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Over the years, the one pain point I’ve heard most about from early-stage investors is that founders from a technical background often struggle with sales.

Crane Venture Partners is looking to tackle this with a new book all about founder-led sales.

I spoke to co-author Rav Dhaliwal to find out why it’s needed and how they went about making it a good fit for founders suddenly faced with the task of getting people to buy the thing they’ve built.

– Martin

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How Crane Venture Partners wants to help early-stage founders learn to close sales deals

With a focus on early-stage deep tech and B2B startups, Crane Venture Partners is closely matched to what we do here at PreSeed Now.

Rav Dhaliwal is a go-to-market venture partner for Crane. Having built and run sales teams for Yammer and Zendesk, run customer success at Slack, and spent years at companies like IBM and Salesforce, his main role is to help Crane’s portfolio companies improve their go-to-market approach.

Now alongside colleague Ben Wright, Dhaliwal has written Founder Led Sales Explained. It’s a book aimed at early-stage founders, helping them get started with sales in the right way before they have the ability to hire an experienced team to do the job.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, RD: Rav Dhaliwal

MB: How did the idea for the book come about?

RD: Part of Crane's ongoing philosophy is that it wants to, as a fund, invest in helping to accelerate technical founders being successful.

What we found is increasingly, our founders are coming from engineering, data science, and academia. They're absolutely brilliant minds and the best of what they do in terms of their domain expertise, but have little or no exposure to commercial activities and commercial conversations.

Seed and pre-seed are such formative stages in a startup's life. What you do or don't do at those very early stages has a profound effect on your chances of being successful. Ben and I both started to see a lot of commonality in both the challenges and the pitfalls early-stage founders faced. We found we were coming up with the same version of the same questions, the same problems.

So we wanted to put something together that was very tactical, very actionable, but specifically for technical founders, people who are brilliant at what they do, but they don't necessarily have had that exposure to commercial activities.

As you'll see as you plough through the book, it's organised and written much more like a technical instruction manual.

It's super-practical with lots of examples. What sort of language should you use? What questions should you ask? We wanted to help founders build a very solid foundation, and if they could do that, they can accelerate much faster.

MB: The book has an explicitly practical approach. But life isn't always as black-and-white as a technical-style manual might make it appear. How do you balance the need for clear instructions with the need for flexibility in the real world?

RD: One of the things that we really emphasise in the book is that at this stage, it's all experimentation. We're not coming in with a very prescriptive view that ‘you must do these things in this order’. It's actually very fortunate that many of these early-stage founders are academics and engineers, because they all really know how to run a good experiment.

What we're really saying is that everything is experimentation. ‘Here's a framework to help you run your experiments in the most efficient way possible, so you can get to the answers that you need quicker.’

There are no prescriptive sales processes in the book. We haven't said ‘you need to have seven stages and they need to look like this’. We've broken it down into very high-level buckets.

Who should you meet with? How do you get those meetings? What do you do in those meetings? And how do you convert those meetings to deals?

We've tried to give founders the tools, techniques, the templates, the questions to ask, so they can practically run these experiments and get to their own answers quicker.

MB: There's lots to get through in this book, but do you have a favourite insight or lesson that all founders should know?

RD: While putting the book together, Ben and I would look at the various drafts and realise that so much of this is actually counterintuitive, so no wonder founders struggle with it.

A few of those key things are:

• If you build a platform or solution that's broadly applicable, you initially want to start focusing on a very narrow part of the market, not a very wide one. If you try to sell everything to everyone, you'll end up selling nothing to nobody. So you want to go very, very narrow and find an initial beachhead, where you can just start getting repeated success. You will learn more about how to sell repeatedly, what problems you're solving, and then you can branch out wider to your next market.

• Never leave a meeting without booking the next one. It's a technique called ‘BAMFAM’: Book a Meeting From a Meeting. A lot of our founders will say ‘we got introduced to this person, we had a great call and they were really interested in working with us and what we had to offer. We followed up with an email and a proposal and we never heard back from them’. That is a common thing that we’ve seen. So don't leave that meeting without booking the next touch point and make that next touch point in a few days time or the next day, because otherwise you'll lose momentum.

• Another very common thing is just getting across the idea that all successful companies in software, regardless of whether they're open source, whether they're bottom-up, freemium product led growth; all of them end up doing outbound sales. I've been lucky enough to work for two of the most successful companies doing bottom-up, product-led sales and founders are astounded when I tell them we had 800 people doing enterprise sales in the background, doing outbound, reaching out to people.

MB: Do founders need a book like this in the age of AI, where LLMs can assist with both devising and executing a sales strategy?

RD: One key point that I want any founders reading this to think about is that B2B buyers haven't changed the way that they buy. I think that's an often overlooked insight.

There is a plethora of AI tools and agents that will help you build your company more efficiently, but your buyers are still buying the same way, and so that's why everything we have put in here foundationally still holds true.

In the future, if big businesses decide to have an AI agent that does all their buying and talks to another AI agent, fine. But for now and for the foreseeable future, people are still buying from people.

MB: What is Crane looking for in 2026 and what kinds of investments are you making at the moment?

RD: Crane is in the process of expanding its reach globally. We've just taken over a fund in Asia, and we're now making more investments in Asia, Australia, and India. That will be a focus for this coming year, as well as expanding into the US. We have two very strong team members on each coast.

We will continue being very thematically focused on deep tech, data and infrastructure, developer tools; that's what we do and what we know, hence why most of our founders are engineers, data scientists or academics.

That focus on data has served the firm very well, because we were doing machine learning and AI investments 10 or 15 years ago, before they suddenly became part of the normal tech landscape. So I think they’re the focus areas for this year, along with a continued investment in wrapping go-to-market expertise around the portfolio to help them accelerate.

Part of that is this book. We're also working on the next part of our book series. We'll be doing a book on go-to-market hiring, because we recognise that when founders are ready to hire, that's another area they tend to not have any exposure to, and we have a lot of hard-fought-and-won lessons to help them with that as well.

MB: What mindset should founders be approaching 2026 with?

RD: I think the mindset this year, from my perspective as a go-to-market person, is probably not too different to the mindset that any founder should have regardless of the macro situation in the world: make sure that you are solving a hair-on-fire problem for your customers.

If you're solving a really high-priority, hair-on-fire problem, your ability to sell and raise money will be that much easier. If you’re solving a ‘nice to have’ problem, you’ll struggle. You really need to find a super-high-priority problem that enough people are looking to solve. And I think that's always been the case, irrespective of macro trends and the macro market.

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Crane Ventures will hold a launch event for Founder Led Sales Explained in London on the evening of 10 February. You can sign up to attend here.