Conquering Seed Stage Sales at a Deep Tech Startup: Insights from a CRO turned VC | Nate Williams of Union Labs

Nate Williams is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Union Labs - an applied DeepTech seed fund focused on building and backing leading seed-stage startups in Climate, PropTech and Mobility.  Nate is a hands-on serial entrepreneur having previously played roles as an EIR at Kleiner Perkins, CRO & Head of Business at August Home, Inc. which became a leader in Smart Home Access, later acquired by Assa Abloy in 2017. He was also the CMO & Head of Business at Greenwave Systems and Senior Director of Marketing & Business Development at Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility. Join Host Alex Shartsis in this episode as Nate shares about the different stages of sales in a startup's life, from day zero to a scalable product, and the importance of a team approach to sales efforts. He shares his advice on creating a channel map to reach customers and markets, and talks about the risks of customer concentration. This channel mapping approach brought huge success when he was heading the business at August Home. Nate also talks about the significance of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) title and the shift in funding trends towards mitigating technical and go-to-market risks early on. Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 9:38 Startup Sales Stages: From Jungle to Highway 11:17 Team Approach to Sales: Beyond Founder-Led Selling 15:23 Channel Mapping: Strategic Market Reach 21:11 Early Client Engagement: Setting the Deal Clock 23:38 Customer Concentration Risks: Balancing Goals 35:13 Targeting Influential Profiles: Building Key Relationships 40:23 CRO Role: Signaling Structured Sales Growth 49:52 Funding Trends: Balancing Technical and Market Risks Guest: Nate Williams (linkedin.com/in/nathandwilliams) Host: Alex Shartsis (linkedin.com/in/shartsis) Audio Engineer & Video Editor - James Fixx (fixxmusic.com) The Seed to Sequoia podcast is created by Silverwood Advisors to help founders with practical advice on building successful startups. If you would like to get expert advice for your startup reach out to us on: Website: silverwood.ai Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/silverwood-advisors