A Guide to Sales for Startups
Learn from those who built the Salesforce sales engine
Startups fail because they lack customers, not funding — only those companies that understand how to thrive in today’s sales climate will make it.
To celebrate the Salesforce Incubator’s Batch #1 graduation, we brought together a panel of sales superstars with extensive experience building playbooks for growth — at Salesforce and beyond:
- Mike Wolff, SVP of Commercial Sales at Salesforce, contributed to 14 years of transformation and growth at Salesforce, currently leading the SMB sales team.
- Brad Gyger, VP of Worldwide Sales for Heroku at Salesforce, started as the first salesperson at Heroku, pre-acquisition, and has built and transitioned a global, multi-channel sales team.
- Linda Crawford, SaaS Sales veteran, spent nearly a decade at Salesforce defining the sales strategy before joining growing Optimizely to refine all go-to-market functions. Linda now advises high growth companies on all aspects of sales, marketing, product and customer success.
- Our very own Leyla Seka, who leads the Salesforce AppExchange, moderated and extracted the best of the panel’s sales advice to help guide you as you build your own sales team and process.
For the full discussion, check this out:
Invest in data
“When you see success in the patterns, that’s where you build playbooks, that’s where you invest, that’s where you scale.” — Brad Gyger, VP, Worldwide Sales, Heroku, Salesforce
Beyond providing the basic sales insights every founder or salesperson needs, collecting relevant customer data will help you understand your early customers and experiment with them until you can clearly see both your success and fail points. From there, you can not only optimize your UX and messaging based on actual data from your target demographic, but build your playbook for growth.
Fill cracks with blended roles
When you look at how your prospects and customers are moving through the funnel, don’t neglect to keep an eye on what’s falling through the cracks. What happens between a lead hand-off and a salesperson’s first call? The closing of a deal and customer success?
When you’re small but mighty and starting to grow your team, consider blended roles as a trick to reduce bumps in your processes. Instead of hiring different people for different roles, you may want to try to hire a profile whose job will be to take a customer all the way from zero to extremely successful.
Sales reps can be a combination of sales and customer success people and sales engineers can also wear a customer success hat. This is not one size fits all, but worth experimenting when you are still early stage.
Tackle only what you can digest
“Playing in all sandboxes at the same time is really tough.” — Linda Crawford, Sales Advisor, formerly Salesforce and Optimizely
Spend the time to understand the selling motion of the segment you are going after — including expectations, decision-making, and purchasing processes. Then, think about what kind of deals you can support.
You might not be ready for huge deals but you can kickstart enterprise sales with an SMB strategy by going after individual teams or divisions in which your product is a perfect fit. Plant the seed and grow it when you identify a successful pattern.
One last bit of advice from each of our panelists:
Mike Wolff advises:
Alignment within your team is critical. If you need inspiration on how to get there, have a look at Salesforce’s prioritization tool.
Brad Gyger’s hiring recipe to build a go-to-market sales team is simple:
SUM [Customer empathy + Passion for the mission + Inquisitive personality] = Perfect profile
Linda Crawford says:
“Pay close attention to the quality of your revenue. Say no to bad revenue.”
