got
a bunch of rejection, but you took
those opportunities to see what you could learn from them
to improve. What questions did we not have answers to? How could we
answer those questions better before you put yourself back out there again?
Absolutely. And the learning never stops. And
I think it was Peter Drucker who said the number one
advantage you have in business is learning and application
of this learning ahead of your competition, faster
than your competition. So when we moved
from selling to small mid-sized businesses to selling to corporate, so
we niched down on analytics, became a Google certified
partner in analytics, one of maybe 200 globally,
we started to get these large leads from Fortune 500. So
what worked for small businesses did not work for
Fortune 500. The pace and the
level of professionalism and the level of everything
had to be really polished. So we had to
learn, I had to read a couple of books on how to sell B2B
long sales cycle and even adjust our sales
projections and revenue projections based on these lower sales cycles. So
learning in my mind never stops, never stops. And today
you have to also learn about AI and how AI is impacting your
Thanks for tuning in. Please don't forget to like and share so we can help more