Sold! The art of Sales in a startup
ALT: Ambitious Ladies in Tech Masterclass series
In this masterclass Sandra Friis at Adyen, Dimitar Stanimiroff previously from Stack Overflow and current founder of Heresy, Danna Gurbaxani at Salesforce and Sophie Adelman from Hired joined a panel chaired by ophelia brown to discuss the art of sales in a startup.
ALT is an Ambitious Ladies in Tech programme for female London startup talent with 2–5 years experience, hosted by the seed VC fund Local Globe. More about the programme with details of how to get involved here.
The key attributes of startup Sales people who do well
Adopt a consultative approach
This approach rests on entering a dialogue with a potential client, rather than ‘pitching’. Danna boiled down her success to “doing your homework” e.g. being up to date on a client’s news and identifying what its biggest problems are. She recommends adopting an honest and candid approach as to what a prospective service can and cannot answer for a client. This can be stretched further to recommend other services which may not result in a sale now but helps build credibility in the long run.
Ask direct questions about qualifications
With a sea of opportunities for potential clients to sell to, one of the key pitfalls is how to manage one’s time across a sales pipeline. Asking direct questions to a client is a way to qualify the importance and likelihood of a deal closing.
Example questions to a client include: “Is this a hard or soft need? Do you have budget this year? What is the budget? Are we in the lead? How do you perceive us? What can we do to help you make a more informed decision?”
Shadow the top performers in the firm
Figure out who the best sellers are in the firm. Put in coffees, shadow them and learn their tricks of the trade. Ensure to offer something in return.
How to sell outside HQ territory
Applying HQ sales techniques in different territories does not always pay dividends. Different territories require different styles.
Sophie from Hired proposes learning from colleagues in HQ, attending training and shadowing peers in New York and San Francisco. The UK tends to be slightly more relaxed than the US, less direct and it’s important to nuance one’s style to reflect this.
Alongside attending training, regular trips to HQ ensures visibility to Product and Marketing colleagues to influence feature requirements and messaging. Common mispractice without local influence includes an alienating tone of voice and sub-optimal timing of emails due to time zone differences.
Preparation and leveraging your network is key to increase the number of Sales
The best Sales person is never going to close 100% of leads, a good outcome is 25% and 50% if you’re lucky. VCs have extraordinary tentacles to help open doors and forge links to new clients. Otherwise, the below step-by-step Saturday morning LinkedIn ritual (courtesy of Sandra) has proven a hit to close 50% of leads.
- Pay for Premium access on LinkedIn (or get your company to) and carve out time to keep your Salesforce up to date.
- Write short LinkedIn messages to a targeted list of CFOs and CTOs, highlighting the individual challenges they may be facing. Aim to write 5 good, well-researched emails. This alone, has resulted in a 85% hit rate for a meeting with a C-Level Exec.
Never underestimate the importance of picking up the phone too. Choose your subjects carefully though, as Dimitar (ex-StackOverflow) rightly pointed out developers dislike calls.
Tips on hiring
During the interview process, ensure the Sales candidate meets as many people as possible from different functions- marketing, development and UX teams.
Be mindful that it can be particularly alluring to see yourself in others but it’s more beneficial to not hire people in your own image.
Lastly, this is an interview for you too- a prospective candidate will be looking to work for someone who is invested in their own personal development.
Mastering the Sales game might just lead to your next startup idea…
Dimitar founded Heresy- software to build, manage and scale sales organisations- off the back of his experience at Stackoverflow. He had the sole notion of structuring his Sales team as a developer team whilst at StackOverflow and sought to convert the benefits of agile development.
He hosts an interview podcast series on Soundcloud where he invites Sales personnel at prominent startups to discuss their tactics.
Compensation structures influence performance
Adyen adopt a progressive structure of paying people more to work together, to encourage ‘lifting eachother up’. Sole deals bring in 100% commission for the seller and deals done with a colleague generate 140% commission with either a 70%:70% split or a 100%:40% split.
Ask tough questions and challenge management to incentivise the Sales team appropriately.
Productivity tools and book recommendations
- Salesforce- CRM to plan the week and Sugar — for visibility
- Yesware- to send mass emails and track them
- Sharebird- enables users to attach documents to send, feedback to see what recipients are scrolling on and looking at in more detail
- Workday- HR and financial management software
- Mind Meister- online mind mapping for team collaboration
- Slack- good communication tool but not for decision making
- Heresy (obvs)- agile workflow management for sales
Weekend reading
- Eat that frog by Brian Tracy- start the day with the hardest tasks
- Grit by Angela Duckworth- the blend of passion and perseverance to get to outstanding achievement
