-
Website
http://venturebeat.com/ -
Original page
http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/08/05/14-tips-for-building-a-startup-sales-team/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
For a person who's not heavily exposed to the sales-side of the world, you're well informed. As a former CRM consultant and enterprise apps sales guy, I think an emphasis needs to placed on lead generation and the cheapest customer acquisition method known - highly targeted, well tailored outbound email campaigns. Then, just like you said, A/B test and iterate for success. I think any winning sales/marketing staff should be able master this first step of introducing leads to the funnel.
Edwin Fu
cloudize.net
The retained customer can be sold via inbound sales.
Your product alone can't sell itself (unless it is an extreme exception to the rule) but your product + marketing + support staff can sell your product by themselves without traditional sales staff.
Since I have been a sales professional for longer than you have apparently been on this planet I will have to call you out on this one. If you want your product to be successful in the enterprise and it costs more than $20,000 you better have a strong sales team. I will say however that as I sold very complex products and service offerings a team selling approach with strong pre-sales technical support at my side was always the most successful. In my career I have sold at least $25 million directly and much more than that through teams I have managed. A wise man told me early in my career there are only two jobs worth having in a company. Be CEO or be one of the top sales people. The rest will not matter unless those people are successful.
stepping off my soapbox,
Greg
Many people in my industry (solutions often costing $1k-$10k) consider having sales staff mandatory. Our company is growing while competing with these players with no sales team. All we have is knowledgeable support staff that answer questions from potential leads.
Premising your argument with a statement about age is a cheap shot.
If everyone did everything the way it has always been done progress would grind to a halt.
What role was your "wise man" in when he told you that? Sales or CEO? just wondering.
Watch sales vs. order-taking, especially in an early product or enterprise product. There's a tremendous temptation toward doing semi-custom work. This "custom" stuff may be important features that ought to be in the product. Or it may be a one-off that doesn't pay for itself if only sold once & creates a maintenance disaster. It'll blow your COCA & product pricing models completely if you do custom work without knowing it.
Set up communication between sales, product management and engineering, so "that one thing that would make all this so easy, if only *those guys* would do it" gets discussed. Sometimes that one thing really is easy. Sometimes it's hard for non-obvious reasons, unless you're the guys doing it. Cuts all ways among sales, marketing & development. Make them *jointly* responsible for figuring out what's worth doing, in terms of having a viable product in the market that can actually be delivered. I think product management should probably broker these conversations, but the trick is to get them all in a room.
There's a related thought here:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales...
Peter Cohen
SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors
www.saasmarketingstrategy.com
Thank you for the excellent article. I couldn't agree with you more. As a veteran of a half-dozen start-ups, may I offer two more tips?
Tip #0. Before you hire any sales people, hire a great product manager who can analyze the market and select the segment(s) that the company should attack first. Sending the salesperson out to call everyone in her rolodex or make cold calls might lead to some initial sales, but it's tough sledding, and learning lessons and iterating (finding patterns) take longer. Plus, you'll get feature requests from early customers that are all over the map. You need someone who can rationally analyze and prioritize the requests.
Tip #10.5. Before you hire the second salesperson, hire a product marketing person. Maybe your product manager can write and speak and communicate adequately, but usually they cannot. Product management and product marketing are very different disciplines. If you want your growing sales team to have great sales tools (script, preso, collateral), and if you want their prospects to have already heard of your company when sales calls on them, through press and analysts, then you need a great product marketer. The old analogy about sales being the ground troops and marketing being air support is a useful one. Don't send sales out there unarmed.
Cheers,
Andrew Lochart
The ony big thing I would add to the tracking of the data is: enquiry levels.
To sales orientated people this may seem like the complete basics, but I could surprise anyone with the number of already trading companies (months/years) that:
A) didn't know what conversion rate was; "okay, no problem, it's sales/enquiries; how many enquiries have you had...?"
....and B) couldn't get the enquiry level information for love nor money, as they had no facts on it. At all.
(Biting tongue and trying to hide bemused look) "So we need to start tracking this immediately so we can have an idea how you are performing as a whole and who your best performing salespeople are.." !
Crazy but true! ;-)
suresh