What every Startup founder/exec needs to know about sales development

Sales Development is the most vital elements of a startup, especially in its early days. You may say it’s the lifeline of the company, and the founding members are its first sales people.
No matter what your fundraising goals are, if you are consistently increasing sales and acquiring new customers month over month, you are on the path to building a sustainable business.
And so, for all you founding members out there, here are a few tips from our work with your peers:
ONE: Do not hire sales people.
Hire or outsource as-a-Service Sales Development People.
What’s the difference? There’s plenty.
Salespeople are expensive when hired early on in the process. Most of the founding team participate in early customer acquisition efforts across the sales cycle stages, and provide the executive credibility and dedication to closing the deal. You will not make a good use of their talent. In addition, the early sales stage is extremely frustrating. The good salespeople will move on if they don’t see the deals pouring in.
Forget about high base salaries and equity. Hire a bunch of sales development reps who will open doors, create engagements and initial relationships, and will charge on with persistence and grit. Make sure they are focused on specific targeted accounts and offer incentives for displacing competitors’ accounts. That will get you on the right track early on, creating momentum, engagements, market buzz, a health pipeline and the first sales.
TWO: Light speed response.
You probably have inbound assets already created. Take a minute to think: how long does it take you to respond to an inbound request / engagement. If the answer is more than 5 min. — you are not properly utilizing your MarTech and you are losing valuable potential business.~30%-45% of sales (the companies wanting to purchase at every given moment) go to the vendor who responded first. When buyers engage with your inbound assets, they don’t pledge loyalty to your brand exclusively, You can rest assured their next click will be with your competition. If you have a chat box on your website, make sure there’s a human being manning it 24/7. Don’t rely on automated respond. There’s only one winner in this race. Someone downloaded a white paper? A phone call should immediately follow. Lead scoring? leave that to a year from now. You want to follow up on every interaction and learn more about your buyers’ profile in the process. You will learn what makes a lead real, and who is just kicking the tires. This information is priceless and can only come from a human engagement early on.
THREE: Got a meeting? Invite everyone!
Meeting = in person, an intro call, a video call or any type of meeting.
Don’t waste your time meeting just with one person and than invest time and effort looking for all relevant stakeholders. Right from the start, ask for the email addresses of everyone who ‘should be in the meeting’. Most people will comply and give you their names and email addresses, and Bamm! you just mapped the account.
FOUR: Founders and senior execs are closers, not sales developers.
Take a look at your calendar. I bet you it’s full of prospecting meetings. Are you really making a good use of your time and efforts? Yes, no one will do the pitch better than you. But than again, no one can run an investor meeting or create a development roadmap like you do. Let sales development do their job of creating the relationships. Make sure they are trained, enabled and confident enough to create a pipeline. You should only be actively involved in designing a custom solution for a prospect, or help close the deal.
FIVE: Apply ABM (Account-based marketing) / ABP (Account-based prospecting) early on.
No time for long-cycle lead generation. Take the time to think and map your initial target companies and go after then with all the might of your sales development team. Don’t wait for inbound. Outbound is your friend if you want quick wins. Have a great story to tell and an engagement plan that is flawlessly executed.
SIX: Hire core competencies. Outsource everything else.
Unfortunately, startups and young companies are no different than established ones. The cost of a hire, and the cost of losing a hire, is extremely high. You should always calculate the risk of losing your sales development rep or sales person after the first year. The good ones are being courted everyday. And a bad hire… well — you already know how much a bad hire will cost you in money, time and impact on business.
In my conversations with startup execs they all express their need to stay lean. You should stay lean, but you should also be able to be nimble. Agility when investing in sales and marketing resources is critical. Scaling up or down your operation and move things around so that they fit a current need is priceless. A startup’s culture does not always support this need. You need discipline and someone that can enforce it to make sure you get the results you need. Consider as-a-Service competencies as much as possible until the value of internal teams outweighs the alternative. It will take a while.
Here at REDHOT, we help Startups and VC backed companies sell more and grow, sales people exceed their quota, and prospects relish in a better purchasing experience. I’d love the opportunity to share more of our insights with you.
