Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing.

Startup founders need sales skills.

Here’s a list of sales skills to bring to your startup:

1. Can craft a compelling story about the startup to sell to investors, prospective employees, partners, and others. 
2. Knows the competition and the other choices the prospect has.
3. Knows the customer’s language, whether it be company-specific or industry-specific.
4. Understands the customer’s problem. 
5. Spends twice as much time listening as talking.
6. Ability to probe for the customer’s careabouts.  
7. Ability to set up a sales funnel and bring prospects through it one step at a time. 
8. Ability to ask for the sale.
9. Can generate social proof to show how others have succeeded with the product.
10. Can turn sales into a repeatable process that becomes a core system within the company.
11. Can set up sales compensation plans with proper incentives.

Many investors look for basic sales skills in the founder before funding the startup.


Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.

Let’s go startup something today.
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Music courtesy of Bensound

In this episode, Hall welcomes Elisa Miller-Out, Managing Partner at Chloe Capital.

Chloe Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in women-led innovation companies.

Despite recent progress, only 2% of female founders receive venture capital funding, with only 0.2% going to African American founders.

Chloe Capital is on a mission to change that in partnership with foundations, universities and corporate innovators. They travel across the U.S. as part of the #InvestInWomen Tour, moving capital to female founders in each city we visit. Their fundraising experiences for women entrepreneurs and impact investors spotlight innovation, connect founders and investors to resources, and build community.

The firm invests in seed-stage companies with at least one woman in the C-suite receiving a fair amount of equity. Companies should have a working prototype, with the potential to disrupt macro industries including SaaS, blockchain, AI, VR/AR, IoT, cleantech, agtech, hardware, edtech, wearables and/or robotics.

Elisa is an exit-tested serial tech entrepreneur, investor, board director and community builder. She has over 20 years of experience, including 10 years in the software product space. She’s had 2 exits and 2 acquisitions and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Washington Post, TechCrunch and more. Her career spans multiple startups and global fortune 500 companies. She serves on the board of Women 2.0, Singlebrook and BAX and is co-founder of PollQ, a chatbot startup for higher ed. She’s a graduate of Columbia University.

Elisa discusses her investment thesis and advises startups on what to do before raising funding.

You can visit Chloe Capital at www.chloecapital.com, via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/chloecapital/, and via Twitter at www.twitter.com/chloecapital. 

Elisa can be contacted via email at elisa@chloecapital.com, via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/elisamillerout/, and via Twitter at www.twitter.com/ElisaMillerOut.  

Music courtesy of Bensound.