One of my favorite moments from IMTS this year wasn't a meeting, a demo, or even a signed deal. It was a compliment from a stranger.
"Where did you find them?"
On day two of the conference, a VP of sales from a booth a few rows over walked up to me and said something along the lines of: "Your sales team is so energized and passionate. Where did you find them?"
I couldn't help but laugh. Our "sales team" for IMTS was half our engineering team, our chief of staff, our head of marketing, forward deployment, partnerships, a few passionate customers and advisors, me, and my co-founders. Not an official salesperson in sight.
Our booth was staffed by the people who write our product code, directly serve our clients, handle our security and compliance, shape our narrative, and chase down the bugs nobody else can find at 11pm. On reflection, there couldn't have been a better group to explain who Structify is.
That doesn't make it easy. Standing in an aisle for nine hours asking strangers for two minutes of their time is hard. But our team showed up every morning and went for it. They stopped people in the aisles, asked real questions, listened to the answers, and talked about what we're building with so much genuine excitement that other people noticed.
What sales actually is
I've been thinking a lot about why this worked.
People sometimes treat sales as a separate skill, something you either have or you don't, with scripts, objection-handling frameworks, and a quota attached. Strip it down, though, and sales is really three things: passion, persistence, and enthusiasm, held together by genuine empathy and caring about the person in front of you.
Our team had all three. They weren't pitching a product someone taught them how to pitch. They were talking about something they built with their own hands, for problems they understand deeply. When someone on the floor described a pain point, our team didn't reach for bullet points. They got curious. People can feel the difference between a pitch and a conviction.
The lesson for me
There's a lesson in this for me as a founder, too. The best thing I can do for our customers isn't to perfect a pitch. It's to make sure the people building Structify stay close to the people using it. When that happens, the story tells itself.
Taichi Kato, Nico Marin Gamboa, Hovik Minasyan, Gabe Broome, Laura Garcia, Autumn Moon, Alex Reichenbach, and Alex Goldstein: you made us look like we've been doing this for years. I'm proud of how you showed up, and endlessly grateful to be building alongside you. And a special thank you to our friends Brian Calvey, Kellen Liu, and Alex Frey for the extra support.
What a team.
