General observation on networking
- There were a total of 40 attendees and we received a total of 2 name cards – net conversion rate 5%
- Social expectation during a networking session is that you can approach people to talk
- Start with a clearly one liner if asked about your project
- actively direct the conversation to them and spend more time listening
- make sure to bring name cards
Compare and contrast small businesses and medium sized businesses
- Small businesses
- acquiring new customers
- accessing to investment capital
- not enough time
- Medium sized business
- acquiring new customers
- achieving work life balance
- not enough time
Sales best practices for founders n SMB sales leaders
managing leads process
- Develop a concrete definition of a lead and make sure all employees understand it.
- Install an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool.
- Track the source.
- Distribute your leads quickly.
- Nurture your leads and get your Sales team excited about every prospect.
- Treat your prospects like customers.
- Measure everything you do.
- Hold regular meetings with your sales staff and anyone else involved in the sales process.
build out sales stages n codifying it
standardized sales process see up to 28% increase revenue
- A consistent schedule: You should know when and how often you are going to be
performing your sales activities. - A strong message. You should know what you are going to say and at what point in the
process you are going to say it. - Mixed media plan. Use multiple channels to convey your message and mix it up – emails and phone calls are the most common, but perhaps it’s appropriate to reach your potential customers on a favorite social channel.
focus on boosting sales rep productivity
- Make ongoing sales coaching a priority.
- Advance prospects faster with Value.
- Evaluate & re-evaluate sales processes.
- Embrace Automation and technology.
- Use Analytics to always be improving.
Observations on Sales force
- UVP helps users get data from spreadsheet into systems that allows easy sharing within the sales team
- Sales force comes with Gmail integration
- disrupted CollaSpot’s business model
- Social proofing: Video where users talk about the benefits they get using a tool
- Extending existing business lines
- current base – market segment with higher margins using enterprise sales acquisition strategy
- new business line market segment with lower margins using self service model
- USD25/user/mth package self service tier
- acquisition strategy is not well defined yet
- partnership with companies to value add for their customers
- sales force partners with SVB to throw event to teach SVB clients how to better do sales.
- Helps with SVB retention.
- tap into Silicon Valley Bank’s extensive distribution network
Alessandro Chesser, VP of Sales Carta
Key regrets
- Not investing early enough in sales operations.
- CRM system very important. Cleaning up the mess later is going to be a headache
- Dealing with duplicate accounts are pretty painful
- Don’t over engineer sales process up front.
Enterprise sales versus organic adoption
Organic signup forces u to put your whole pitch online for easy copying. A sales rep can sell the vision to extract higher margins. Deliberate back and forth. Use the demo form to generate leads for sales rep
Getting the enterprise sales engine started
- The more data you have the better your decisions. Create baseline and iterate over it over time.
- Marc Benoff on Closing. When he joined eshare there was no product. His job was to get potential customers excited about the future of their own company. The vision and the pitch is so important. Get their feedbacks.
- Don’t sell to far ahead and can’t deliver. Need to spend time with engineers to know what can be delivered. Always keep in mind a 1 to 2 months implementation cycle. Only sell ahead when is early stage company but don’t over promise. If failed to deliver, will create bad PR
- Always iterate on the vision of the company and the pitch to figure out what resonates with your potential buyers
- Early stage startups can utilized VC to generate inbound leads. The more money raised the more inbound happens with PR that follow each fund raising events
Scaling the sales organization
- Make sure one person can bring in 100K ARR before replicate and scale up sales process
- When is Sales cycle replicable? Use revenue as signal. Driving 100K ARR per month is a good signal. Gut feeling. When deals leads are starting to slip through the cracks
- Charge via ACH instead of credit cards. ACH is more scalable, since the latter tends to expire.
Structuring and managing the sales team
- For smooth transition from inbound sales to outbound sales first create demand from SDR first before hire sales team.
- Not all sales people are comfortable with generating sales leads
- Extremely important to make that SDR hire early. Utilize tools like OutReach.IO
- SDR – handle email marketing and phone calls. Uses pitchbook. Scrape Startup names and email addresses. Thousands of emails a day to generate leads.
- Ensure at least sales development representatives hit at least 60% their quota. If hitting below, it means u have over hired. It’ll create very bad culture like sales leads stealing if not hitting above quota.
- Have sales people prioritize and focus on closing and not be the jack of all trades.
-
Promote Successful SDR to become sales reps. They will be well positioned for success.
Mapping the hiring process for the sales leader.
The mistake is hiring really experienced and expensive people who are not willing to roll out his sleeves. You need someone who is really willing to get his hands dirty to go out to close sales. Industry experience is important, will ensure sales leader motivation level. Since he knows what is broken
Balancing the functions of marketing and sales
- Early in startup marketing and sales goes hand in hand. How to ensure no stepping on each other’s toes?
- Marketing organization should have good process too
- Need to balance load of marketing and sales organization. Make sure invest more heavily in marketing to generate more leads than sales can handle to ensure good culture.
On Pricing
Pricing is important. Need to make sure not too cheap. Perceived value is very important. Need to be more expensive than competition and explain the value clearly to targeted subset of customers.
Learnings from Loominance
UVP to attract customers via word of mouth: They need us when they are drowning in data.
Account based marketing
- Scrap company websites, identify and recommend similar companies as sales leads to clients
Related readings
- SalesForce workshop presentation deck
- SaaS business models
- Spin Selling, Neil Rackham
- Predictable Revenue, Aaron Ross
- Insights from dinner with Brian and Jason
