Gary Whitehill: You are not going to be next Zuckerberg and that is OK

This month on StartLabs Meetup we had a special guest Gary Whitehill, entrepreneur and mentor from San Francisco, who is founder of companies BURST, Entrepreneur week and also a member of Dell’s board of directors. Gary’s specialities are entrepreneurship, entrepreneur communities, venture capital and business development.

He talked about building a sales team from a whole different perspective which have seemed to be very inspiring for local community.

Around 100 entrepreneurs has talked with Gary about building teams and unique approach to startup business. Entrepreneurs from Serbia rated Gary’s presentation very positive, inspiring and encouraging. Feedback was great, so we will try to continue to support and inspire community in this way.

We spent two hours talking about sales without presentation about money streams and revenues.

“It’s about WHY you’re building your product and HOW it changes your social context?”, Gary explained.

He talked about how to build a sustainable company, not just a sales team.

“Leaders who build great sales teams are better in two things than anyone else: improving humanity around a core structure-building everything around vision and understanding how to leverage unused resources. You are not going to be next Zuckerberg and that is OK”, says Gary.

He also answered to the most common questions among entrepreneurs: What’s the secret about building sales team, what’s the secret of success, fundraising?

“There are no secrets! There are principal ways to build companies, based on universal truth and there are ways to fail.”

Gary’s definition of successful entrepreneur is simple – you have to take your plan for next three years and execute in the next six month.

Gary also advised local startups that sale is important and it’s not just about fundraising.

“Don’t raise money just because everybody does. 432 million entrepreneurs try to start a company every year. Only 305 million of them make first step, only 100 million of them actually launch, one in a thousand become sustainable. Only one in a thousand of those actually raise money.

Your company should be based on certain value and what you should sell is storytelling.”

Building a successful sales team is about deep simplicity – if you communicate with your customers on personal level and they like it – they will forward to 13 people, if they don’t – they will forward to 13 people.

It’s up to you to figure out how you communicate.

After StartLabs Meetup, Gary has attended Belgrade Venture Forum, where he talked about improving local community and entrepreneurship.

We hope that this advices will help you in process of building solid and reliable sales teams. Thank you all for visiting our events, we had a really good time.

See you again on December 18th!