VentureBeat - Latest Comments in 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Reckon Media LLC — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 04:19:10 -0000

No doubt that building a sales team is such a hectic. Here are few guidelines mentioned in this blog through which you can make a sales team in a professional manner.

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Bryant Jaquez — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 12:00:16 -0000

One of the things that we are doing in our new sales team is trying to figure out the most effective way to make cold calls "less cold." You can try to connect with a company before you call them either through a "pre-call letter" , through social media or even through a common connection (Linkedin). http://withnoble.com/everyt...

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Kumar — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 02:09:42 -0000

Suresh i am going to start my sales for my software application. ur were replied for this three years back . Now i need to ur input. ID kumar.visolve@gmail.com

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

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Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

John Dandeneau — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:09:05 -0000

Jlaing, in my opinon, just because someone is not hired into the role of a salesperson doesn't mean they aren't selling. In the case of your example, that support staff answering questions are serving as your front lines, interfacing with your customers - they are selling, whether they carry the title of salesperson or not. It's important to realize that not just salespeople sell and their absence doesn't mean someone isn't selling. You may have just figured out that the type of salespeople best suited to your product and market are consultative, support oriented individuals who are super helpful and non-threatening.

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

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Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

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Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

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Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

kvsuresh — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:57:06 -0000

Great article, speaking the minds of young entrepreneurs. This was too late for me as i had already burnt money in marketing before realising these facts.But expect this will help the upcoming entrepreneurs. I am one of the director of a software company which is specialised in software products. As someone said every experince comes at a cost. Some pay more and some pay less.
suresh

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

unrivalledconsulting — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:43:19 -0000

Great article! A LOT of this rings true for many of the start-ups I have worked with.

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! ;-)

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

jlaing — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:41:59 -0000

Nothing in this article indicated it was only for enterprise software or for products costing $20,000 or more. I have no experience selling products that cost that much so I can't speak to that, nor was I attempting to.

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.

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

gregl — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:08:03 -0000

Jlaing,

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

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

andrewlochart — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:45:02 -0000

Mr. Shah,

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

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

petercohen — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:26:28 -0000

Excellent suggestions. Start-ups providing a software-as-a-service solution should also consider issues unique to selling SaaS. For example, you'll need to develop a means to appropriately reward sales for securing renewals of existing customers, or establish a group outside of sales to handle this responsibility.

Peter Cohen
SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors
www.saasmarketingstrategy.com

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Jim Bullock — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:39:21 -0000

Wow. That's good. Two related ones to add ...

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/ans...

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

Doug Schulze — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:49:44 -0000

Great insight that often eludes most founding CEOs. Others to add might include: 15- Create cross team reviews to iterate on the product, marketing mix, sales tools and target customer based on the direct field feedback from your "revenue engineer" (we call Renaissance Sales). to hear the feedback direct. 16- To your slow grow point, a good rule of thumb is to not hire your second rep until the average yield from the first is higher than the COCA. There are other points around this topic on a post at http://www.altusalliance.co....

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

jlaing — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:03:17 -0000

These sound like great points but I disagree with the premise that you must have a sales force.
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.

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

davidlocke — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:53:29 -0000

As you grow, you will need to separate your sales force into new customer sales and retained customer sales. A sales rep will dump the retained customer to work the new customer. The COCA will be much lower for retained customers. Capturing your increasing return requires that the commission and marketing expense be lower for retained customer, hence the compensation plan will not motivate the sales rep to serve the retained customer.

The retained customer can be sold via inbound sales.

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

InternetBestProducts — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:56:35 -0000

Nice article!

Re: 14 tips for building a startup sales team

cloudize net — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:06:49 -0000

Dharmesh,

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