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All right, welcome to another episode of Sales Transformation. I'm your

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host, Colin Mitchell, and the show's brought to you by Ledium.

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Today, I've got Feras Alhlou on. He is the co-founder over

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at Startup with Feras, has scaled multiple businesses, exits,

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I'm doing great. Thank you so much, Colin. I appreciate being here. Great content

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Oh, appreciate it. And we were just chatting a little bit before and we're

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Yeah, down South here. I've been here in the Bay Area for over

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25 years now. Seen all the bubbles and all the bubbles burst

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Yeah. It's been an interesting couple of years for

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some new things going on in the startup world, but especially

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with the rise of AI and lots of things changing very rapidly.

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But take us back to where your entrepreneur journey started.

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And you mentioned something before we hit record here that you were forced into

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Yeah, so we'd moved from Florida in 1998, got into

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the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. And then

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that one dreaded day when the CEO walked

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into my office and said, Feras, we have a layoff tomorrow, okay?

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And then you're impacted. So that was a really hard moment.

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That was a hard phase in my life. Maybe

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we can dedicate a whole episode on what happens after a layoff. It

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was a dry market, not very dissimilar from what we're seeing today. So

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couldn't find a job, had a young family, a friend of mine wanted

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to start a business. So we joined hands, we joined resources and

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we kicked off our very first business. It was cutting

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edge at the time, web design and search engine optimization. So

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that's, in a way, I was always thinking of starting

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a business, but that major life event really

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Yeah. And what made you go

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down that path of that business? Why web

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Sorry, there was a pause. I don't know if there's a

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Yeah. So what made you go down the path of web design and

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Yeah, so go back to 2003, and maybe some

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of your younger listeners, they don't remember, but it

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was the dawn of the internet. We had Yahoo

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and a bunch of other browsers, and then Google and Yahoo introduced this concept

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of pay-per-click, search engine marketing. And

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this was business owners had no idea.

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Like when we go and walked with a business owner and say, here's, we can build

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a website for you. Why do I need a website? Big companies need

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it, not me. And then when we told them about pay-per-click and

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we can get you to rank on Google, they wouldn't even buy. So

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we figured it's a new industry. There's a wave here and

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we got to ride this wave. And then I remember, this is maybe a tip for

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your listeners in sales. we used to go and show the competitors.

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When we show a competitor, this is a local restaurant owner, a local

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dentist, a local attorney, your competition is

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ranking number one and you're nowhere to be found. That was a

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very good tactic to help them get business, but

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Yeah. I mean, people were still trying to just wrap their head around the

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Exactly. Yeah. It was not easy to sell at the time.

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Yeah. And did you have any sales experience or

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No sales experience. So I was in corporate for maybe about 10 years prior

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to that, but I was not in sales, never sold, never asked

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anyone for money, maybe except my dad. So that was

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a pretty steep learning curve, Colin. And for the founders

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out there who started a business or thinking to start and they don't

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have a sales background, I'm gonna tell you, it's not going to be an easy

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route, but if I did it, I think you

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can too. There was a lot of learning. I think

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there was a lot of CDs at the time. There wasn't a whole lot of YouTube videos on sale.

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So this is a short funny story. My partner

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had a set of CDs from this gentleman by the name of

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Tom Hopkins, The Art of Mastering Real

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Estate Selling. And we don't

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want to pay money, another hundred bucks to buy another set of CDs. So I

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actually ended up listening to those CDs on selling real estate and taking notes

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and replaying the CD to capture how you handle certain objections.

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So that's how I learned sales. And then I attended a few courses, in-person courses,

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two or three-day courses. And you go out to the field. and

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you still get rejections, and you still know what to

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answer. But that's part of learning. And later,

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we were selling six-digit contracts. So it's

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just part of the program is you got to roll up your sleeves and learn

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Yeah. There

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No, no. I don't think we were cheap. We

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were bootstrapping. We didn't have a lot of money. There's a good set of CDs. Why buy

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Yeah. And I think the

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interesting thing is there is you were willing to lean into

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learning sales. Because I think sometimes founders struggle with

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that where it's like, I'm a marketing person, I'm an operations

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person, I'm a technical person, and I'm not a salesperson. And

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they don't want to invest the time with its courses, CDs, podcasts,

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you know, getting some help to master that

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skill. How important do you think it was for you to

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really learn and lean into learning sales to be able to

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We couldn't have done it without it, Colin. I mean, I

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had a young family, my partner, the same. We had to sell. And

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I remember, and I've said this before, on our very first day

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when we decided to go out and sell, It was really hard.

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It was really hard. And where do we go? Well, let's

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go to places where people know us. So, we went to five restaurants. We

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ended up having to have five meals that one day. And guess what? We

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had five rejections. I kid you not. I

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can still name the restaurants. One of them, Athena Grill, right here down the street in

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Santa Clara. So, It

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took us three days to recover. But then, okay, what

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were the questions that they asked us we did not have an answer for?

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So that was our way to produce my own list of FAQs on

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what to answer if someone says, I don't need a website at the time. So I

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think that would be, today, if I go to a networking event and people ask me questions, I

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just typically between networking, I go and jot down what they asked

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me so I can go back home and come up with a better answer next

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time. But there's no escape, I always tell founders, You got

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to be out there. You can do a lot of things online these days. You can research, you can go

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on YouTube, you can listen to these amazing podcasts, but there's no

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substitute of going out there and meeting people

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and practicing your pitch. The more you do it, the

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better you're going to become at it. It'll be just a second nature over

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Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it's, it's, uh, it's

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even harder to do it in person, right? Really test your skills.

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Then over Zoom, on a phone call, over

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email, all the ways that people like to sell today. In person

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is the real test if

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you can handle those questions. But I think that the important learning lesson

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there is that You got

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a bunch of rejection, but you took

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those opportunities to see what you could learn from them

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to improve. What questions did we not have answers to? How could we

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answer those questions better before you put yourself back out there again?

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Absolutely. And the learning never stops. And

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I think it was Peter Drucker who said the number one

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advantage you have in business is learning and application

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of this learning ahead of your competition, faster

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than your competition. So when we moved

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from selling to small mid-sized businesses to selling to corporate, so

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we niched down on analytics, became a Google certified

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partner in analytics, one of maybe 200 globally,

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we started to get these large leads from Fortune 500. So

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what worked for small businesses did not work for

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Fortune 500. The pace and the

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level of professionalism and the level of everything

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had to be really polished. So we had to

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learn, I had to read a couple of books on how to sell B2B

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long sales cycle and even adjust our sales

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projections and revenue projections based on these lower sales cycles. So

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learning in my mind never stops, never stops. And today

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you have to also learn about AI and how AI is impacting your

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Thanks for tuning in. Please don't forget to like and share so we can help more