A Guide to Sales at Tech Startup—Lessons from Pipeline Summit 2016
When I started to do sales full-time at Brainhub last year, I did what I usually do to master my skills — I tried to find people wiser than me and copied their skills&hacks.
Thanks Pawel (https://twitter.com/pawel_step)
Top Sales Resources I used
So, of course, I started to read books about sales, building sales teams and in company processes. These resources helped me a lot:
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com — My favorite one. A must-read for anybody building inbound/outbound sales, sales team and all other related processes.
The Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales — The best f**** sales hustler that I have ever seen live. I am pretty sure that this guy could sell snow to an Eskimo.
How to Win Friends and Influence People — Basics that you need to know to make people like you.
Blogs:
$$$ http://blog.close.io/
$$$ http://blog.hubspot.com/sales
$$$ http://blog.pipetop.com/
$$$ http://righthello.com/blog/
Unfortunately, this was not enough. I wanted to find a mentor, a hustler, somebody to guide me.
So, I tried to look for events for IT/Tech Sales. After a few months, I stumbled upon the Pipeline Summit in Gdansk organized by Mick Griffin from Brand24.
Below I have summarized the presentations and summarized the key take-aways for me. I hope, that it will help you, too. Sorry for not including all of the awesome speakers, but I simply couldn’t include everything. Kudos to all the amazing speakers, I haven’t mentioned like Piotr Mrozinski and Bram Kanstein.
Summary of Pipeline Summit 2016
Usually, I don’t attend the paid events, but this one’s line-up of mentors, was enough to convince me. I hadn’t ever found anything like this before, so I decided to pay.
Thankfully, the investment paid off. Let me share with you the most important things that I have learned there:
Growing Sales Through Culture and Values — CHRIS SALLEN / Director of Sales — UXPin
#Culture & Values in Sales
How culture and values are related to sales performance?
Core Values → Company Culture → Actions/Performance
Set your goals and you will find the way to achieve them with your values and culture.
eg. “Surround yourself with only high performers.” This core value keeps managers focused on excellence in hiring and managing employees.
Read more (not recommended by Chris, but I think this article describes the idea behind values & culture together with performance)
How to Plug the Leaks in Your Pipeline and Increase Conversion — SYED ASAD HUSSAIN / Director of Sales — LiveChat
#Follow-up ASAP
You will get way higher conversion rates if you follow-up with your leads as soon as possible. Reply e-mail or send demo/presentation asap.
Responding to Leads Within an Hour Generates 7x the Conversations
#No differentiation between leads and qualified leads
Understand the customer’s problem. Qualify your leads each time and focus on those qualified first.
#Process, process, process — Storyboard the process!!!! Have a Roadmap
Create pipeline, predict goals & money flowing.
From start to close. Add KPIs at each level. Predict, what you are doing and create a process to scale your team.
#Follow-up, educate, nurture leads
Work on your leads, educate them — Most of them are not willing to buy anything from you without building a trust, they need to see an expert in you willing to help them.
#Don’t take no’s to quickly
If somebody says “no” figure out — why. Understand their objectives. Ask 5x Why? Don’t give up!
#Under promise and over-deliver always
eg. Promise to send an answer by Friday — Deliver on Thursday
Surprise your customer by delivering more/faster than expected.
I highly recommend Syed’s Short&Sweet Sales Training Deck
How to Merge Online CONTENT with PAID TRAFFIC to Generate Sales — Ewa Wysocka & Samuel Cook / Founders TRAFFIC & CONVERSION MEETUP
#Spend money on what they want, you will get more money for what you want
Focus your ads to promote a free content (ebooks/webinar/course), which gives an added value for users. Don’t focus your campaign on that, what you would like to sell at the end.
You need 5 touch-points with a potential customer before trying to sell him/her something
#Use Facebook video campaigns to warm up cold traffic. Promote some free stuff
#Spend 50% of your budget on front-end view, which means to promote the FB Video.
60” Video Sells Better Than a Thousand Words — Maciej Sawicki / CEO- Mumin’s Interactive, Co-founder Animationb2b.com
#Create short videos to promote your brand
Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated to do.
I used Keynote and iMovie to make my first video (I only spent $50 on it), see my tutorial here.
#Get video testimonials from customers
Share them on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter. They are faster/easier to make sometimes for your customers than writing them. Those videos sound more “human”.
Generate sales with videos. Source: http://www.slideshare.net/MuminsINT/pipilene-summit-maciej-sawicki
Building a Repeatable Sales Process in a Global B2B Service Business — WIKTOR SCHMIDT / CEO — Netguru
Long story short — 18M PLN ($4.56M revenue — 150 people in 2015). Impressive Wiktor Schmidt!
Clients: 1/3 Referrals, 1/3 Cold Mailing, 1/3 Content Marketing
#Books recommended
$$$ Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance
$$$ SPIN Selling
Of course, Predictable Revenue, too :)
#Tools
$$$ CRM (Salesforce)
$$$ Outbound.io
#Try to upsell
Contact your old customers to upsell your services/products. Ask them for recommendations/referrals.
#Create additional connection via all social media — people see you as a person
Closed deal by WhatsApp… Building relationship, human connection.
#How to grow so fast?
Focus only on sales.
#Sales Team
7 people
*Processing new accounts/clients,
*Customer success up selling, building relationships,
*Inbound/Outbound.
How Brand Reduces User Acquisition Costs — MAREK CIEŚLA / CEO- MIMI Group, Woolet, Sher.ly; CO-Founder- ALLPLAYER; Board Director- Indie Designers
#How to create a brand for a new product?
Put your product among other products from already known brands > Test your product with different brands > Measure conversion rates.
Example: Woolet Marek Ciesla
In the picture, you not only see the wallet, they are selling, but products like an iPhone, a $20 bill and a Luminor Panerai watch. Products that are already well-known and expensive. This elevates a value of a an unknown wallet to the next level.
Other examples:
$$$ Phone holder for cars -> Put it together with BMW and iPhone and sell it in the UK. Those brands will help you here.
$$$ Furniture made in Poland -> Start a company in Italy, change company’s name to sound Italian, add a family heritage to it and sell it abroad as Italian furniture, but made in Poland.
How a Developer Builds a Sales Team — JEFFREY SZCZEPANSKI / COO — Stack Overflow
What is the objective? — Predictable revenue that is rapidly scaling.
#1 Proving Product Value
Understand your market and ensure it exists.
#2 Understanding the sale
StackOverflow -> 98% sales use humans and outbound prospecting.
Full-stack — One person for entire sales process
Split Sales — Sales Reps, Account Exec. etc.
Best practices:
$$$ Aggressive Compensation Plan (Only if you have a process ready to scale)
$$$ Your product will always suck to some, admit it.
#3 Scaling the organisation
Skills Development = Software Skills Development
Using burndown chart to see if the Sales Reps are on the way to achieve their goals. They use SCRUM for sales and approaches similar to SCRUM in Development for Sales.
Last, but not least, my favorite quote from the event.
Let’s wrap it up
Why I wrote this post?
To be totally honest with you -> To have the highest ROI from the Pipeline Summit Event possible.
Sharing this will expand my network and grow my business. So, if you enjoyed reading it, just share this post.
Or
Visit us!
Brainhub — Top JS Software Boutique driven by Serial Startup Founders
Or let me know, what we can develop for you: mateusz@brainhub.eu
