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Get Your First 10 B2B Customers

Founder-led sales, before you hire anyone

This listing is published as an example of what an operator playbook looks like on NELL. The marketplace has not opened — nothing here is on sale yet.

Six weeks of founder-led selling, run as a sequence rather than advice. You will build a list you actually believe in, get the first real conversations, learn to hear a no that means something, and close the first handful yourself — so that when you do hire, you are handing over a motion that works rather than a hypothesis.

Maya EllisonMaya EllisonSample profileFounder-led sales operator · B2B SaaS
Length
6 weeks
6 milestones
Included
16 templates
2 free to download
From
$149
3 ways to take it

Fifty named accounts worked end to end, ten real conversations, and the first paid deals out of them.

What you will have, week by week

26 tasks · about 34 hrs of structured work

  1. 1A list you believe in5 tasks · ~5.1 hrsFifty named accounts, each with a reason — not a scraped export.Most founder-led sales fails here, quietly, six weeks later. A list assembled from a filter has no reason attached to any row, so every email reads as if it were sent to a thousand people — because it may as well have been. This week you build fifty accounts you can each defend in a sentence, and cut the ones you cannot.
  2. 2The person, not the company4 tasks · ~4.9 hrsA named human at each account, and what they are measured on.Companies do not answer email. This week turns fifty accounts into fifty named humans, and — the part almost everyone skips — establishes what each of them is measured on this quarter. That sentence is what the whole sequence is written against.
  3. 3The first conversations5 tasks · ~5.3 hrsTen discovery calls booked, and the opener that got them.Sending begins. One at a time, from your own inbox, in a paired order across email and LinkedIn so the second touch does not read as the first one again. The target is ten booked calls; the deliverable is knowing which opener got them.
  4. 4Hearing the real no4 tasks · ~7.8 hrsAn objection bank in the buyer's own words, not your paraphrase.The most valuable week and the least comfortable. You run the calls with a question bank open, talk less than forty per cent of the time, and write down objections in the buyer's own words rather than your paraphrase of them. What comes out of this week changes the roadmap as often as it changes the pitch.
  5. 5Pricing, said out loud4 tasks · ~3.5 hrsA number quoted without flinching, and what happened when you did.You decide three numbers in writing — the ask, the floor, the walk-away — before anybody is looking at you. Then you quote the ask to five people and do not discount, so that you find out what the price does on its own. Five flat nos teach you more than five discounted yeses.
  6. 6The first closes4 tasks · ~7.5 hrsSigned, or an evidenced dead end — both count, and neither is guessed.Written proposals to everyone still live, one page each, and a direct question about what would stop this happening. Then you close what closes and write the post-mortem. The week ends with a handover pack, which is the actual reason a founder runs this themselves rather than hiring for it.

Is this for you?

Built for

  • A founder with a product that works and no repeatable way to sell it
  • Pre-revenue, or under roughly $20k MRR from inbound and your own network
  • Selling to businesses, at a price point worth a conversation — $2k+ a year
  • Able to give this eight hours a week for six weeks, and to deliver to ten customers without hiring

Not for

  • Pre-product. There is nothing here that finds out whether it should exist — validate first.
  • Consumer or self-serve under $200 a year. The economics of a named-account motion do not work.
  • Companies with a salesperson already. This is the motion you hand them, not a course for them.
  • Anyone looking for a lead list. You build the fifty yourself, and that is the point of week one.

What you get

16 items · 2 free to download now

  • Worksheets

    2 · CSV

    ICP canvas, personas, positioning, territory plans

    • ICP definition canvasFill this in before you write a single email. If you cannot complete a row, that account does not belong on the list.Free sample
    • Trigger map — the nine reasons companies moveFit tells you who could buy. A trigger tells you who will buy this quarter. Score your fifty against the nine and re-rank.1 KB

  • Scripts

    2 · MD

    Call scripts, discovery question banks, demo flows

    • Discovery question bankTwenty questions, ordered. Ask them in this order and you will hear the answer before you pitch.1 KB
    • The pairing — LinkedIn and email, per personaWhat to send where, and in what order, so the second touch does not read as the first one again.2 KB

  • Email sequences

    2 · MD

    Cold and nurture sequences, with the framework named

    • 5-step cold sequence (PAS)Problem, Agitate, Solve. Written to be rewritten in your own voice — send it as-is and it reads as a template.2 KB
    • Booking, confirming and no-show recoveryA booked call that does not happen costs more than one never booked — you stopped prospecting for it. This is the confirmation flow that holds the slot.2 KB

  • Objection handling

    1 · MD

    Objections in the buyer's words, with responses

    • Objection bank — the seven you will hearThe seven objections that account for most early-stage nos, and what actually answers each.2 KB

  • Battlecards

    1 · MD

    One competitor a page - strengths, gaps, switch triggers

    • Battlecard — the three you actually lose toTwo of the three are never a competitor. Fill one page each; the template is here with the spreadsheet and do-nothing cards already written.2 KB

  • Proof

    1 · MD

    Case studies, reference stories, one-pagers

    • First customer story — one pageWrite this the week they sign, while the before is still accurate. By month three nobody remembers what it was like before, including them.1 KB

  • Pricing & proposals

    2 · MD

    Pricing sheets, proposal and SOW templates

    • One-page proposal templateA proposal that fits on one page and can be said out loud. Anything longer is you hiding.1006 B
    • Pricing ladder worksheetThree numbers, decided before the call rather than during it: the ask, the floor, and the walk-away. The floor is the one founders skip and then discover mid-negotiation.2 KB

  • Models

    1 · CSV

    Pipeline maths, CAC/LTV, forecast calculators

    • Pipeline maths modelWork backwards from the revenue you need to the conversations you have to have. Most founders find the number is bigger than they assumed.779 B

  • Decks

    1 · MD

    Workshop and training decks

    • Founder-led sales — the internal briefingTwelve slides to align a co-founder or an early team on what the next six weeks are and are not. Outline plus speaker notes; rebuild it in your own deck.2 KB

  • Checklists & SOPs

    3 · CSV, MD

    Run-books and quality gates

    • Week zero readiness checkNine questions. If you cannot answer six of them, the six weeks will not work yet and this tells you which one to fix first.Free sample
    • Call quality scorecardScore your own calls for the first ten. Founders talk too much on nine of them; this is how you find out which nine.1006 B
    • Handover pack — what a first sales hire needs on day oneThe point of doing this yourself is what you can hand over afterwards. Assemble it in week six while it is all still in your head.2 KB

About the author

Maya Ellison
Maya EllisonSample profile

Founder-led sales operator · B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS · pre-revenue to the first ten paying customers

Based
Austin, Texas
Operating
11 years
Founders advised
40+

Track record

  1. First commercial hireContour — developer tooling$0 to $1.4M ARR in nineteen months, founder-led throughout
  2. Head of salesHalden — logistics SaaSBuilt outbound from zero; first twelve mid-market accounts
  3. Account executiveBrightlaneClosed the first five enterprise logos on a one-person team

What they bring

  • First commercial hire at two seed-stage B2B companies
  • Built an outbound motion from zero into mid-market logistics
  • 400+ founder discovery calls reviewed and scored
  • Advises three to four founders at a time through their first ten customers

In their own words

I run the part of the company that has to work before you can hire a salesperson.

I was the first commercial hire at two seed-stage B2B companies and spent four years before that selling into mid-market logistics, which is where I learned that most founder-led sales advice is written by people who have never had to book the meeting themselves. Everything in this playbook is a thing I have actually done, in the order I actually did it, including the parts that did not work.

I work with three or four founders at a time, in the narrow window between “the product works” and “we can afford to hire for this”.

This playbook and the claims in it are Maya Ellison’s. NELL hosts and delivers it, and handles the payment.

Questions people ask first

How much time does this actually take?

Eight hours a week, and week four is the heavy one at roughly twelve — that is ten discovery calls plus the writing-up afterwards. The task estimates add up to about 27 hours of structured work; the rest is the conversations themselves, which nobody can do for you.

I do not have fifty accounts in my market.

Then you have a smaller number and a better reason to work each one properly. Twenty-five worked end to end beats fifty half-worked every time. Keep the sequence and shrink the list — the one thing that does not survive is dropping the why-them sentence.

What if nobody replies?

Week three is designed to tell you why rather than to leave you guessing. Sub-2% reply on fifty is almost always the list or the trigger — week one — and almost never the copy. The playbook sends in two batches of twenty-five for exactly this reason: the second batch carries what the first one taught you.

Do I need a CRM?

No. A spreadsheet holds fifty accounts fine and the templates assume one. Buy a CRM when you hire the person who will live in it.

Is this outbound spam?

It is the opposite of the thing that makes outbound spam. One-at-a-time sends from your own inbox to a named person at an account you can explain, with a trigger you can point at. Fifty of those is a week's work; fifty thousand of anything is somebody else's playbook.

What do I have at the end if it does not work?

A worked list, an objection bank in your buyers' own words, real conversion rates instead of assumed ones, and evidence of which of the four things failed — the list, the message, the price or the product. That is a materially better position than not knowing, and it is the reason week six ends in a post-mortem rather than a celebration.

Can my co-founder work through it with me?

Yes, and it works better. One of you owns the list and the sending, the other sits in on the calls and takes the verbatim notes — that split is why the objection bank comes out usable rather than remembered.