The advantage of Top Down selling is that it follows a proven playbook, making it easier to find customers who will pay for solutions if you understand their problems.

Top Down sales work well for products that help executives achieve strategic goals, but they can be expensive to implement and require significant support.

Startups that sell using a Top Down approach often see better early retention metrics compared to those using Bottom Up sales.

Scaling a Top Down sales motion typically requires building an expensive Enterprise sales team, which sets a high floor price for your product, often around $10K for mid-market and $100K for Enterprise.

It's important to avoid creating a product that requires excessive consulting time from the founder, as this indicates the product isn't truly scalable. If you're solving a small, rare problem, even a billion people in the addressable market may not be inclined to pay real money for it.

Bottom Up sales start with the user, focusing on building a self-serve product that can be adopted without direct interaction with the company. This approach works well for startups that solve pain points for individuals or small teams, as products need to be easy to adopt and can spread virally within an organization.

Top Down sales begin with a decision maker high in an organization, focusing on identifying leads and validating their problems before navigating bureaucratic processes to secure contracts.

Startups typically use a top-down sales motion to sell expensive products to executives at large companies and a Bottoms Up motion to acquire individual users, which can lead to sales to those executives.

To build a Top Down sales motion, define your target customer and identify the individuals within those companies who have the problems your product solves.