Kick-Start Your Sales Engine
Randy Seidl
Board Member | CEO | CRO | Executive Recruiter | Sales Community Leader | Advisor | Consulting
Kick-Start Your Sales Engine
How do early-stage companies kickstart enterprise sales with urgency and constrained budget.
Check out some ideas from Steven Dietch for building high quality pipeline down below!
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Tech Sales Insights LIVE
Join Randy for this weeks episode of Tech Sales Insights LIVE featuring Mark Stephenson, CRO
This episode is sponsored by trender.ai, smart social selling. Get more leads and increase sales with trender.ai’s search and recommendation platform. They help you find the right buyers in your target market. Start creating authentic conversations to build trust with the right prospects and customers to further engagement and close more deals faster.
“I just started kind of thinking about like, Well, how do we like, deconstruct these crappy incentives, like President's Club, for example, it's like three months into an annual incentive, you already know who's gonna win, and so demotivates 80% of the team.”
-Travis Ashby
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Advisory Board on the Move 🚀
Big congrats to these Advisory Board members on the new roles in March:
• Mary Jane (MJ) Leslie - Chief Growth Officer, FORESIGHT Reports
• Anthony Faustini - Chief Revenue Officer, theom
• Jeff Miller - Chief Revenue Officer, StarTree
• Jay Snyder - Chief Customer Officer, BetterUp
• Ed Calnan - Managing Partner, 10,000 Pens
• Adrian Jones - CEO and Co-Founder, personar.ai
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From Our Sponsors:
The Alexander Group
If the key to maximizing valuation is through growth and profitability, how are leading technology executives learning from this past year to prepare for the inevitable volatile market conditions in the future?
Alexander Group is hosting a virtual, interactive roundtable on the actions that revenue, sales and operations leaders are taking now to prepare for 2024.
Key topics will include:
Recommended by LinkedIn
Getting Ahead of FY24 XaaS Planning
Wednesday, March 22 | 11am – 12pm PT
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Randy's Tips to Sell More 👉 Excerpts from Your Go-To Sales Advisor
Early-Stage Company: How Do You Kickstart Your Sales Engine?
By Steve Dietch
What the Idea Is: How do early-stage companies kickstart enterprise sales with urgency and constrained budget.
Today, early-stage companies are challenged to penetrate the enterprise. Existing enterprise proven vendors and organizational inertia create enormous barriers to entry for companies in the initial stages of existence. Investors have limited patience and look to CEOs and their sales leaders to “hack” the typical long enterprise sales cycle—demonstrating traction as quickly as possible and establishing a solid foundation to meet key milestones that drive a successful next round of fundraising.
Successful early-stage companies have discovered that relying solely on their own pipeline development is tough. The lack of personal senior executive connections at target companies is a significant challenge. Selling high in an enterprise is key to not only creating the right sales momentum, but is mandatory to accelerating the sales cycle. Anything below vice president, where there is lack of budget ownership/signature authority, is most likely going to drive a less than stellar result. And if it is successful, it will take twice the time, versus engaging at the executive level.
So what’s the answer? Is it building out a strong direct sales force? Probably not. This takes time, it’s hard to recruit, and it’s extremely expensive for an early-stage company. Is it using reseller partners to generate pipe- line and drive deal closure? More than likely, no. In the early stages of a company, there is a lack of understanding about how to sell the product yourself. Engaging a partner to do the end-to-end selling before the company’s own salesforce gains a solid understanding is not recommended.
The better approach to “hack” the sales motion is to use what we would describe as sales advisors. These sales advisors are former executives or con- sultants within your target verticals who possess strong connections to senior executives at companies that fit your ideal customer profile. Early-stage companies enlist these individuals to provide introductions to executive committee members to kickstart the sales process. In exchange, these individuals are compensated with lucrative commissions if the introduction results in a closed deal.
Why It Is Valuable: You are building a high-quality pipeline with zero dollars out of pocket upfront. The company only pays if the introduction results in a deal.
How It Works: Based on your segmentation and ideal customer profile (ICP), identify an initial handful of advisors (former executives in target markets/companies, consultants, agencies) that have strong executive-level connections. There is no downside to recruiting as many advisors as you can, given the cost only materializes if a deal closes.
Once you’ve established a group of advisors, you will need to create program guidelines on deal registration and roles/responsibilities. It’s important to hold regular pipeline reviews with your advisors to keep them up to date and aligned to the company’s priorities.
Helping professionals across industries get more done with less crazy.
1yAdvisors (emphasis on the plural) are clutch, especially within industry, but with less emphasis on rolodex. There should be at least equal emphasis on guidance fot product market fit within each target market, the jobs to be done, and razor-tuned positioning.