Original Summary

After working with tech startups, I realized I wanted to explore non-tech startups. Compared with tech startups, they seemed far behind in technology adoption, so I thought I’d give it a try. For the past three years, I had been building multiple SaaS products for me and for different companies, and I wanted to understand how non tech industry works. I joined an IoT-based company, and the founder asked me to work with the sales team. That was all he said because he already knew I was someone who took ownership. I wanted to own the entire process, from design to deployment, including understanding customers, validation, and integrations. I told him at the beginning, “You don’t have to spend anything extra on building this product. I’ll manage everything. Even if something breaks in the middle of the night, I’ll wake up and fix it.” When it comes to ownership, I feel like nobody can beat me. The company had been around for about 6 years, but they were still managing their entire sales process in spreadsheets. There was no proper system, and I felt I should build one. My mindset quickly changed from building a CRM to building a system where everyone on the sales team would know what to do next. They needed to know what had happened to each lead, why a deal hadn’t closed, how many activities had been completed for a lead, and how many deals each salesperson had closed. I wanted to organize everything, set boundaries and limits, and make the whole process easier to track. Building it from scratch was a fun job. The sales cycle usually took several months roughly three to six months. Here’s how it worked. A new lead would enter the initial acquired stage and appear on a Kanban board. A salesperson would call the lead and ask a few basic qualification questions about their requirements. We had a minimum ticket size. If a lead met that requirement, we would handle it ourselves. If it was a smaller deal, we would pass it to a sub-dealer, who would handle the rest. Once the lead was qualified, it would move to the verified stage. We would estimate how many IoT devices they needed and conduct a survey. Based on that survey, we would prepare a quote and send it to them. Then came the follow-ups. The customer often needed approval from a higher authority before closing the deal, so this could involve three to four months of conversations. Once we received the purchase order, we would close the deal. That was the entire sales cycle. Initially, the CRM was just a Kanban board for tracking leads, but I realized I could do much more. The company already had product-market fit and was receiving a lot inbound enquiries through Google Ads. We didn’t need to call everyone to generate interest; we needed to handle the enquiries we were already getting. So, one of the first things I built was an AI voice agent. As soon as someone submitted an enquiry with their phone number, the agent would call them and ask the qualification questions. We used an LLM to evaluate their

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/11 22:41:15