Sales for Startups feat. The Story Architect

Fear. Fear is the emotion most startup founders use when they think of selling. But selling is a crucial requirement to validating your startup and gaining traction. In this session, Kevin Smith will help demystify the buying process, help you understand how sales works and yes, take the fear out of it. You’ll learn how to confidently approach new prospects, qualify their needs, pitch your products, handle objections, and persuade your customers to buy. You’ll leave this session with the tools needed to find new customers and achieve growth for your startup.

Kevin Smith is The Story Architect. In his 25+ year career in sales, marketing, & entrepreneurship, Kevin has done over 10,000 pitches. Kevin helps businesses & start-ups unleash their story to secure customers and investors, by helping them understand what their core customer story is and then helping them get their story to market. Kevin spent 14+ years at Dell in consumer sales, B2B sales, Enterprise Sales, Enterprise Marketing, and M&A GTM Strategy. After helping to develop go-to-market strategies for their acquired startups, he reconnected with his passion for entrepreneurship and began helping startups and growing businesses full-time. His expertise includes branding, messaging, marketing strategy, SEO, Content and Social Media marketing, presentation and pitch design, web design, lead generation, sales coaching, and business development. He’s provided mentorship to startups through WeTech, The Spark Centre, The RIC Centre (now Altitude Accelerator), Humber Launch, U of T i-Cube, Startup Toronto / TorontoStarts, Startup York’s Y2, and Startup Next in addition to delivering educational entrepreneurial workshops as a MaRS facilitator. He also participates as a judge for startup pitch competitions and has spent time with angel investor groups as a subject matter expert.