Category: Sales and Marketing

Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross gave one of the best presentations today at Dreamforce in their talk titled Tales from the Front Lines: Building a Killer Sales Team. Jason is the author of SaaStr and Aaron is the author of Predictable Revenue — both incredible resources for entrepreneurs that care about sales (which should be most!).

Here are the 10 startup sales tips from their 10 slides:

1. A/B Test is Key. Hire 2-3 AEs & SDRs. Not 1.
   – A/B Test Helps You Learn
   – Any Sales Rep That Performs is Cheap
   – 1 Rep Performing = Repeatable
   – 2+ Reps Performing = Repeating
2. VPs Hire: Not Too Early – And Not Too Late
   – You have to sell it yourself first. And then hire 2+ reps. But once you have two that perform, get your VP!
3. Don’t Hire Early Reps You Wouldn’t Buy From
   – Later, you’ll need many types of reps.
   – In the early days leads are so precious.
   – You’ll never be comfortable handing them off to someone you don’t trust.
4. Make Sure You See the Customer Segmentation Pattern Early Enough
   – The Pattern is Set Early – $500k ARR
   – One it’s repeating, be confident.
   – You’ll have an “organic” type of core customer.
   – So from $1m – $10m ARR, just double down on what seems to be working.
   – Deal sizes will go up but pattern will stay the same.
5. If You Can, Go Upmarket Faster
   – If you can get one enterprise customer, you can get 10
   – If you have one customer in an industry, you can get 10
   – The outliers aren’t anomalies. They are the future.
6. Invest in Getting to a Mini-Brand
   – Brands are highly defensible, a proxy for whom to trust, and huge air cover.
7. Never Allow Revenue Per Lead to Drop
   – PR. Marketing. Upgrade the team. More customer success.
   – Competition doesn’t really matter for revenue per lead.
   – Deal sizes should go up.
   – You should only get better at closing.
8. How My 2nd VP of Sales Double Sales in 90 Days
   – Immediately upgraded the team to proven closers. The first week.
   – Got the most out of the team he inherited and got rid of the ones that weren’t working.
   – Didn’t attempt to do it alone.
   – End pipeline as a metric and any credit for it.
   – Embraced competition.
9. It Gets So Much Better at Initial Scale
   – No matter how bad you are at X or inexperienced at Y you will learn in SaaS.
   – Great will get ever better.
   – You will get even better. Guaranteed.
   – You will become a great SaaS CEO.
10. Not Doubling the Plan
    – Once the team was great, we exceed the plan. Every quarter, every year. Always.
    – I should have challenged us to do even better than 120% of plan.

Want to learn more? Pre-order Jason and Aaron’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue.

Last year I was talking to an entrepreneur that was in town doing a marketing roadshow luncheon at a nearby restaurant. This was his fifth stop on a tour of 10 cities with a goal of 25 prospects per city. After asking him about the roadshow, he said it was one of the most effective marketing programs they do and that it really made sense for his audience.

Here are a few thoughts on marketing roadshows:

• An in-person event is a great way to see a number of prospects at the same time and get more economies of scale compared to one-off meetings
• Events are an excellent reason for sales reps to call prospects, or potential prospects, and invite them to learn about a relevant topic (the best form of marketing is education)
• Existing customers, especially evangelists, are perfect to invite as well since it provides for more face time to build rapport and a chance for them to share their testimony with potential customers
• Many products are sold completely over the internet now, meaning there’s no face-to-face aspect, making in-person events that much more powerful for team members to hear customer challenges directly
• Customer economics like average deal size and lifetime value of the customer are important considerations when determining if a marketing roadshow makes financial sense (e.g. $50/person times 40 people equals $2,000 for the restaurant plus any travel and expenses)

Once product/market fit is in place along with a repeatable customer acquisition model, a marketing roadshow is a worthy initiative for many tech companies.

What else? What are some more thoughts on marketing roadshows?

Rivalry, at the Atlanta Tech Village, is one of the fastest growing companies in the building (disclosure: I’m an investor). After creating a sales rep leaderboard platform to promote internal competition for teams, they found a bigger opportunity with sales coaching and accountability software. The big idea: the one-on-one once a week between a sales manager and sales rep often isn’t process driven and lacks appropriate follow-up. With sales coaching software, sales reps shorten their sales cycle, increase the average deal size, and sell more.

Here’s how it works:

• Every sales manager and sales rep has a user in the system (can be single sign-on via the CRM)
• A specific template of weekly questions for each role is created (or taken from standard best practices)
• Metrics are automatically pulled from the CRM (important to see where the rep stands during coaching sessions)
• Sales managers and sales reps use the software each week during their one-on-one to answer questions and create follow-up tasks right within the system
• Reports show progress and insights (e.g. which sales reps are making the most progress and which managers are most effective at coaching)

Rivalry ensures one-on-ones happen, are productive, and are documented. Check out Rivalry as a great way to improve sales coaching and accountability.

What else? What are some more thoughts on Rivalry and sales coaching software?

Several months ago I was talking to a successful, serial entrepreneur. He had sold several companies and hadn’t had to work for many years. Even still, he loved creating companies and so was at it again with his next startup. After talking for a while, the topic of travel and sales meetings came up. Naturally, he loved chasing big deals and was on the road 50% of the time. His mantra: get on a plane. There’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction.

Here are a few thoughts on the importance of getting on a plane:

• People buy from other people they like (this is one of the reasons the best product doesn’t always win)
• Collaboration tools like Google Hangouts and Skype Video are good, but in person is significantly better
• Rapport and strong relationships help when challenges inevitably arise (e.g. bugs, downtime, late delivery, etc.)
• Body language and subtle feedback are critical when negotiating important deals

While many entrepreneurs fantasize about a world of self-service products with no business development deals or humans selling, the reality is that most startups require a heavy human component. When there’s a heavy human component, there’s no substitute for getting on a plane and meeting in person.

What else? What are some other thoughts on the importance of getting on a plane and meeting face-to-face?

Back in the early days of Hannon Hill, as part of my learning how to sell, we hired several inside sales reps. The reps did a great job setting demos by following a process similar to Predictable Revenue (it was more cold calling heavy and many years before the book came out). Once a demo was scheduled, I was brought in to deliver the demo and act as a joint product manager and sales engineer. In fact, I demoed our content management system to over 1,000 prospects, sometimes one-on-one and sometimes to an audience of 20 or 30 people.

Entrepreneurs would do well to personally demo their product to the first 1,000 prospects. Here are a few reasons why:

• Talking to prospects in-person or over the phone generates unfiltered feedback, perfect for enhancing the product
• Excitement and passion shine through the voice, and no one cares more about the product than the entrepreneur
• Repeatedly demoing the product results in constant refinement of the script and flow, making it better for everyone else on the team doing demos
• Unreleased features can be shown to build awareness and assess value, while doing so in a controlled environment

Personally demoing the product to the first 1,000 people created the shortest feedback loop possible and helped refine the product as fast as we could. I’m confident that doing those demos, over and over again, made a huge difference in the success of the business.

What else? What are some other thoughts on the idea that entrepreneurs should demo their product to the first 1,000 prospects?

Late in the summer of 2001 I was seriously frustrated. After raising money from a professor, hiring several friends as programming interns, and taking a leave of absence from college, we had built a good product, but only had two customers. Eagerly, I reached out to a mentor of mine I met earlier that year when he was on sabbatical from Microsoft.

As he was back in Seattle, we scheduled a time to talk. Even today, I clearly remember that I was standing on a campus tennis court using my cell phone (a flip phone!) for the conversation. After sharing our progress, and my frustrations, he quickly diagnosed my problem: I needed to learn how to sell. Everything I did was focused on building the product, and not on acquiring customers. It was time for a change.

Most entrepreneurs are in love with their product. Unfortunately, most products don’t sell on their own. One of the most difficult, and important, challenges for product entrepreneurs is to learn how to sell. When an entrepreneur reaches out for help, it’s almost always because they haven’t figured out to grow sales.

What else? What are some more thoughts on entrepreneurs needing to learn how to sell?

Terminus, a new account-based marketing startup, launched last year at the Atlanta Tech Village (disclosure: I’m an investor). With so much marketing focus on individual lead generation and nurturing (e.g. the great functionality that Pardot provides), a big gap emerged around marketing and advertising to all the potential stakeholders at a company. Enter account-based marketing.

Here’s how it works:

• Existing leads and contacts from the CRM or marketing automation system are imported in based on rules (e.g. take all the leads/contacts with an active opportunity in the pipeline)
• Based on job titles, additional contacts are retrieved from the targeted companies through different data sources (e.g. NetProspex and others)
• Similar to retargeting, ads based on rules are shown on mainstream sites to everyone identified in the account (e.g. show specific ads based on where they are in the sales cycle)
• Ad click throughs and conversions are tracked to show return on investment

Companies with a complex sales process, especially for mid-to-high dollar ticket items, are great candidates to use Terminus as they work leads through the sales funnel. If you know anyone interested in increasing their close rate and shortening their sales cycle, have them take a look at Terminus.

What else? What are some other thoughts on Terminus and account-based marketing?

With so many startups reaching out and asking for help as they implement an inside sales team based on SalesLoft and the Predictable Revenue book, it’s a good time to highlight a few posts and notes for entrepreneurs. Building a successful inside sales team isn’t easy, but there are a number of proven strategies and tactics.

Here are a few sales resources for startups:

• Notes on Predictable Revenue
• Building a Sales Playbook
• The First 30 Days for a New Sales Rep
• 4 Best Sales Books for Entrepreneurs
• Notes from Jack Daly Sales Training
• Always Hiring Sales Reps
• Modeling Sales Rep Ramp
• Startups Should Resist the VP of Sales Hiring Temptation
• When to Start Scaling the Sales Team

To start, most entrepreneurs should hire a sales assistant to get going and then expand from there. Sales and sales teams are the lifeblood of many startups, yet take time to understand and scale.

What else? What are some other sales resources for startups?

When people ask about fast-growing technology opportunities, I love pointing out the marketing industry and how much growth it’s experiencing. First, though, it starts with a simple quote from John Wanamaker: Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know what half. There’s a huge shift in marketing and advertising dollars from offline to online, and that, combined with newer technologies like the smart phone, present enormous new opportunities for growth.

As a simple, tactical example, let’s look at revenue growth from a few publicly-traded marketing technology companies:

• Constant Contact (NASDAQ:CTCT)
  2014 – $332 million
  2013 – $285 million
  2012 – $252 million
• HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS)
  2014 – $116 million
  2013 – $78 million
  2012 – $52 million
• Marketo (NASDAQ:MKTO)
  2014 – $150 million
  2013 – $96 million
  2012 – $58 million

Just these three companies alone have added $236 million in new marketing technology revenue in the last three years. With huge growth rates, and scale, Wall Street is bullish as well about marketing technology.

Famously, Gartner proclaimed that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Think about that for a minute: more money will be spent by marketing on technology than general IT will spend on technology. The growing budgets and focus on marketing technology will open up many new opportunities for entrepreneurs.

On the industry side, look for events like the MarTech conference to grow at a pace even faster than the budgets as people seek to gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities. Just like technology waves in the past, marketing is a huge one that’s gaining momentum.

What else? What are some more thoughts on marketing technology as a massive growth opportunity?