Hi, I’m Adam and I’m a software founder obsessed (seriously, obsessed) with understanding and making selling b2b simpler, more personal and more dynamic. Because I suck at it.

In my last startups, I resisted the idea of “being in sales” at all — my entire career leading up to that moment was in technology and software specifically. I have been a developer, a project manager, a CTO and finally a partner in a software development firm but never in pure sales. I never carried a number or quota but I loved being the “software guy with people skills” and it was honestly fun. It was fun because I never had to actually succeed — there was always somebody else for that. But after watching my startup falter (for a number of reasons) I quickly, and begrudgingly embraced the idea that I’d have to “Get my hands dirty” to save it.

I romanticized the idea of a startup like many people in owning their own rustic, cozy coffee shop full of ambience and natural light envisioning each day reading a good book in front of a fire and leave the roasting, marketing, serving, ordering and everything else to somebody else.

The startup honeymoon was over, I put on my big boy pants, jumped in and immediately realized just how outclassed I was. Unlike technology, I had no mentor, no purpose, no north star, no blogs I read, no publications to depend on and not even any contemporaries - just a goal and a desire to succeed.

Spoiler alert : I didn’t. I built that business up to around 500k in ARR but ultimately failed on a perfect storm of churn. We (I) sucked at selling software into organizations and couldn’t weather the storm. The business closed.

How its going

Enter 2020. My only remaining asset from my previous failure was just how many sales concepts and tools we built as a technology company. To us it was simple - every sales problem was a nail and we were a hammer. It was more fun to build a quick ROI calculator that we would use to sell our platform than the actual platform itself. It was more interesting to embed our sales conversations on a landing page connected to Salesforce and create visual sales packages with open source software that would create a branded buyer experience. All of that we did for FUN and never got paid for it.

It’s time to change that.

Closed/Lost is my newsletter cataloging the successes and failures that brought me to ultimately build Backdrop — a technology focused sales startup aiming to group all the sales tools and assets together we built into a dramatically different buyer experience and singular tool so everyone can benefit from our creations .

Follow me as I (attempt to) put on my technology hat and solve real problems for sales teams with technology tools.

What you can expect in the next issue

A Rant on how selling software is fucked from the get-go
More about selling into larger organizations
Challenging the idea of a monolithic proposal

I hope you’ll find this “built in public” experience as interesting as I am

Adam Alexander

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Closed/Lost

Introducing Closed/Lost