Which Sales Strategy Is Best For Your Startup?

Top-down sales starts by getting a decision-maker’s attention, confirming their problem, and showing that the product can solve it. The process then moves through procurement, contract signing, and onboarding. Pete says this approach often suits products tied to executives’ goals, especially when they are expensive to implement or need significant support.

A defined sales playbook can make top-down selling predictable, and executive customers may have strong early retention. But large customers can pull a startup into building one-off features that turn the relationship into consulting. Scaling also requires an expensive enterprise sales team, which Pete says usually makes products below about $10K for mid-market or $100K for enterprise difficult to sell profitably.

Bottoms-up sales begins with a self-serve product that users can adopt without a salesperson, paired with a low-cost way to reach many potential users. Slack is an example: small teams could start using it independently, and adoption could spread through an organization before sales reached out. Once usage grows, a company can sell contracts, additional features, or bulk pricing to the users’ employers.

Viral growth is difficult, and bottoms-up companies still need salespeople; existing product use can make their sales cycles more efficient. Pete advises talking to early customers, removing friction from the product, clarifying the landing page, and watching users complete onboarding. He also recommends measuring funnel drop-off, using A/B tests, and offering individual features free while charging for team collaboration features.

Top-down sales sells expensive products to executives, while bottoms-up sales builds individual usage that can lead to company contracts. Pete says neither approach is inherently better, noting a roughly even split among top YC B2B SaaS companies. The right motion depends on whether the product’s value resonates more with executives or with individual users and small teams.