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- How I Butchered My First Sales Meetings, _SOUTHSTART Icebreakers, and My 13-Year-Old Soda Side Hustle
How I Butchered My First Sales Meetings, _SOUTHSTART Icebreakers, and My 13-Year-Old Soda Side Hustle
Plus, in the AFR!? What!
Sean Grealy
February 28, 2025
Hey founders, sellers, and the sales curious!
Is it just me or has Feb been flying by on 28 days of pure adrenaline? We’ve had back-to-back (10hr) sales meeting days, onboarded new clients, and our first Sales Accelerator Cohort is nearly closed, with just 1 week left to join and go $0-$1m in 2025.
In today’s Growth Drop, we go deep on👇
💬 How to build your simple _SOUTHSTART intro in our Founder Asks segment
📉 My first sales meeting fails and what I’d do differently
🥤 And going all the way back to the start on the scalr podcast
Also, hot off the press, check me out in the AFR! 🗞️ 🤯
P.S. A small ask: Our community is growing. If you are a new or loyal reader, share with a founder or seller who SHOULD be reading these Growth Drops!
FOUNDER ASKS
How to Nail Your Intro for _SOUTHSTART
Founder Ask: I’m attending _SOUTHSTART for the first time. How should I introduce myself?
If you’re a founder heading to _SOUTHSTART to meet customers and investors, a strong intro matters.
Here’s Our Advice ⤵️
Start with a simple one-liner to kick things off. Include:
Who you are
What you do
Your authority in that space
Template: “I’m {name}, the founder of {company}. We help {X-customer} do {Y-outcome of using your product} with {Z-what you’ve built}, and recently we {recent achievement}.”
Example: “I’m Sean, the co-founder of Sell Anything. We help start-ups and scale-ups increase revenue with fractional leadership and sales advisory, and recently, we launched ‘ThincSales’, a Sales Accelerator program with ThincLab.”
Expand to the purpose of your attendance.
A statement about what you want to experience and achieve.
Template: “It’s my {insert visit number} at _SOUTHSTART. I’m excited to {your purpose}. What brought you along?”
Example 1: “It’s my first time at _SOUTHSTART. I’m excited to meet investors and other founders as my company grows from 10 to 50 customers. What brought you along?”
Example 2: “It’s my 2nd time at _SOUTHSTART. I’m here to catch up with friends, make new ones, and learn a lot! What brought you along?”
You’ve planted some seeds and explained who you are. Now, create the ask.
The ask is a straightforward way to let people know how they can help you.
Template: “We are {doing activity} and {activity key goal or need}. Do you have specific insight or connections that could help with {specific ask}?”
Example 1: ”We are raising our seed round and bringing on our next 10 SMB customers. Is there anyone here you think I should meet?”
Example 2: ”We are growing our team and looking to bring on a new product manager. Is there anyone here you think I should meet?”
SALES INSIGHTS
2,555 Days Later: A Reflection on My First Ever Sales Meetings
Back in 2018, my sales meeting inner monologue was pretty much the following thoughts on loop: I went all the way out there, and nothing happened. God… I did all the talking. Did they even like the product? What the f^ck am I doing wrong in this room? Why does sales have to be so hard? The cringing and the chaotic feelings are valid. |  I believe this was literally my first sales meeting… |
They say that if you aren’t embarrassed by your first product release, you launched too late. The same can be said for your first sales meetings. But there’s a difference between moving fast to start selling and moving in a way that might break trust and damage your personal brand.
To bulletproof your sales meeting process, let’s break down the impact of not being prepared:
1. Being banned from the room: If you burn an opportunity, it can take 4-12 months to get back in the room just to have another swing at the conversation. Executives and upper management are busy people who often don’t manage their own calendars. If you haven’t built strong relationships internally, you can very easily be put in the “waste of our time” basket.
2. You’re seen as a ‘vitamin, not a painkiller’: Miscommunication of your value prop and not being aligned to internal company projects or initiatives means you risk being seen as “nice to have” rather than a requirement for the business.
3. Riding the elevator: If you enter the prospect company at a middle management level without clear or defined business cases, you won’t progress to executives and decision-makers because there’s no clear reason to push you up. This means getting stuck riding the middle management levels.
4. Bad word of mouth: People talk! If you burn trust and personal brand equity, it can have bad knock-on effects, especially in tight-knit markets where execs talk to other execs. If you don’t make a strong impression, simple responses like “wasn’t worth our time” or “they’re too early” can damage your growth (I know because it happened to me).
So, here’s everything I got wrong in my first sales meetings and how I would fix them:
RESOURCES
Selling Soda at Recess to Building Australia’s #1 Place for Sales
I was a guest on Matt Woodard’s podcast, scalr, where I talked about my first-ever business… selling soft drink cans out of my high school locker 😅
I get into my original side hustle and where my founder passion came from as a 13-year-old riding my BMX bike to school, the challenges in sales across Australia, and how we help clients today.
COMING UP
And the March Madness Begins…
_SOUTHSTART’s happening from March 4th-6th. You can catch me on Day 1 at Growth Academy!
Our Sales Accelerator with ThincLab, ThincSales, is kicking off the week of March 10th, followed by our own Sales Accelerator the next week!
And watch this space… coffee catch-ups to come for my Adelaide founders and sellers 👀 ☕️