7 Mistakes When Building Your Sales Revenue

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Contents

1) Having no sales strategy! 3

2) No clearly defined roles 4

3) Not building a sales and marketing engine 5

4) Inconsistent marketing campaigns 6

5) Holding onto old processes that are not scalable 7

6) Underestimating the value of partnerships 8

7) Having the wrong people in place 9

Conclusion 10

James Ker-ReidDirector

Growing London tech businesses each day

www.salesforstartups.co.uk

/jameskerreid

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1) Having no sales strategy!

It completely amazes me how some startups don’t have a sales strategy. As many of you know, Sales and revenue is the lifeblood of any business. Without both quantity and quality of revenue, you cannot grow a business. When you attend board meetings, one of the first items on the agenda is Sales revenue, as it completely determines whether a business is successful or not.

What do you mean by Sales strategy?

For me, a sales strategy is the compass that defines all sales activities, marketing efforts, and partnerships. A clear sales strategy will have a massive impact on operations and recruitment at your startup.

A sales strategy is often multi-faceted, with the mere word, Sales often people start to come out in a cold sweat. This perceived complexity puts a lot of companies off really trying to boil down what their strategy is at their company.

One of the most common mistakes that Founders and CEOs make is that they forget, or at least don’t explain, why they have created a particular Sales strategy for the company. It is a lot easier for everyone when you know who you want to engage, how you want to engage and why you are engaging them when wanting to scale a company quickly.

By creating and crafting this Sales strategy to suit the needs and aims of the company, you will create focus and deliberate action from your team. It also provides a sense of accountability to all the members of the company, as when a particular prospect or activity does not match up against this Sales strategy then you have every right to challenge your peers and senior management at your company.

We all want Sales and revenue but often we don’t take the time to create and explain a Sales strategy to our team as company founders and senior managers.

Ultimately how do you expect people to go above and beyond when they don’t know who they should be speaking to or nurturing in their daily roles?

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2) No clearly defined roles

A massive challenge for startups is making the most of limited resources and making the biggest impact on the market and their mission. Often this means that one member of staff is doing several different roles within the company.

There is no way out of this dilemma in the short-term. Although, in order for staff to be effective in their role and for their company this is a completely flawed model.

I believe that by asking the following four questions, you will gain clarity on how to solve this dilemma:

+ What are the extremely valuable activities that you perform in your role?

+ What are you best at?

+ What do you really enjoy?

+ What do you hate and really can’t understand why you’re still doing it?

Once you have this clarity from answering the above questions, you can then move forward with reviewing options to delegate, eliminate or automate some of the low-value tasks that you hate and then you can schedule in and protect time in your calendar for the extremely valuable activities that you perform in your role.

The accepted wisdom at startups is that we have to do multiple roles is true on one level; although when we dive a little bit deeper this custom is not beneficial for us when wanting to grow our company.

Take control and decide what activities are really going to help your team grow your business. You may have neglected this exercise or methodology to date but it is one of the core reasons why startups don’t grow at the rate that they anticipated when they pitched to investors at the start of the year.

The net effect of defining the key actions for each of your staff will mean that the company Founders will really understand the strengths of their team and understand where value is provided to their end customer or alternatively to the benefit of internal operations at the company.

Ultimately, as one of my early mentors said to me, do you want to be a leader or a follower?

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3) Not building a sales and marketing engine

How efficient is your Sales engine?

How easily and quickly can you convert your prospects into customers?

How well known are you? When people think of your solution or industry, is your company name the first one they think of?

First of all, please don’t think for one second that Sales and Marketing are solo functions. The amount of times that we separate these fields and create space between these departments or skillsets still completely amazes me.

Why would you want Sales and Marketing to be working independently? What value does that bring?

Sales and Marketing are completely dependent on each other, there are not isolated functions but synonymous. There are the same thing. You cannot perform Marketing without Sales and you certainly can’t sell without Marketing.

By not having an engine and a combined duo of Sales and Marketing, you won’t reach your goals.

How do I create a Sales and Marketing engine?

Firstly, you need to have a clear understanding of who your customer is and what problems they experience and how you solve them.

Secondly, get both departments, teams or even individuals with these skillsets to collaborate and understand each person’s skills and roles within the Sales cycle.

Thirdly, draft a nurture and engagement plan for your audience and decide which mediums you will use, how you will measure your success and agree on the level of output that both teams will commit to in order to achieve your objectives. This will provide two-way level of accountability.

Fourthly, now you have to create the content, make the calls, send the social media and more importantly TAKE MASSIVE ACTION.

Then pause, reflect and discuss every 2 weeks the successes and improvements that can be made to make your outreach campaigns more effective.

And for real progress, set a minimum expectation of what you believe such a campaign can bring you and keep reminding yourself when you struggle and want to quit that there is certainly light at the end of the tunnel. This will be HARD work.

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4) Inconsistent Marketing Campaigns

Wait! Weren’t you just talking about this in the previous section? Yes, I was. Why am I bringing it up now?

Well, you would be amazed by the amount of marketing campaigns that are unrefined, unfinished or are not carried through until the end.

Now, there is a big difference between the set and leave it type of campaign and finishing a proper marketing campaign. The method and tactics of a marketing campaign can even change week to week.

That’s why most companies see marketing as a cost rather than an investment. Marketing will always be a cost if we don’t react to the feedback that the market and statistics is giving us on an hourly and daily basis in the present day.

We have no excuses not to finish a marketing campaign in the present day with a multitude of tools and methods to reach your target audience and many low cost or free tools to use every day.

Once you really take responsibility for your marketing, that’s when you see progress. This little gem applies to most areas of life. Have you ever found that when you don’t take full responsibility for something that things start to go wrong or don’t work out for you?

Additionally, the most interesting part of Marketing for any user or company leader is how quickly we can understand the effect and efficiency of our actions. With real-time analytics, platforms and technology that constantly support a process of creation, curation and analysis, you always have the opportunity to improve. This even includes creating better content and having a greater reach and impact on your target audience.

My advice to startups is always to complete their marketing campaign and recognise that the tactics they first envisioned using might be very different to the tactics that they end up using at the end of their campaign.

How many marketing campaigns can you complete? What would be the effect of really finishing that campaign?

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5) Holding onto old processes that are not scalable

For a startup to become a scale-up, they have to embrace a new way of thinking.

As Einstein said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

If startups are really to scale at an exponential rate they have to review their process and systems and constantly review where they can make improvements. Ultimately, the business is the system and the product that you market to your customers. Therefore if you have an inefficient and ineffective system, you pass that lack of value onto your customers.

To break this down even further, your customer is buying the perceived value of your product or service to bring about a benefit or solve a problem that they have. Your perceived value is governed by the experience that the customer has during their buying experience with you. The experience you give your customers is a result of the values and systems/processes that are inherent within your business.

A large part of the evolution of a startup is moving away from small business thinking and installing big business thinking.

For example, one of the problems that occurs frequently during our work is the inconsistency and inefficiency of invoicing and protecting cashflow. When a startup first wins its first few customers, it is often hugely grateful for that custom and will agree to payment terms that are not favourable. Furthermore, when it comes to the time of invoicing, the supplier is often chasing the client for unpaid client invoices rather at the outset laying out the terms of the agreement and stipulating what happens when the client doesn’t pay their invoice.

This is incredibly harmful for cashflow for a small business that normally doesn’t have large reserves of cash in the bank.

I suggest therefore that to move out of small business thinking, you ask and answer the following questions:

What business process can we change?

What’s this practice costing our business?

And what systems and procedures will you put in place to avoid this going forward?

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6) Underestimating the value of partnerships

One of the quickest way of growing a startup to a scale up is to leverage partnerships to grow.

The only challenge is that partnerships are so complex, time-intensive and unknown for many startups.

If you could find a way in which is took you no money to double your business, would you be interested in knowing how?

Seems like an obvious question to answer.

Although, why do so many startups spend so little time nurturing, collaborating and building out partnerships?

Every startup is immensely focused on revenue and cashflow and hence often takes an insider view when wanting to grow their business. Growing a partnership is a value exchange, where you look to provide your partner with immense value to sell, distribute or promote the value of your product or service. Often at the same time you have agreed to replicate this for their own services or to service their existing client bank too.

The science of partnerships is that you have to continually improve, educate and monitor the partnership to gain the most value from such a relationship. This is counter-intuitive to many startups as they are not really seen as a normal client but simply a distributor, which means they view it as a win-lose partnership. When going into negotiating and brokering partnerships, one has to think of it as a win-win scenario.

Some of the startups that we’ve worked with have created £500,000 from one single partner in their first year. This is an incredible feat for startups that had total annual revenues that were less than this figure.

Sometimes, it comes down to asking yourself two brutal questions:

Why do we spend so much time on prospects that are 10x less valuable?

What would be the value of enlisting and training a couple of partners?

In our niche of IT and B2B technology, partnerships offer an even greater benefit than pure commercial gain but one of scale, distribution and not having to spend time and money on development requests.

Would you develop a new product for an opportunity worth £500,000 or £5,000?

I know which one I would choose…

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7) Having the wrong people in place

This is a killer blow to any business. In the world of startups, this is a recipe for disaster.

When you need people to go above and beyond in terms of time and effort, you have to make sure that you have the right people in place.

We spoke earlier about having clearly defined roles but ultimately it doesn’t matter how clearly you define the roles and high value activities if you have the wrong people in place.

Any startup who really wants to expand their business and revenue needs a sound and complimentary team in place to grow. I’ve seen so many startups hold onto individuals that are not pulling their weight or they don’t have the drive to perform at the level necessary.

You need superstars! You need people who challenge you, challenge your company, get results and really want the company to grow and succeed.

From interviewing 1000s of people, you can tell a successful person even before they’ve become successful by their attitude. Attracting, persuading and retaining real talent will be the difference between success and failure.

Don’t be indoctrinated by the widely accepted belief that you pay people and so they should just do the job. Have you always done the job or the task you needed to do?

This is where defining high value activities, values and standards within a company is so important, as you can quickly ruin a talented and successful person. Have you ever known someone that has been successful in one company or team and not successful in another?

Provide an environment for your team that is open, collaborative and value-driven and you will keep and get the best people needed for your company to expand.

Never underestimate people and their impact. If you don’t want to leverage the power of your team and people then in honesty, maybe being a company owner or Founder of a startup is not for you. Even if you’re not an extrovert or naturally outgoing, listening and sharing advice with your team from your own experience will get you further than most founders.

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Conclusion

We very much hope you enjoyed reading this guide and if you’re interested, we would urge you to sign up to our strategy of the month for further insights.

The 7 mistakes listed above are not the only errors that startups make when trying to build revenue but some of the most common that we see when tackling any given task.

At Sales For Startups, we help startups define their commercial strategy, help them implement it and then ensure that they take action and deliver results immediately.

When working with Sales leaders, company Founders and Investors/Accelerators, our clients are able to achieve their annual revenue target in a space of 6 months when working with Sales For Startups.

If you would like to find out more please fill out the contact form on the website or email info@salesforstartups.co.uk

We would love to hear your comments on this eBook and if we believed we have missed anything then we are always open to constructive feedback and making things better for our clients and loyal followers.

Happy Selling!

James Ker-Reid

Founder, Sales for Startups

www.salesforstartups.co.uk