Strategic Selling for Start-ups

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A startup is a young company that is just
beginning to develop.
Startups are usually small and initially financed
and operated by a handful of founders or one
individual.
These companies offer a product or service that
is not currently being offered elsewhere in the
market, or that the founders believe is being
offered in an inferior manner.

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In the early stages, startup companies' expenses
tend to exceed their revenues as they work on
developing, testing and marketing their idea.
They often require financing.
Startups may be funded by traditional small
business loans from banks, government-
sponsored Loans, grants from nonprofit
Organizations
Incubators can provide startups with both
capital and advice, while friends and family may
also provide loans or gifts.
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A startup that can prove its potential may be
able to attract venture capital financing in
exchange for giving up some control and a
percentage of company ownership.

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First, build a product to the best of your ability
and an effective product management process.
Be conscious of how you sell the product and
the first interactions customers have with the
company

Develop a sales strategy that can be taught to

others as the organization scales 

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You are the best sales person your company will
ever have—most likely.
Your passion, your product knowledge and your
understanding of customer needs are essential
to the startup from the get-go.

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The day you figure out how to put yourself in
your customer’s shoes is the day you learn how
to effectively sell.  
Do not oversell your product.  Aggressive sales
tactics put people off, and set a bad first
impression.
There’s nothing worse than a salesperson who
doesn’t take no for an answer, keeps talking
about the product and promises the moon

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And worse is selling a bad product to begin
with.  If your product sucks, fix your product.  
In other words, fix the root cause, don’t rely on
sales to win deals.
In startups, sales strategy is an important part of
the game.  
You obviously have to have a great product to
ultimately be successful, but you also have to be
smart about how you sell it.

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One strategy is to “educate the potential
customer about the platform, answer any and
all questions, and be confident that you have
the best platform and that they’ll ultimately
chose you.”  
That does not mean that after the initial
meeting you sit around waiting for them to call
you back
Do a follow up to move the process along, but
make sure to never cross the line of being
aggressive.   9
Ultimately, if the customer picked someone else
because the platform was lacking in an area they
required, either you need to decide to fix that
in your product or decide that client wasn’t a fit
for you because what they were asked for
wasn’t going to be in your roadmap
That’s why things like the product feedback
cycle (i.e., reducing the number of “layers”
between a client’s product feedback and your
engineering team) are important
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Think extremely hard about the incentives you
give your sales team.  
The world is run on incentives.  
You as a startup founder are incentivized to work
until midnight because you own equity in what
could become a valuable company (if you work
hard).  
Sales people you hire by nature are highly
motivated people, often largely motivated by their
short-term monetary compensation (like we all are
at the end of the day).  
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Sales people are often the most highly paid
employees at companies
Because of how companies have structured
sales teams for decades or longer now, things
such as commission plans and financial
incentives based on sales success have become
standard parts of packages.  

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Think about creating metrics or key objectives
that you can track with your sales team that
align with your goals (which could change over
time) that make sense for your company.  
e.g. if your goal in the first year is to educate the
market and bring on a few early adopter clients,
try and make your incentives focused on a
mutually agreed upon goal of “bring on 2-3
clients who fit the following characteristics”.

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Or, figure out how to politely get feedback from
clients on how happy they are with their choice
of picking your product and incentivize your
sales team on those results
Giving a defined separate bonus amount that is
released upon a mutually agreed upon set of
Goals is a good strategy

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Hire sales people who can discern what clients
are asking for in your product and can effectively
work with your product and engineering teams
to improve the product based on that feedback.
i.e. hire a sales person who is comfortable with
technology if you’re a technology company, is
smart enough to dig into basic tech details, and is
a willing and capable listener but also
communicator
 
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A young company with a product that’s still
evolving puts a junior or incapable sales person
in front of their early clients, and the customer
provides all sorts of valuable product feedback
that you know won’t ultimately get back to the
engineering team in a meaningful way (or worse
yet, doesn’t get the feedback in the first place
because the salesperson didn’t know what
questions to ask or didn’t given the customer a
chance to speak).
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Customers really appreciate sales people who
understand their needs, understand the
product, take the time to listen, and can trust
that what they’re telling them is actually being
taken back to the engineering team
properly.  
This will build confidence in your product and
team that the customer can rely on.  

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It all starts with that initial sales strategy.  That’s
another reason why it’s great to see founders do
a lot of the initial sales, as the product feedback
is never more important than then and the
founder(s) should know their product better
than anyone else at the company.

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Another important step is to as the founder,
lead and help craft a definition of and a list of
characteristics of who your ideal customers
are.  
This is especially important in B2B companies, as
every company is different and can be highly
complex.  
If your industry is small enough, there may be an
actual list of potential customer names.

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Making mistakes here are hard to fix if you bring
on a customer that isn’t a fit (for both sides).  

It’s kind of like a golf swing and alignment.  

You could have the greatest swing in the world,

but if you aim at the wrong target and still make
the perfect swing (or perfect sales strategy),
you’ll still miss.

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The more effort you put into defining who is
your ideal customer upfront, the better focused
your sales team will be and the less time you’ll
waste of your potential customers.  

Why meet with a company / prospect and

confuse them and /or sell them on something
you have no intention of delivering or isn’t a
fit if you could have known that upfront?

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Track as much as you can, as you can’t improve
something you don’t measure.  
Figure out close rates on deals for starters.  If
you have multiple sales people, track
performance and patterns across people.

If you have a really low deal close rate, you

could either have a bad product or a bad sales
strategy or be pitching the wrong clients (or all
of these)
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Use data to help you figure out how to adapt
and evolve your sales strategy.  In this process
you may learn that your market is too small, or
that you’re building the wrong thing, or that
your definition of who an ideal customer is was
too broad or too narrow, or that your sales
people aren’t effectively able to sell your
product.  
Always be learning.

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 Key to Do List for Startup Sales Strategies

Set sales targets and monitor variances—a

spreadsheet will do, and know the process never
stops, even after the sale + as soon as you have
made a sale, that’s the time to start looking for
the next one
Create a system to follow leads, accounts, contacts,
‘suspects’ and prospects, forecasts, activities, time
management, products, territories.

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Collect prospect names like a vulture—
newspaper clippings, overheard conversations,
business cards, friends, friends of friends, and
don’t forget to ask prospects for referrals

In a business-to-business sale, don’t forget that

the person in front of you may not the only
person involved in the purchase–ask who is

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Make a habit of researching the prospect’s
business to appreciate what the issues may be;
if it’s an individual to whom you’re selling, find
out as much about the person, or class of
persons, as you can in advance of discussion..

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As the entrepreneur, chances are high that you
will be doing most of the selling.
But everyone in the company must sell.
Nobody is excused, but nobody. Period.

If they need help and support, give it freely. The

selling may be simply handling inquiries on the
phone and not hesitating to make suggestions.

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According to McKinsey, three-quarters of all
industries are driven by WOM (word of mouth)
and should dominate your startup sales strategy,
even when you are using the Internet.
Use the power of the social web
There is no better force to drive sales growth
than strong customer advocacy.
“Make your consumer an advocate: Shift
marketing objectives from sending a message to
facilitating conversations with and between
consumers.”
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Word of mouth marketing makes use of many
media. It is not just a matter of telling your
neighbors.
The direct methods, apart from the neighbors
and the sales call itself, include:
Public speaking: at conferences, local
associations, client events,
Customer referrals; you should not be shy about
asking for them

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Training events–ones you arrange or ones in
which you participate elsewhere,
Demonstrations at trade shows, on client
premises or for client staff.

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The indirect methods include:
Podcasts (that you post on your website or
YouTube), online forums,
Live chat in its many forms,
Consumer reports and user information sites,
Blogs–yours or other people’s (where you post
comments)
email newsletters

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Make sure that you subscribe to Google Alerts,
so that you can capture references to your
products or company, whether positive,
negative or misleading.

This way you can monitor web references both

to you and your competitors or developing
issues in your industry.

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Google Alerts is a content change detection and
notification service, offered by the search
engine company Google.
The service sends emails to the user when it
finds new results—such as web pages,
newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific
research—that match the user's search term(s).
(Handout)

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Whether you sell paper clips, power stations or
packed lunches, you will be using relationship at
the core of your startup sales strategy. Yours. So
start with yourself.
Work at a personal appreciation. Who are you;
how do you like to work; what is your
predominant interpersonal style; how do you
best collect information.

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Above all bear in mind how you are going to
approach the prospect. Think about him or her,
whether it is direct of indirect selling.

Natural born salespeople will do this without

thought, but most of the rest of us will need to
do a bit of analyzing

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What you will be able to figure out is how the
customer most prefers to deal with you.

It will be on the basis of facts:

company, product or service—hard data,
numbers and performance;
support: nature, speed, length or quality—who
will respond and how;
vision: concepts and plans—the end results;
logic: pricing, guarantees—a matter of keeping
score.
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The there is the matter of how you get and give
information.
Make sure you are using all your senses to get
information from the prospect and do not just
rely on your preferred one.
You may like to see things in print, but if the
other person does most of his work through
speaking, you may get nothing if your hearing is
switched off.

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Remember that when you are the listener, you
are communicating, too.
So listen actively by giving the speaker
confirmation that you are hearing, through
flashes of confirming words or by nodding your
head, leaning forward and above all by eye
contact.

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On the other hand try to play to her preferred
means of receiving information.
Bear in mind, for example, that the eyes take in
a third more information per second than the
ears, so if someone is more visual you better
have something the prospect can see.
Good social skills alone probably will not cut the
mustard, and you will leave wondering why you
did not close the sale.

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Thank You!

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