I wasted over 742 hours in energy-draining sales meetings attempting to scale sales in my startup. It burned me down to almost nothing and my company almost died. You see… For four years I was doing everything I thought was right. 1. I had an ideal customer profile and knew their pain points 2. I had a named account list and knew their current vendors 3. I was relentless in outreach across all channels to meet the right economic buyer 4. I trusted and followed the advice of internal champions 5. I attended and spoke at conferences to establish our voice 6. I wrote heaps of proposals and responded to RFPs 7. I followed up like a beast 8. I tried all different types of salespeople 9. And I partnered with big vendors who had “impact or startup” program THE TRUTH = I wasn’t…. Four years of intense activity only resulted in 32 new customers. Most of them came from someone who had already used our product or was a sophisticated early adopter. Only 2 or 3 came from our sales activity. Although, new customers are positive. I was deeply frustrated. I couldn’t continue this way. We couldn’t scale. Every sales activity felt like razor blades. I was distrustful of prospects. Cash was being burned. Staff felt lost. And, the small amount of leads and deals from the activity were getting blown because of our burnout. In a moment of desperation with only 90 days of runway. I started to reach out to potential resellers. In my case, it was the Big Four Consulting firms. I made about 100 calls in a last mile effort and I eventually found an associate partner who wanted an edge. His biggest issue that dominated his customer conversation was resolved by our “unfair advantage”. His biggest strength was the mechanism to procure and this was our greatest weakness. He had access to over 100 ideal customers for my company with an easy path to procurement. He wanted to make Partner and we needed to survive. We complemented each other at that point of time perfectly. It was a Win Win Win.