7 Steps to Startup Sales Success - Webinar Recording

Buckle up for a rip-roaring ride through the ‘7 Steps of Startup Sales Success’ with Alastair and Kiran as your guides.

SECTIONS

1:42 - Origin and Overview of the 7 Steps to Startup Sales Success

3:46 - Step ‘01 Sales Strategy’ plus Ideal Customer Profile

7:19 - Step ‘02 Team Structure’ with Sales Organization Set Up

11:06 - Step ‘03 Tech Stack’ with a focus on Website

14:04 - Step ‘04 Lead Generation’ and People (SDR)

17:18 - Step ‘05 Deal Closing’ diving into Process

21:24 - Step ‘06 Customer Success’ plus Marketing Collateral

23:38 - Step ‘07 Continuous Improvement’’ and Sales Pipeline Analysis

26:25 - Introduction to our 360° Sales Diagnostic

27:51 - Our next live event: Startup Sales Goals: Setting Yourself Up for Success

Together, your hosts have over 45 years experience in B2B sales and business development. They’re co-founder of The Uplift Partnership, a certified B Corp that creates sustainable performance in sales.

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:10

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to this Uplift webinar: 7 Steps to Startup Sales Success. For transparency, this session is being recorded for future generations to marvel over. I’m Alastair Cole, co-founder of The Uplift Partnership, and your host for this session. My background is 25 years in business development, running professional services teams and building technology products. And I'm joined today by my co-founder and partner in crime, Kiran GIll.

Kiran Gill 0:52

Hi, everybody, my name is Kiran. I've got 20 years worth of experience in frontline sales. So I've done a lot of jobs in sales operations. I've also done sales management, also frontline sales, and business development as well.

Alastair Cole 1:08

Thanks, Kiran. We create sustainable performance in sales by combining our expertise in business, sales, coaching and technology. And we're also a certified B Corp. in the UK. We're very excited today to talk you through our 7 Steps for Startup Sales Success, and Kiran… maybe before we show those seven, you could talk a little bit about why we came up with that, and how those steps came about.

Kiran Gill 1:40

Of course, Alastair. Yeah, really the 7 Steps comes out of several years worth of work, actually. So before Alastair and I both got together and started talking about, you know, what were the fundamentals for, for companies to do when it came up to their sales processes? And how do companies become more successful? You know a lot of research went into this. And going through the years of working with lots of different companies around the globe, I realised that the companies that were being super successful, were doing things in a particular way. And there were certain principles and certain fundamentals that they had in place that lots of other companies that were finding it more difficult just didn't have. And when Alastair and myself got together a few years ago to start the partnership, we started discussing these in more detail. And this has come out into the seven steps where we've slowly built this framework with 52 different points, and brought it all together within this seven step process to help companies become more successful. Especially companies that are just starting up with animals and what to do where it comes from. So a lot of time spent on this other service you would think.

Alastair Cole 2:56

Yeah, we’ve been working with companies like Simudyne, Optimer Consulting and others in that startup space, and many more. Without further ado, here are the seven sales strategy, team structure, tech stack, lead generation, deal closing customer success, and, crucially, continuous improvement. Those are the seven. And what we're going to do now is move through each of those steps and pick out a sub point and just chat about it for a couple of minutes. So we'll look at each section to tell you why it's important and pick something out as we move around that wheel and just to bring that to life a little bit more. So that first section is sales strategy. And these bullets are the areas that we see as critical inside sales strategy. Once highlighted here, Kiran, you're going to talk to us a little bit about the ideal customer profile. Why have you picked that in sales strategy?

Kiran Gill 4:05

Well, when it comes to sales strategy, these are all important ones that you can see on the screen. But when it comes to ideal customer profile, ideal customer profile, it's it's somewhere that you really do see that companies do like the kind of specialised or the expertise of building a proper customer profile, the better this is, and the more kind of strategic and more targeted this is, the better your sales results will be. And for some reason, a lot of the companies that we've worked with that have been finding this difficult time kind of cut over these parts and don't actually go into detail when it comes to their ideal customer profile. They can make out that they know what their ideal customer profile is. They know who they're selling to. But when you really start scratching away at the surface, you suddenly realise it's very generic. So when we talk about ideal customer profiles, what we want to see here from a start up, and this is if you've got your own startup, this is where you should be going is, you really need to be detailed. You need to get down to the fundamentals of what that ideal customer looks like. So where are they located? How big is their company? How many people should there be in a certain department, depending on what you're selling. So your service, your solution, your product, whatever it is, has to fit that demographic perfectly. And the more and more concise you can be, with the information you build with your ideal customer profile, the better your targeting, the better your targeting. That means, then you can speak to that person directly. I mean, and that feeds into the rest of the seven steps. So getting this right, and doing this upfront, and doing the hard work really pays off in the long term.

Alastair Cole 5:52

And if I was a startup founder or running sales at a startup today, and I didn't have one, how much? How long should it be? How many pages, what kind of format or what should it look like?

Kiran Gill 6:07

And realistically, try to get it down on one page of a4 To start with, you can go into a lot more detail like most things can't. But remember different ideal customer profiles, but different products could exist also for different target markets. So your ideal customer profile for a customer in Europe might look slightly different to one that's based in Africa, or different to 1000 Americans. So the fundamentals will all be the same. So try to get it on to one piece of paper, or one piece of a4 paper or one screen or, you know, Word or Google Sheet or whatever you use. And Android, try to get it down there. And just start with the basics. And just get that down and then try to get into more and more detail if you can. Because it just helps your marketing team, your lead generation team, your marketing collateral, it just helps define all of that better getting this right.

Alastair Cole 7:04

And like most things in work and life, the more effort you put in, the more you get out, and you'll end up discussing it and refining it and improving it. So yeah, absolutely crucial. Part of sales strategy. Let's move on to section two, which is team structure. Seven bullets here that we see as absolutely fundamental. You've, you've highlighted today's sales organisation set up and why have you picked that.

Kiran Gill 7:37

So like any good organisation or team, you need to have people doing different roles. Now, if you're a startup, you probably started off with a very small team, and lots of people doing different roles. And we've run into that multiple times or steps as we've always had, where people are doing different jobs. However, when you start building your sales organisation, you need to start thinking about what roles and what will people be doing within that team. So the way I like to set it up, and this is your basics, remember, this is your fundamentals. This is your foundation, that's what we're talking about here today, what are you really gonna start off with is probably a salesperson, and that salesperson is probably your key account person, that's the person who's going to be closing the deal. Now, you might then want to add a SDR to that that's a sales development representative, who is basically there to feed or build the food. After you can start thinking about a sales manager, bringing a sales manager in order to do all these times you're probably going to get you're a couple, you're the account manager, if you're a founder led company, you're, then you're probably building all these processes, you can then start thinking about bringing in sales management. Then after that, once you've got a few customers, you then start thinking about customer success managers. These are the people who are going to help retain your customers. And then how do you know in which order you're going to do this, but then at some point might start thinking about a pre-sales person. That's if you're selling solutions. So you might have somebody there who's very technical, helping you to sell your technical solution to customers. And possibly you might even be integrating parts of marketing into that. So this is your full team, your stack of people that are going to help now and these roles could be split, you might have one person who's doing a bit of this a bit at a time. However over a period of time what you're hoping to do is grow the sales organisation to be very, very clear in what their goals and targets are. So your sales manager is leading a team of Kemet executives . You've got to catch up. You've got a cluster of STRS sales development guys who are feeding your account executives and around that you've got your customer support people, your pre-sales people all feeding in. So this team needs you're organised as they should and having them Define the descriptions helps you become more successful. And if you can get this done very early on, it just helps you be more successful quicker. Once you start moving.

Alastair Cole 10:12

Yes, and, you know, beautifully articulate the articulately laid, put my friend and that kind of growth about what you need to bring in and, and how you grow. And if you're a founder and at the beginning of your journey, we're working with a health tech startup at the moment. And it's pretty much just the founder doing sales, but she does have a couple of other people not necessarily in the organisation who are helping her out with other jobs, few and she's got some virtual assistants who are helping with some STR work. So even though she's on her own, she's still able to outsource some of those jobs and kind of create a team and then wear different hats herself. So I think thinking about it in different hats in different roles, even if it's just you, it's a good way to get that process going. Thank you, my friend, let's move on to section three, which is the tech stack. Six really important parts inside the text stack here. And the one that I'm going to pick out and talk about is the website. spent many decades building, deploying , operating, optimising websites for sales. And the reason I've picked the website is because it is effectively your HQ, you know, digital or otherwise, it's the headquarters where you want to drive people to you want to drive traffic there, because that's where your buyers are going to read about you, make contact, and potentially book meetings. So driving traffic there is absolutely essential, it's essential that you've got the right SEO practices in place so people can get to your website. And that you're then feeding into your content generation engine with blog posts. It's also where you're articulating, really the value proposition and your copy around those words. And it's essential that every, every page in fact, every section on your website has a very clear call to action that starts with the verb encouraging buyers to take further action to learn more about you or, or perform some action to get in touch with you. It's also where your website's also where you're connecting your email marketing, so your newsletter connection through MailChimp or what else you're managing your email lists. So it is absolutely the fundamental cornerstone, really of your tech stack that you have a functioning and high quality website. Before we move on anything you'd like to add Kieran, in on that text, second, our website piece?

Kiran Gill 13:05

Well, it's more of a question for you at this date. So how important is a well defined customer, ideal customer profile for you? If you were designing a website?

Alastair Cole 13:16

Well, yeah, absolutely critical, because I want to be able to look specifically at starting with a landing page. So if you're running a campaign, and going after ideal customer profile to say, then the landing page from that campaign on your website got to be tailored, not just to reflect the creative and the copy from the campaign, but also to engage directly in specifically with with ideal customer profile number two, and then their journey from that landing page into the rest of the website needs to be smooth as well so they can get to other collateral, and continue their journey. So these things are all tied to a website. Absolutely critical. The fourth step around the wheel is lead generation. And we've picked out people here who are absolutely critical. Kiran, tell us how to start an SDR.

Kiran Gill 14:18

So we touched on this in section number two where I was talking about UTM. So an SDR is a very specialist role and probably really common to kind of it's quite a big role now but five six years ago or something. It was a very American side of things. We're we're we're now catching up in Europe, and SDR is a sales development representative. These people are lead generation experts. That's what they're there for. They are basically finding leads or your account executives to close and their jobs. They're very social. They tend to be social, social settings. So they're spending a lot of time on social networks. But they're also doing, you know, normal networking. And they're also thinking about how to find customers in different places. So, you know, whether it's events, whether it's networking, whether it's, whether it's social, whether it's, you know, wherever it is, their job is to make sure that they're targeting the right people, and they're bringing those people in, they are very specialist, they tend to be more junior. And these people will, hopefully, in your organisation, end up being your account executives in the future. So it's a great place to bring in juniors, get them up to speed and then push them into their main role selling or closing. And the great thing about SDRs is, it's a fast moving role.

Speaker 3 15:43

They are really, really generating leads,

Kiran Gill 15:47

and having multiple conversations at times. And then moving on, and hot leads your account executives.

Alastair Cole 15:59

And for founders who feel like they're doing all of the sales function themselves, and they're not sure where to what to do next, in order to generate leads and drum up business, breeding, doing a bit more research about what an SDR should be doing day to day and putting that hat on would be a great place for founders to go to. So yeah, that thanks, thanks for that really, really interesting again, that we're kind of coming back to picking on the people. Because that's, that's how it goes. And you know, what we've, what we found is that, even if you're not super confident or comfortable with with posting, you know, original posts on social media, actually, a crucial part of the SDR is commenting and being part of the conversations happening online in order to warp the LinkedIn algorithm or others. So that you're, you're attracting comments and likes and feedback from others. And you're part of the discussion part of the sales discussion around your particular industry. So that SDR role, really critical. Let's move on to the next section on the wheel, which is number five. deal closing, absolutely crucial and a big, big favourite of ours. Why have you, why'd you pick process from this long list my friend,

Kiran Gill 17:33

we could go into all of these women, when you're talking about the 50 D, you could go as all of them because they're all interesting, or sales like myself. But if you think about process processes, that mentor when it comes to closing that you have a process in place, that you know how to close. So what happens when your SDR or whoever generates a lead, and it's time to do your poorly through a process. Now, if your process is random, you might do different things for different customers, the more structured or the more dynamic, your process tends to be where it's been actually formally documented, the better it is. So what we want to see here is that you've actually thought about your process. When you get a customer what happens? What happens to you, when you get a prospect? What do you do? You know, what are the things that you will do in that first stage? What happens when they go into the second stage of your sales process? Now that might be depending on how you've structured your sales process? And if you haven't, or maybe you haven't, it's just basic. But what happens when they go into multiplication? Or, or whatever you call it discovery, some companies call it and then recovery, what happens after that? Do you go into the present? Do you go to send in a contract? How do you do that? It's just all the way. As the documentation, the process, the easier it is to find where the problems are. So what you're looking for is you document the process, you put people through the process. And you might find that there might be bottlenecks within that process. And as the bottlenecks turn up, you're able to resolve those. And you'll find no other problems. But what you want to do is keep to a process. And depending on what you're selling, who you're selling it to, where you're selling it, you'll have different processes. So somebody who's buying from you directly on the net sale from the web, might have one process, somebody that you're selling to face to face might have a different process. So you might have multiple sales processes working at the same time. And your job as a sales expert or a sales manager within your company is to make sure that the right customer is in the right place in the right process and the right things are being done to that person to make sure that that sale

Alastair Cole 19:57

I'm working with a lot of elders. We've discovered that there can be a bit of reluctance about formalising. They'd feel like they're doing the right things at the right time. And they kind of inherently feel like they know what's next. And actually, it's been quite challenging to get them see the value of putting a more formalised structure process based, but once they've done once they do that, and they have the right steps, then actually, that stimulates discussion about well, is this opportunity in step one or step two? And then how do how should their behaviour and their approach be tailored to that, that opportunity, once it's once it's in a different stage, actually, it feels like it's kind of could be considered a waste of time, but actually, that that formalisation then stimulates discussion and, you know, more rigour and, and a better all round approach to sales. So yeah, we've seen lots of founders benefit from, from creating that, that process in their, how they go about closing their opportunities. Wonderful. And, you know, once that opportunity has landed, and the buyers on board, and they're paid up customer, which is fantastic, that's what we're so avoid driving towards, then it's about how do we ensure that they, they are a successful customer, for the business, which moves us in to Section six around the wheel, customer success, and we've picked marketing collateral to focus on. And that is something that I'm particularly passionate about, trying to ensure that even though they're now a customer, they've not been forgotten about, and they're being treated in exactly the same way as they would be before closing in terms of sharing great content and thought leadership with them. And the kinds of themes that you might consider using to engage customers or existing customers is maybe looking at the ongoing struggles they have in their marketplace, looking at the real problems that they face on a day to day basis. What's keeping them awake at night? And trying to empathise with those struggles? And you're bringing humour in another theme of marketing collateral you might use for existing customers is the desires, where do they want to be? Where do the potential that they could unlock in their role, their current role using your product or service? So that's about thinking about what, what ideal customer profile, are they? What are their dreams and desires, and again, using real life stories to try and engage them and keep them abreast of what your product and service could do in terms of achieving their desires. And then another theme, which might feel quite obvious is is talking about your product, so new features and benefits that are coming out in your product, or new elements of your service, testimonials, case studies, from other existing customers, which might spark new ways for them to engage, and either upsell or cross sell them. So creating really good marketing collateral for existing customers is really important. The seventh and final step is continuous improvement for bullets inside this section. Why have you picked sales pipeline analysis, my friend?

Kiran Gill 23:51

So if we think about the seven steps, what we've done now, and if you've gone through, no, no, we picked out certain points of the seven steps and spoke only about one or two things as we went around. But if you've done this correctly, or you, you're all doing this, if you got a company and you're selling something, you're going to have data, and that data turns into your sales pipeline. Now you will find, like I said in the section about your closing, that you might have bottlenecks within your process. And a dish is a great place where you are in continuous improvement, what you're trying to do on the seventh, you know the final step that brings you back around. What you're trying to do here is to analyse your data, and to make sure that you understand what's happening. So have you got enough leads coming in. Now, you might not have enough light leads coming in and the reason that might be is because your ideal customer profile isn't strong enough or you're not targeting the right people. So you can do something by as it and this is why sales yourself analysing your sales plan is so important because you will do once you have the data you will See, depending on your solution and what you're selling to different market, because you will have multiple pipelines, you will start seeing anomalies or problems. And your job as a sales manager or as a founder is to make sure that you deal with these so that it can be as fluid as possible that your sales pipeline isn't getting stuck with ISIS, and addressing problems before they happen. So that's why as in continuous improvement, I think your sales pipeline analysis is probably one of the most important things that you should be doing at all times.

Alastair Cole 25:34

Yeah, thank you. So to, you know, to go back to the seven steps, the way we think about it is that those first three are to set the foundations for sales strategy, getting the right team in place, and the text back. And the next three are really the execution of your sales function and how it should operate. So generating leads, closing deals, and ensuring customer success. And then the seventh continuous improvement is about refining, improving and optimising those previous six and ensuring that you're you're you're reviewing on a regular basis, and improving. So that's it I kind of a whistlestop tour around the seven sections. And we've picked seven out there, those 52 that sit under the seven, and actually those 52. And those seven sections are also the cornerstone, or the back backbone of our 360 degree sales diagnostic that we run. And we sit down with clients for one on one and hours one on one, and we have a Q & A session. After that we combine insights from this session and our desk research to create a detailed 360 degree sales diagnostic score. And based on our assessment, we make tailored recommendations in the areas we believe will make the most impact to your business. And after you've received that report, we follow up with a 60 minute show Intel to talk through that and any questions you've got. You head over to the uplift partnership, comm slash 360 You can sign up and start getting started moving towards your own score. Today, we're taking increasing numbers of startups through the 360. It's getting smoother and slicker. We're enjoying it and loving seeing the results of producing a score for the startup. And then and then our recommendations about what they should do next, either themselves with somebody else or with us. So take a look at that. And our next live event will be a recording of the sales scoop podcast, which is happening two weeks today on the 12th of September. Our focus for two weeks today is startup sales goals. So we're looking at that sales strategy, specifically overall sales goals and how startups and sales leaders can set themselves up for success. So at the same time, two weeks from today, you'll be able to find those events on LinkedIn after this webinar is finished. And really, that's us. We're coming to the end of our half hour and timed it very nicely. Thank you, Kiran, for all of your insights and thoughts and choosing those seven inside the 52. Any final words from you, my friend?

Kiran Gill 28:43

Oh, and if there's any questions, or if you want any more information, or just to have a chat about where you are, please reach out to either myself or other staff. Always happy to talk about anything about sales. And anything I can help with is always happy to give you a guiding, guiding kind of information or anything. But other than that, is it night? Have a great rest of the week, everybody.

Alastair Cole 29:06

Yeah. Well, thanks very much for tuning in and watching everybody in the comments on LinkedIn. It's been a great half hour. I hope that that made sense in terms of the seven steps for startup sales success. We'll see you for our next live event in two weeks. Thanks very much, everybody. Thanks, Kiran. Bye.