It’s your turn. Now.

A little Book of the best kept secrets of selling Software services TO STARTups

This book isn’t rocket science!

But it’s an honest sharing of our experiences of selling software services to startups for last 6 years. Short,

simple and to the point guide for you to achieve sales greatness without stress.

Godspeed!

Contents

Getting started, 04

Your first steps, 14

Prospect to opportunity, 22

Art of the connect call, 28

FAQ & Epilogue, 35

Our manifesto, 03

Our manifesto : To all the startups

We have a deep respect for startups, and the investors who back them.

They are dreamers, who have a spark that can make a difference to humanity;

They are doers, who get out there and don’t just sit and watch the world go by;

They are risk-takers, who love winning more than they fear losing.

They inspire us, and we want to put our talents to work in taking their dreams to

reality;

We want to be the wind beneath their wings.

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Part 1

Getting started

Many years ago two salesmen were sent to Africa by a British shoe manufacturer.

The goal of their trip was to investigate this new market, and to report their findings back to headquarters on the potential of the market.

The first salesman came back with a rather dismal report, “There’s no potential at all here, because

nobody wears shoes.”

The second salesman came back with a rather different reply, “There’s massive potential in Africa, because

nobody wears shoes.”

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Hello & WelcomeCongratulations for starting with us.

Before we begin, there are a few things that we’d like to share.

**First**, Seat belts on, please. If you are working with startups for the first time, it might be an overwhelming and incredibly exciting experience at the same time. Startups by nature are chaotic, disruptive and full of uncertainty. Hopefully, you’ll embrace all the impending challenges (or opportunities) with your amazing (selling) skills.

**Second**, Most of the things mentioned in this booklet are tested selling strategies. You might already know them, or you might be applying them in your everyday job. Still, we thought if we could bring together the most essential selling wisdom relevant to startups, it will ease out a lot of things for you.

**Third**, This isn’t a book you glance through and set aside. It’s meant for action. The intent of this book is for you to:

1) Read it in an hour. 2) Put the method into action.

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3) And keep coming back while in action. You’d know when to come back for what. What we’ve done is divided it into short sections, so you can find the little kernel of insight you need, when you need it. (We hope!)

Our goal is to give you enough insight and confidence that

you’ll get off the bench and make it happen.

With that, we are incredibly glad you are here. Thanks for joining in.

Who are we and what do we do ?Simply put, we are startup friends. We work like startups, we work for startups and we just love the energy that this combination brings to the table.

We build cool websites. And mobile apps. Or rather anything digital. Only for tech startups. It’s what we do; and we’re turbo good at it.

But that’s not it. There’s more than “just-tech”.

Let’s take it step by step.7

Suppose you have a start up idea. You want to deliver freshly baked cookies at people’s houses within 3 hours.

Wherever they are, they find you through an app, order and wait for your delicious cookies to come home. You call it : Frookies.

So when you approach DreamToIPO with your cookie idea, we first sit with you to really dissect the problem you’re trying to solve. We ask difficult questions about the problem to gain better clarity around the idea. We spend time researching about your market, your target audience and possible competition. And broadly settle on overall product vision, feature set and roadmap.

To begin with you’d want to build, the simplest possible thing (MVP): An app that lets you register, choose from 4 varieties of cookies and do a cash on delivery order. That’s it. This would get the idea validated and get the show going with potential investors.

Our offering here: High speed development at low cost. We know we need to release fast and iterate; and we don’t want to over engineer.

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So when a bootstrap startup, or the one in angel funding mode comes to us, they receive what they’re looking for the most at that time.

Post MVP, during your seed and angel rounds of funding, you are looking out to add more features, fine tune your app performance, add a payment gateway integration and other tech stuff.

Our offering here: Rock solid code, full fledged project management, and firm adherence to schedule.

And later, in your Series-A,B,C rounds you need to scale up your technology to support your ever expanding user base, or you need to migrate to new technology, so be it.

We’ll be there, when you need us, how you need us. From idea to clarity to reality.

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**True Story**: Giri Addanki, Founder & CEO of Mindful Meal

After the birth of Giri’s first child, he noticed that his family had started eating poorly. The birth of a second child worsened it. He spoke to a few other families and realised that he wasn’t alone. Consistently eating healthy wasn’t only time consuming but also complicated. That’s when MindfulMeal was born.

Giri came up to us with this idea of building an app that matches health needs with taste preferences and generates balanced meal plans. He was bootstrapping and had nothing else but the passion to solve the problem. We knew it wasn’t just about “building technology”. But much more.

We almost became co-founders with Giri! We plunged heavily into studying the problem, competition, market, target audience and stuff with Giri. And together settled on the product vision, feature-set and roadmap. We built initial prototypes of the product to help Giri get to the next round of funding. With more funding coming, we built the MVP, the effectiveness of which led to venture capitalist funding for the future phases.

The product received good traction and we focused on making the technology more robust and scalable. And as we write this, it makes us feel really proud to see Mindful Meal entering Series A funding.

Giri is today happier, wealthier and of course, healthier.

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What we’re really good at?

Who’s our ideal customer?

1. Build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product): This is something the startup needs to get the show going with potential investors.

2. Build full-blown applications, web or mobile: The startups that got funded go this path. It is part of our job to work within the funding available to the start-ups and collaboratively work towards the best feature set that can be practically implemented.

3. Dedicated tech team: Some startups want to manage their own technology and just need extra skilled hands. Onsite or Offshore.

4. Technology migration: We have several case studies where startups have gone with one technology and found it unsuitable as they scaled. We migrate it to technologies, which we know will scale with their business.

Over the past 7 years we’ve worked with more than 100 entrepreneurs, angels, accelerators and VCs. And broadly one of the following has been our offerings :

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How does our tech-stack look like?

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It looks like this at the moment.

Our geeks savour all of these : Ruby on Rails, jQuery, HTML&CSS, MySql, Postgres, Mongo DB, Rspec, Bootstrap, Git, Third Party Integrations to Ruby on Rails App, Redis, Angular

Just in case you’re the logo-types, this is what it looks like.

But we continuously keep upgrading our skills. So when in doubt, check with India about our latest tech-stack.

And wait, who’s our ideal customer?

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Any tech startup. At any funding level. At any stage of development. Looking for the tech stack that we have expertise on. Ready to offshore. Or work in parallel teams.

The rest of the book is to help us reach out to them in an effective manner.

Let’s go.

Your first steps

Part 2

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it

seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which

they think.

- David Ogilvy

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Your first stepsWe’re here to work with neat tech startups building good products. When we get to do that, all goes well.

So your primary job would be to help us meet those kind of people often.

A lead is any startup looking out for technology help, typically for building a mobile or a web app.

So staying up to speed with what’s happening in the startup universe is the key for you to grow your leads list.

We found the following resources, coupled with extensive googling, extremely useful in growing the leads list.

PitchBook TechCrunch YourStory

CraigsList angel.co ProductHunt

LinkedIn 500Startups Startup Accelearators

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It’s a great idea to attend meet ups, startup weekends, conferences and any such startup congregations!

You could also look at job portals. Any company looking for recruits in technologies where we have expertise can be a lead.

How many leads?Many you’d say. But our empirical evidences suggest, capping active leads at 25 is a good idea, for your maximum effectiveness.

Active leads are leads that haven’t yet failed the FIT tests (explained next).

If the number of leads is less than 10, then the pipeline is not healthy at active lead level. Also, we recommend a ratio of leads by funding stages as (Out of 25) :

Angel/Bootstrapped 12-15

Series A/B 8-10

Series C/D 5-7

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Keep a lead in Active mode for a week tops. Within that week, get it moved into Prospect, or move it into Inactive mode for later.

Pursuing a lead

So you’ve got a good no of leads with you now. But there’s no point in pursuing a lead if its technology requirement isn’t matching with our technological expertise. Or if it doesn’t have a budget created.

To help you keep sane, there are 3 simple elimination criteria which will help you filter out a lead from your leads list. We call them FIT Tests.

FIT stands for : Funding Test (Elimination Criterion), Investors Test, Technology Test.

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Let’s look into a little detail of each.

1. Funding Test When a startup gets funded, usually 10-15% of the funding is used for building technology. Usually.

Enough googling about the startup on Angel.co, Craigslist and TechCrunch etc.; and you’ll find most of the funding information.

So if we could get more information on budget availability, time, allocation and scope that will be extremely resourceful.

You can even find term sheet funding conditions. (Hopefully some good people would have posted this information on the Internet about the lead we’re looking for.)

Lead’s website will give indications on what is coming from a time perspective, that - they are looking for funding for : so and so feature… - they have secured funding for : such and such a thing…

If you’re not able to find funding information, bring it up to Sumeru India. Sumeru will give a go/no-go on the lead.

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2 . Investors Test In the past 7 years of working with startups, we’ve identified a list of investors who are not open to offshore development outside their country and/or their offices. We’ve hit this wall time and again. Instead you can refer to the list here and if you find *clear* hint that the lead you’re working on has a particular investor connection, you can let go of the lead.

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3. Technology Test We work on specific set of technologies. If there is *clear* data that indicates that the lead isn’t working on the technology expertise that we have, remove it from the leads list. Easy.

(Check with India for the current list of technologies we feel comfortable taking up projects in.)

Hint 1: Check out lead’s website thoroughly. High probability that you’d discover what technology they are looking for.

Hint 2: Looking for their careers page is a good idea to check if they’re looking for developers in our technology expertise (e.g. Rails).

Hint 3: Hit builtwith.com : Gives you a detailed X-RAY of their technology profile.

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From lead to prospect

Oh, and if there’s no *clear* data on the elimination criteria, keep that lead. Sumeru will look into it.

Having 25 active prospects in your list is healthy. Consider moving prospects to *inactive* if within 4 weeks there is no opportunity identified.

Prospects are leads that have passed the FIT tests. In other words, FIT leads are called prospects.

Prospect to

opportunity

Part 3

For every sale you miss because you’re too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because

you’re not enthusiastic enough.

- Zig Ziglar

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Opportunity, knock, knock.In order for a prospect to become an opportunity, they have to agree that they have something that they want to change and they are considering you as a potential partner in helping them make that change. That change might be around a problem or a challenge. Or it might be helping them to take advantage of some future-oriented opportunity. But unless they agree that they are going to explore change and consider you, you still have only a prospect, not an opportunity.

Getting in touch with the prospectWe need to figure out if the prospect identified has got an opportunity for us to pursue. So your goal is to get in touch with a decision maker and at least 1 influencer from the prospect. So that you can avail more details about the prospect and eventually the opportunity.

A decision maker, for purposes of initial assessment, carries a designation of CTO or CFO or Founder/Co-Founder.

Note: Don’t connect with the VC at this point.

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It is useful to categorize people at the customer as “Business Decision makers”, “Financial Decision makers”, “Heavy Influencers”, “Light Influencers”, “Roadblocks”. As conversations evolve with the customer, always keep this in mind.

LinkedIn works like a charm in giving you ideas on who you should connect to. Dig deeper and you’d probably find a connection with the prospect.

In case you don’t, look for an intermediary who can connect you with the connect(prospect).

Reach out to Sumeru for help. Sumeru will help if it has the ability to reach out to the prospect or in finding an intermediary.

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Intermediary is a person who can pick up the phone and call the connect. The relation between intermediary and connect is such that connect will pick up the call, or return it.

Getting in touch with the intermediarySo you’ve found an intermediary.

Preferably call up the intermediary. That works better. Brief her about the prospect with enough information so that when she speaks with the connect, her conversation is more productive.

As a result, expect an email from the intermediary connecting you with the prospect.

If this does’t happen, then look for another intermediary.

Communicating with the connect

Write a personalised warm email response to the prospect. Thank the intermediary, introduce ourselves(DreamToIPO) briefly and have a clear call to action.

The communication goal here is that the prospect agrees for a call with you.

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But what happens when the connect doesn’t respond?

Follow up in 3 days and speak/leave voice mail. Remind again over email on 4th day. If still no responses, once again go back to intermediary. If it still doesn’t lead to result, maybe you can look for another intermediary.

In either case, this leads to a call with connect or to a connect drop.

Note: Connect drop is NOT the same as prospect drop. If connect drops, then find alternate connect.

Let’s say the connect agrees for a call with you. Yay!

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art of the connect

call

Part 4

AGA Cooker Sales Manual Excerpt

The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore……

Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospects shows an interest in.

The more she talks the better, and if you can make her laugh you are several points up…….

Perhaps the most important thing of all is to avoid standardisation in your sales talk. If you find yourself one fine day saying the same things to a bishop and a

trapezist, you are done for.

- David Ogilvy

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Your first call with the connectThis is your moment of creativity. Relish it

The goal here is to begin to make a connection and get a pulse on the scope, need and budget of the possible opportunity.

We like to think of it as the first step in making a new friend. Our aim is to engage the connect warmly, positively, and sincerely.

Take genuine interest in him, his product and begin looking for ways to serve him and add value to him.

Study the product thoroughly. Do a bit of research on the pain points, bottlenecks and struggles that the prospect might be facing. Some smart googling should help you discover these things. Knowing their pain beforehand is empathetic and a way to show that you have done some homework.

Tring. Tring.

Let’s ring in now. Good news : there’s no ultimate script to follow.

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But yes, some general principles :

1. It is helpful if you can ask some questions which provide general knowledge that they do not mind sharing. Almost everyone enjoys speaking about themselves so keep the focus on them. Make it an enjoyable experience for them in that initial conversation.

2. Infer : “Is this connect the right person to help fill the qualification checklist?” . That checklist contains vital information that guides us whether we should invest more energy in the current prospect or not.

Hint : One way to check if connect can help you in filling the checklist is: if the connect has a good sense of the product’s roadmap.

Caveat: A connect who does not have any visibility to the roadmap is probably having an operational role, and may not help in filling in the checklist and qualifying the opportunity.

3. Very briefly, maybe in 2 lines, you should be able to give your understanding of prospect’s business and pain points to the connect. Connect should get the feeling that he can probably have an interesting conversation with you.

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4. If the connect is interested, you can present the mini DreamToIPO deck. Distill this presentation to maximum 5 minutes of talk time.

5. You can say the call went well, when at the end of the call, we have a clear understanding about the need, budget and scope of the work.

To enable that, we’ve made a simple questionnaire that you can run through the connect. Really really important stuff, but done informally (by interspersing these questions in your conversation.).

Que#1 : Does the customer have specific technology preferences? If yes, what is the technology preference and does Sumeru have exposure on this specific technology?

Que#2 : What is the business domain and does it demand specialised knowledge? If yes, does Sumeru have exposure and skill sets in this domain?

Que#3 : What is the urgency level? Is it High / Medium / Low? Provide details. Why is this a priority item?

Que#4 : Does the company have a known history of being in tough financial situations? 32

Que#5 : Is the scope of work well defined? What kind of documentation is available?

There’re more questions to this list, but for this call’s sake, these 5 questions are a must.

6. Our bill rate should be communicated to connect during this call itself. Assess the reaction of the connect to this bill rate. So that there’re no surprises later.

Celebrate, if the answers to the qualification checklist questions were positive. Create an “opportunity brief ” indicating that the opportunity is present.

Have these things clear in the opportunity brief :

1. What does the prospect expect from us? 2. Clear scope of work. 3. Existing technology stack (and whatever documentation

available.) 4. Find out who else you need to speak to.

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So what did the connect say ?

If the answers to the questions were “no”, move on and celebrate anyway.

Hint : If the connect mentions that opportunity will be available after x number of months, then slot it into “Inactive Opportunities”, and follow up aggressively when due.

At this point, your role becomes mostly of a facilitator. Between India and you, there will be close interaction in arriving at way forward in taking opportunity to closure. This can vary from opportunity to opportunity. But India will take the lead, and you’ll be involved as and when needed. You’ll be kept well posted.

Now, probably take a short power nap.

Your next lead is waiting.

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FAQ & Epilogue

Part 5

Outstanding people have one thing in common: An absolute sense of mission.

- Zig Ziglar

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How do I know how well am I doing?You'd know it. But still, we feel coming up with 3-5 opportunities in 2 weeks time is great. If you’re hitting 3 opportunities in 2 weeks, you’re doing your job well. If it’s 5, you’re a rockstar.

Does this stuff really work?Well, so far, yes. And we believe, it will get better with your inputs. With this book, we’ve attempted to help you make better choices selling software services to startups.

Once you’ve read it, help us make it better for other new people. We’ll collectively review the changes and fold them into future revisions.

But what to do when all this stuff doesn’t work for me?Don’t freak out. Sometimes, the philosophy and methods outlined in this book don’t match perfectly with how things are going day to day. Share it with us. Suggest possible solutions. We’ll look into it.

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Who’s on the cover?That’s David Ogilvy. Remember : “We sell. Or else.” ? Worth digging deeper.

What to do when I feel stressed?

There’re thousands of ways that you’d find on google. But we’d suggest only one thing : meditate.

If it was one thing that you’d take from this book : it’d be - learning to meditate. There’re really amazing guided meditations available at artofliving.org. But otherwise, ping Chidha and he will get some CDs shipped for you.

When to seek help?When you feel you need help. Simple. We’re here for you, when you need us. Give us a buzz.

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Is there more to this?Yes. Thanks for asking. We made a very handy little 4 pager book as your quick reference workbook. It fits this same wisdom of 40 pages into 4 for your routine consumption. Enjoy.

3-2-1- Go!You’re the captain of your moves at DreamToIPO. Use this book as your compass and conquer new worlds.

We can’t wait to see what kind of future you choose to build. We’re with you.

Where will you take us ?

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Notes

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Notes

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Go. make things happen.

Copyright, 2016 Dream to ipo