Startup Sales — 5 Common Sales Mistakes by Founders
August 12, 2025
Founders are responsible for the first sales a startup will make. For many founders, this is one of their very first experiences of sales and mistakes are often made.
Getting great references is a big part of the hiring process and whenever you need to provide a reference, make sure that person is armed with your top talking points.
If you mention that you’ll provide talking points when asking someone to be your reference, you make it a lot easier for them to say yes, as they know you’re going to do most of the work for them.
You can’t expect a reference to know the details about your best wins, so providing the talking points makes sure they’re focused on the most appropriate items for this role.
It’s worth putting in the effort to make these talking points authoritative, that way you can re-use them with minor edits across multiple different referees, over the course of years.
Best of luck out there.
