Startup Business Series: Scaling Your B2B Sales

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Richard Howard, Startup Business Development_RHoward

20th September 2017

Scaling your B2B Sales

• Know your customer

• Your First Sales

• Hiring your first Salespeople (Culture vs Relationship)

• Compensation

• Building & Training Teams

• Using your Salesforce to lead Product Development

• Churn

Know your customer

• Who is your customer – their vertical, their size etc. Where will they spend money?

• Who is your customer within the customer – CEO, CIO, CTO or distributed teams (Slack)

• What are their hopes, dreams, fears? Greed or fear?

Your First Sales

• Should be founder-led

• Need to know what it’s like to sell your product/vision

• Founder should have direct interaction with customers

• Cold contacting – InMail vs Cold email vs Cold Call

* From Christoph Janz’s blog, The Angel VC

Hiring your first Salespeople

• Knowing when you need to hire

• Interpreting past success (Salesperson vs company). Can they do early stage?

• Culture vs Relationships

Creating a compensation plan

• Early stage: Focus on activity based management –calls, meetings, demo’s, prototypes.

• Create the plan that works for your company and size

• Base/Bonus/Accelerator

• Reward the winners, penalize the losers

vs

Building & Training Teams• Demand Generation – inbound vs outbound

• Inside Sales, Outside sales or both

• SME, Corporate, Enterprise

• Channels: AWS Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Resellers

• Invest in training and CRM systems

WORKING FROM THE CUSTOMER

Backwardsbackwards

Most companies write the software, they get it all working, and then they throw it over the wall to the marketing department, saying ‘here is what we built, go write the press release.’ That process is the one that’s actually backwards.”

Jeffrey P. BezosFounder and Chief Executive OfficerAmazon.com, Inc.

write the press release

write the FAQ

define the user interaction and write the manual

Churn

• Every company experiences churn

• Measure churn. Drive it down

• Aim for negative MRR churn

• Save ‘At risk’ customers – “Nearly churned”

Thank You