Alejandro López, Vozy | Landing Your First B2B Customers and Growing to Millions in Annual Revenue

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

Selling software to large companies for the first time is a hard task for any founder: getting prospects, asking the right questions, setting prices, and so on are a learning process that, over time, the founder comes to understand how to handle.

Today’s guest, Alejandro López, CEO and cofounder of Vozy, went from billing 200 thousand to several million dollars a year in just 3 years, and he told us how to navigate the world of corporate sales.

Vozy is a platform that automates effective conversations through personalized voice assistants, based on artificial intelligence.

We talked about how to close your first customers, how to run a B2B sales process, and how to build a sales team in order to scale. We also talked about Alejandro’s experience as a founder and the lessons from his first exit.

To date, Vozy has raised more than 8 million dollars from funds such as GoHub, Starling Ventures, and Globant, among others.

Youtube Timestamps*

[2:26] - Lessons in Entrepreneurship

How did Alejandro arrive at the fascinating world of startups?
Alejandro founded Turboboy, and his experience was a genuine roller coaster, from the split with his partners to the exit. What lessons did you learn during this stage that have shaped you as a founder?
What should a shareholders’ agreement include, according to Alejandro?
Alejandro lived through the last-minute cancellation of an investment in Turboboy that had already been confirmed. How did he get past that blow, and what did it teach him about raising capital?
Alejandro trusted his cofounder Humberto Pertuz from the start, first as an angel investor and then as a partner. Why, and what did he see in him?

[20:33] - First Sales: 0 to 1M

Today, at Vozy, they have more than 100 corporate customers and millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue. But just 3 years ago they were billing less than 200 thousand dollars a year. What were the most effective tactics they used to connect with and meet potential customers?
In the first sales calls or meetings, what questions should a founder ask the potential customer to get valid feedback?
What are the wrong questions and the most common mistakes?
How important is pricing in those first sales? How do you think about the trade off between maximizing the price or the probability of closing the customer?
What lessons have you learned about pricing, and at what moment does price discipline become key? What are the risks of not doing it?
What tools do you use as a founder and sales leader to create urgency in a sales process?

[41:25] - Scaling Sales: 1M and Up

In sales, people talk about the commercial “playbook.” What does the sales playbook mean to Alejandro? Does one exist at Vozy, who created it, and how has it evolved?
In your experience, for the first sales hires: Does it work better to hire a leader or a sales representative? When one, and when the other?
What characteristics do you look for in the first sales hires, and what are the questions that reveal them?
What should the onboarding process include to speed up the learning curve of a new member of the sales team?

[53:15] - Rapid-Fire Questions

If he had to start a company from scratch, what is the main piece of advice Alejandro would give himself?
What has been the most influential book on Alejandro’s path through the world of startups?
Changes Alejandro would like to see in Latin America’s startup ecosystem