B2B sales best practices by 500 Startups
Some weeks ago during Sberbank and 500 Startups acceleration program, there was a lecture of Robert Neivert, the 500 Startups venture partner. He focuses on seed investments in B2B startups, manages blockchain acceleration track and specializes in B2B sales.
In the middle of the week, Tristan Pollock joined him to share his secrets in Storefront B2B sales forces.
One of my counterparts posted the outline of his lecture on SPIN-sales (who is not familiar with this approach and works in B2B, I highly recommend to read Neil Rackham next). This article is rather my perception of how Rob gave the lecture as I was amazed not only by the content but by presentation as well.
How Rob worked with the audience
I was taken aback by the way he entered and immediately started to interact with the audience: he spoke loudly and clearly in cool English without “chewed” American accent.
The lecture was for such entrepreneurs as me who participated in the accelerator. Robert instantly reminded me of the image of the spheric salesman in a vacuum from American movies.
Rob knew his audience and was able to spark interest by hitting the very pain: “Imagine, that you increase your sales by 50% after this lecture”, — he started. Someone would consider it as crowd-pleasing from another infopreneur, but as before lecture I already knew his traction and Linkedin profile, I was opened to information from the professional.
I made own notes not only about the lecture but also noticed how Rob presented himself to the audience, what he emphasized, which gestures he used, how he changed intonation, how he chose a new “victim” for exact life examples. For me personally, it is very important as I often make public speeches myself: to pitch is a very important skill for any entrepreneur.
Who are you going to face while making a deal
Rob drew our attention the fact that a group of people of different roles in the company takes part in making decisions in large transactions. Among them, there is an interested party that wins from buying your product in the first place. In an ideal case for us, the person is a so-called “champion” who impacts the final decision. If you manage to win him he is the one who will protect your interests as a potential contractor on internal meetings and events where you cannot be.
There is always a person as well who signs the contract directly and defines a budget for your services. If the other party says at once “I’m the one who makes a decision” but is not able to tell you the sum of the last contract or a company name the contract was signed with, more likely that is not the person you need.
The next role is a “gatekeeper”. This employee will prevent implementation of your product for different reasons: he can lose a job, either his competitor will get a promotion. The same applies to administrative staff and secretaries as their job is to say “no” to you. Be extremely polite and amiable with them. By winning them over, you will access the information like what events their boss goes, and this is a direct road to a meeting with the person you need.
How to build B2B sales
Robert proved my hypothesis that if the transaction is without human participation it is marketing, with a personal interaction it is a sale. Robert told us that it is especially true for sales with the bills for more than $10 000. My experience in Russia proves that starting with the transactions for more than 100 000 RUB there must be a personal interaction, the marketing is enough for deals of dozens of thousands of rubles
Neil Rackham said that if there was no problem, there would be no sale. The salesman task is to indicate a problem and define how much the solution costs. The technique is well described in the Rob Fitzpatrick book: “The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you”.
The key idea is that you should speak as minimum as possible, ask specific questions, indicate a client problem and hear him out.
Rob shared his experience of building a sales department in corporations. When he enters an office for the first time, there is hustle and bustle, all the salesmen push clients to close a deal. Within several months the result is that the sales department is in complete silence and only sometimes you can hear specific questions to customers.
Tristan Pollock gave us his practical example later. He put all his knowledge on the topic to a specific algorithm that includes the following steps of b2b sales department building:
- Step 0. Who is your target client? At this stage, it is necessary to define a business size (by a number of employees and sales volume) to which you are going to sell your solution, as well as clients geography.
- Step 1. Where can you find your client? This includes analysis of current online platforms as well as offline events where b2b audience often meets.
- Step 2. Collect data and compose a list. It is necessary to collect data. You can do it yourself or outsource it to Yandex.Toloka/Upwork or automate it with bots.
- Step 3. Segmentation and completion. It is a completely manual work including analysis of emails, website addresses, phone numbers and etc. At this stage, you should filter non-existing email addresses.
- Step 4. First contact and A/B testing. The stage includes cold mailouts and calls, regular manual testing on small samples. That is you as a founder as no one else can form a knowledge database, test email topics and bodies different in content learning the most effective result.
- Step 5. Automation. Only at this point, you can and you need to switch on automated chains trying to digitize manual process, to hire additional sales executives and scale the process.
Each step is followed by the list of tools to help which I am ready to share with you separately so do not hesitate to contact me on Facebook.
Reputation and stages of the deal closing
A very important moment for each sales executive is to work on his “non-liar” reputation. Rob told about cases of the seven-digit deal closed by phone but those were the results of his previous business. A client has already known that Rob sells problem solutions and he can be trusted.
Big deals require more than one contact. Each transaction has to go through the following stages:
- Preparation — realization if you trust each other. Rob compared it with a date: only 3–5 seconds are needed to understand if you like a person or not. Further, we just seek proof of the decision made.
- Research — a key phase of big deals: collect any information about a company, ask the right questions to indicate a problem.
- Solution presentation. It is here when you sell but you already have a clear knowledge of what. For this reason, it is not your sale but a client purchase more.
- Deal closing. It is a formal process if all the previous steps were correct: it is an exchange of documents, bills, payment.
Robs recommendations
Practice! Remember, that first 10–50 call will be a failure, the contractor will not become your clients that is why you’d better leave the key companies to dessert.
Don’t be afraid! Everyone has problems, the most important thing is to ask right questions, you do not always know which question is correct.
Stop long discussions! You can theorize and build hypothesis, brainstorm internally for a long time. However, while you are not out of your comfort zone and you do not talk with a client, you will never know a truth.
