That time when God was my lead salesperson

In the fall of 2015, my startup company Wyzerr had just received a term sheet for a $1,500,000 investment. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine raising that much money. In fact, in 2015 there were very few women of color that raised over a $1M in funding so the thought didn’t even cross my mind. I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high because getting a term sheet doesn’t mean the deal is done. While our lead investors were excited about our company, they had some reservations about whether or not we had a valid business. Mainly, they were concerned about us being able to get customers because our founding team had zero software sales experience. Before the investors would give us the money, they wanted to see some proof that we could secure a customer. It became very apparent that the bigger the customer, the better it would be for our due diligence process. If we could secure an enterprise client, it would be a no brainer for them to close the investment deal.

Up until this point, I had very limited experience in selling anything. I quit girl scouts because I didn’t want to sell cookies. When my school would have annual fundraisers, I asked my parents to buy the minimum amount of products to allow me to meet the mandatory individual student contributions. The thought of interfacing with potential customers and selling them things was incredibly frightening to me. I had never held any type of retail job, and didn’t know where to even begin. Fortunately, being in the Brandery accelerator allowed me to have access to some incredible mentors. In a meeting with one of my mentors, I began to lament about how I had no experience in selling and didn’t think I could do it. My mentor interrupted me right away and said “what do you mean you don’t know how to sell? You just sold these investors on why they should invest in your company. That’s selling. There’s no difference in selling to customers as there is in selling to investors except in the terms of the agreement and payment. The pitch is the same, Natasia. You are asking customers to invest their money to use your software.” This gave me a much needed confidence boost that I would be able to do a sales pitch. Now, I just needed some sales leads.

While we were working through our sales leads to try to secure customer meetings, something on the inside of me began to brew about the type of software application we needed to build. At the time, it would have been easier, cheaper, and faster to just build a simple database and software tool to get by. After all, we had no customers yet. However, for some reason I had this strong feeling that our first paying customer would be a big company so we would need to be able to support the kind of data they would be collecting. We put in the infrastructure to support thousands of survey responses even though at the time we weren’t collecting any data.

While we were wrapping up development of this first version of our software tool, someone on Facebook reached out to my cofounder BK Simmons requesting information about Wyzerr and said he may have a customer for us. He asked for a lot of information and then finally a meeting. Up until the meeting, we had no idea who the customer was. BK took the meeting and excitedly called me afterwards saying that the mystery customer was Walmart! They wanted to use Wyzerr immediately for a study on Walmart Pay. We didn’t actually have a fully functioning product at this time but we were able to make it work because we had built the infrastructure to support thousands of concurrent survey responses. I couldn’t believe our good fortune that our very first customer was the biggest retailer in the world. Walmart used our surveys in a small study across 300 stores and collected over 40,000 completed survey responses in a short time frame. Their 5-figure contract and immediate payment single handedly helped us close our Seed round. Investors were confident that if we could close a 5-figure deal with Walmart using a terribly functioning prototype, we could close a lot more customers with a well-funded and built-out software. And they were right. Having Walmart as our first customer was the ultimate sales pitch. If Wyzerr was good enough for Walmart, it was good enough for any other company in the world. Over the next 18 months, Wyzerr grew to 2,400+ customers in 42 countries, with a rolodex of customers that were some of the world’s largest companies. They were calling and emailing me on their own so I never really had to do a cold call or sales pitch. Clients were giving us referrals without us asking them to. By the time I met with these contacts, they were already sold on Wyzerr and just needed to determine the best service.

The Calling

I know that God didn’t give us Walmart as our first customer because he wanted us to have a big customer. He gave us Walmart to help me do something I wasn’t really good at in that season: sell tech software. God must have had his angels doing sales calls for me because we were getting enterprise customers left and right, and we never really did anything to bring them in. I remember being in St. Louis one day for an investor meeting and saw a call from Germany come in on my cell. I didn’t know anyone in Germany so I didn’t pick up. When I listened to the voicemail, it was the Head of Innovation for Volkswagen. Calls like this was happening more and more frequently, and there seemed to be no end. It was very clear that this wasn’t my doing. There was some kind of divine intervention and anointing on my company. God was blessing me in such a profound way and I was so undeserving. I felt so overwhelmed with gratitude for His goodness and love. I decided to give my life completely to following Him, and get baptized. It was the best decision of my life and God has continued to bless me in even more profound ways since then.

Today, I can confidently say that I am one of the best tech salespeople in the game. I’ve closed major deals in only one phone call, after only 14 mins on the line selling a completely new and innovative product nobody has ever seen or heard of. My team and friends have started calling me nicknames like “sniper” and “killa” because of my efficiency at closing business deals of any kind. I have come a long way from the woman that used to have panic attacks at the mere thought of having a sales meeting. I overcame my fears of selling when I internalized and started truly believing that my life is in God’s hands. Everything that I do is part of God’s plan for me that He set long before I was born. The Yes, the No’s, and the Maybe’s are all part of His vision for my life. Before every sales call I have, I say the following prayer “Lord, let your will be done. If it’s not part of your plan for me, take away my words. Take away the thoughts. Take away the deal. Thank you for leading this call. I trust you. Amen.” I have so much peace in every sales call because I know every deal is in God’s hands, not mine.