7 Quick Wins for Startup Founders in Sales

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:06

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a live show for startups who want to improve how they sell. Every fortnight we tackle the hottest topics in startup sales and bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced sellers. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for the day. I'm a software engineer, ex-software engineer, and computer scientist with two decades experience in sales and marketing. I'm a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership, and delighted to be joined today by my co-founder Kiran. Hello Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:43

Hi, Alastair. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill. I'm also a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. And I've got over two years or two years, no two decades worth of experience in front line sales and sales operations working both in technology and in finance.

Alastair Cole 1:00

Some would say even a B2B sales guru, I think. So today, the topic today is very exciting. Seven quick wins for startup founders in sales. We know they struggle sometimes. And we're here to help them just accelerate their tech, their tech startups with seven quick wins. And we're going to try and move pretty quickly. Today we're talking about acceleration, we're talking about quick wins, we're talking about pulling the levers that are going to make the quickest or generate the biggest bang for your buck very quickly. What do you think is clear? And when we talk about quick wins, how important are they? What are they? What's his thoughts?

Kiran Gill 1:47

Well, the thing is quick wins. It's one of those strange terms that people try to bring up because you always think that you don't have to put much effort into something and it's a quick win because it's going to happen quickly. Especially in sales. You know, everybody wants a quick win and sales call. Everybody wants one of those. However, there are things within your process that you might be able to implement very quickly that might have drawn amazing effects straight away that will help you just boost your sales. So I know we're coming up into the summer season now we're seven weeks away from you know, basically the holiday starting. This is the spring to know ladies and gentlemen, we've got to get it on now. If we don't get it on now, we're probably going to fall behind and hate to or the second half of the year is going to be more difficult. So now's the time to get our skates on. And these seven quick wins. These are quick kinds of things that you can get into your sales process, something just accelerated very quickly to get some deals across the line before the summer season comes up.

Alastair Cole 2:49

Yes, spot on. And you know, quick wins aren't always the answer. Certainly they're not the answer for long term growth. But quick wins can be used to catalyse a process, you know, reenergize kickstart your sales function if it's slowed down, or it's stalled. And the truth is that in sales, like a lot of things, there's kind of two speeds, you need to be sowing the seeds for future success. And at the same time, you can look at what can be done quickly in which levers can be pulled. And that's where we're going to be today looking at seven quick wins that can accelerate your sales function. And we're going to couch these seven around our 360 sales diagnostic.

Kiran Gill 3:36

Yep. So when we analysed when we built our dashboard, or our tool that basically analyses sales functions, what we did was we split it into seven different segments. Now the reason we did that was, as we analysed everything, we built the 360 to find out what was the actual problem within sales functions? And how could we accelerate your business as quickly as possible by analysing the different sections. So you see that there's seven different sections. So we start off with sales strategy, that is the fundamental foundation for your business. And that's what we look at straightaway, have you got the strategy in place in your sales strategy to make sure that you'll be you're going to be able to be successful, we then move on to team structure because you know, team is human. That's what we are, we want to make sure that we've got the right people doing the right jobs with the right skill set. And then we move on to technology stack stack, because technology plays a massive role now in sales, whether whatever you're selling, so unless you have the right stack, you're not going to be successful. We then move into more of this process side of things or the sales process itself. We have a look at lead generation, and we look at your lead generation process. All the things that go with that, whether it's technology, your people, your your material that you're using, and then we move into deal closing where obviously we want to make sure that those ones that we're bringing into the funnel, that we're able to convert them and close them. And then we're moving into the final two sections. Section six is about customer success, we want our customers now we want to keep them, we need to retain our customers, make sure they're not going anywhere else, or they're getting the value out of our products. And then finally, we need to make sure that we're continuously improving our processes, our tools, our people, and that we're constantly looking at improving across the board in our sales function, because we're never going to stop still, we're always going to try to grow as best as we can.

Alastair Cole 5:32

Yeah, yeah, thank you. That's a great whistlestop tour. And then underneath those seven sections, we overlay 52 different metrics that sit under there. And that's where that's how we score 360. And so we've divided into all the data that we've got from the 50 Plus startups that have been through the 360. And pulled out the seven areas that are the ones where you can pull the lever for a quick win and get an immediate impact in your sales function. The 360 that Kiran talked about this thing is something that we use for all of our clients, and generates doubles in number of meetings, for exes, win rates, and provide a healthy return on investment, and that. So let's get into the seven now. What we're going to do is work our way round the Wheel, starting in the sales strategy space, and we've picked out buyers journey analysis, which scores just 31.1%. So it's much lower than the average in sales strategy and a much overlooked area. So at 31.1%. Talk to me here and about a little bit about buyer's journey analysis, what is it? How important is it? Okay,

Kiran Gill 6:49

We spend a lot of time when we're setting up our sales processes, looking at how we sell. However, something that tends to get underlooked is people knowing how our customers are actually purchasing our products or our services. So it's very easy to just generically think they're going to purchase the way we're trying to sell to them. Actually, you have two processes, you have the sales process, and you have the buyer's journey. And what we need to do is make sure that those two processes are actually linked together. And that we make sure that our clients are getting all our protected potential clients are getting the right information or the right tools or whatever it is along the way. Now, what tends to happen is companies tend to have a very simplistic view of the buyer's journey. And they have a kind of an understanding, but they kind of make it up ad hoc. The quick win here is actually by just getting a piece of paper and sitting down for a few hours, you can quickly jot it out and look from the customer's point of view what the actual process is. If you were the customer, how would you purchase your product from you? And what you can find there is a quick gap analysis. Oh my god, we're missing this fundamental thing. When we're going to networking events, we're actually not tape, we're not doing any research, how are we going to be, you know, that's a quick win. These are simple little things, only by mapping this out, will you actually find that out, and it doesn't take that long to do.

Alastair Cole 8:17

And I love that with a pencil and paper, you're sitting down, you're listing out the different channels that you're how you're engaging your buyers, and how successful each of those is, what your funnel mix is, and how you're going out to market and then the comps and content that you're delivering to the buyer each step. So you know, your idea of pen, a pen, pencil and paper is fantastic. You can sketch out those touch points and then have a think about what messages are being delivered at that moment and how successful they are. That's the analysis piece, right? You're getting the data from your various tools, website analysis, social media analysis, how well your email newsletter is doing. And bringing all of that data together. And really where the rubber hits the road is in the language that you're using, right the search terms that people are looking for, for your product or service. And then how you're engaging them, what verbs you're using within your calls to action to engage them, whether you're in the awareness stage, consideration stage four decision stage, you know, there's the relevant language that needs to be used and that experience tailored just for them. So that's the number one buyer's journey analysis. Second to within the team structure. So looking at your sales team. We've got roll definitions, right, which is kind of at 42.2. There are areas that are much lower in the team like sales, learning development, we see average scores at just 30%. Right, but obviously, sorting the people's side of things and skills is not really a quick win. So we've picked something in the role definitions that actually you can move quite quickly. What should a startup be doing my friend, if they wanted to clarify the roles within their sales function, what should they do?

Kiran Gill 10:09

So the sales process is we have multiple things that's happening all the way through, and you need different skill sets at different points and different people within your team might be better to actually do certain parts of the process than you are, the easiest thing to do would be and this what tends to happen in most startups is you tell your salesperson that they have to do their lead gen, closing and probably their customer success on their own. And they'll probably do ad hoc marketing, whatever, that pretty much does everything. However, the quick way to win here is if you've got a team, that is no, you're not a solo entrepreneur who's stuck with everything. So pretty much you have to do everything anyway. But if you've got a bit of a team, you can start splitting up those the actual tasks that you have to do, and put them into defined roles. So you can get one person doing the lead gen part, you get another person who's doing the deal closing part. And you could have another person who's looking after the customer's success, that doesn't stop them overlapping, and it doesn't stop them helping out. But you've got one person who takes control of the lead gen. And they know that it's their responsibility to get those campaigns launched. And vice versa, and vice versa. And again, this is a great thing that you can do. I've seen my friend and colleague asked to do this so many times, it's a great thing for a whiteboard or a piece of paper, you list out all the tasks, you start splitting them up.

Alastair Cole 11:38

And we've got that between the three of us as founders don't we have a kind of single single slide and we've sketched out what are the kind of gold, silver and bronze things that everybody's doing in sales, and it doesn't doesn't feel like a lot, but actually you get that clarity then right and with the clarity, we see with our clients comes additional confidence. And then guess what they end up starting closing more deals than previously. So just getting some bullets down on a piece of paper, you know who's doing what and when that rolls into cadence as well. So difficult to affect the team structure really quickly. But defining those roles a bit better, will certainly help. And we know that definitions in sales are helpful, right? HubSpot found that 68% more accounts are one when there's a stronger ideal customer profile defined and sure that isn't your people. This is about having the words and the definitions down on paper so that the rest of the process is built on stone and not sound. section number three is inside tech stack, and we pick the analytics and reporting tools that startups are using because that score is very low at just 35.6 on average and tech stack. Why are analytics and reporting tools? You know, so important? How can they how can they How can I deliver a quick word, my friend

Kiran Gill 13:04

tends to be ad hoc. In most companies or at the basic level, you tend to have salespeople or management using Excel, or backs or pieces of paper or whatever, because it's all about doing isn't it? It's so important, we just need to get things done. However, unless we have the data, and we understand what we're doing and what our actions are, and what the results are, we won't know what we can change to make it better. And the quick win here is ladies and gentlemen, that most tools or CRMs that you're using nowadays, come with dashboards, they come with analytics. The strange thing is and what we've noticed is the fear from a lot of companies to actually use those analytics or use those tools effectively to make sure that they're getting that data. So there are other tools that you can use to link in with that CRM to make sure that you get a robust understanding of what your analytics and your dashboards are. So that when you do your review, at the end of the week, you actually have proper data to say, oh, that piece of content that we sent out last week, no one opened it. Oh, or something that we did do was amazingly effective. And we need to do more of that.

Alastair Cole 14:16

Yeah, rolling that data up through dashboards that are accessible on the desktop on your mobile is really important. This is the engine room of the dashboard for our 360 sales diagnostic showing Recent Activity wins, win rate income generated and how your 360 score changed over the last 90 days. And as a result of that, your sales and that data comes from multiple points but it's rolled up easily to get easy to see what's happening. Sometimes you know they do need a bit of interpretation. But overall we see relatively low scores in this area. I think that that is a quick way to try out a new tool. Come and work with us to get your sales data reported in a way that you can see where the gaps are and plug them. Let's dive out of the tech stack and into the fourth segment around the wheel. Very important area lead generation and technology in the gym here scoring not terribly, but well below par at 38.9, on average across the 53 startups that we've put through so far. Technology Lead Gen. I mean, we did a huge show on this last week. And I know that you're kind of self confessed lead gen tech junkie Kiran, talk to us about what quick wins can be made in terms of sorting technology out for lead gen. Right.

Kiran Gill 15:48

So when it comes to technology, there's loads of new stuff coming out AI and generative AI is pretty much getting thrown into all sorts of lead gen tools now. So the tool that you're using doesn't have that you're already behind the curve, and you're pretty much turning into a dinosaur. So you need to be careful. Now, I'm not telling you that you need to keep on changing to the next best thing, because there's so much new stuff out there. But our last show on hyper personalised outreach was, it changed the way I looked at things because suddenly, I noticed a lot of the tools or some of the tools that I used to use weren't as good as they were. And some of the new tools, we talked about one called Sally, were there, they aren't very, very good. But they're still not at that point where you probably think, Oh, should I be using it? So you need to keep on looking at technology? Is your technology stack or your lead gen stack up to date? Up to up to scratch? Is it doing what it's supposed to do? And that links back into your dashboard? Is it bringing in if it's doing good, and you're getting enough leads through why change it you'll find keep an eye on it. However, if you suddenly notice, hold on, we haven't reviewed our tech stack or our lead gen tech for a while, you probably need to speak to somebody to say, hey, is there something that we're using? Should we be looking to do something different? Hold on, we want to try something a little bit more exotic. Is there something out there? You know, and again, you can speak to us. We know, I have a pretty good knowledge of what's out there and what's working. And some things that might not fit me might be a good fit for you. So always reach out and have a chat with us.

Alastair Cole 17:22

Yeah, totally. I mean, I posted a video about this on Friday, last week about how it is kind of looking at your technology stack. In lead gen and other areas, you you have to both be you know, wedded to something that's going to deliver in in, you know, 612 months time, but also playing with the new stuff, it's challenging, and there's a lot of time needs to be invested in seeing what's happening, because you might, you know, missing the boat on a new wave of platforms or new kinds of technology might not seem that bad. But if your competitors are all diving into that space, and they're generating leads, you know, 10 times quicker and cheaper than you are then that is going to be a long term problem. You know, we know that those lead gen technology tools can deliver great results, right? We've seen it and it's just as well because 87% of buyers, According to Forrester report from just a few months ago, 87% of b2b buyers expect to be delighted. Before and after purchase. Right? The pressure is on the expectations are super high. And as you said, you know, hyper personalised outreach is almost getting into table stakes. We're not quite there yet. But those kinds of highly personalised assets are tailored not just with your name and email address, but tailored to your current business challenges and what's been happening. The news for you and your competitors is it's a way to cut through the noise and technology can help that in the area of lead generation. Let's move around to slot five and the wheel within deal closing the area of picked is deal qualification methodology. You know, 54.4 is better than pretty much all the ones we've reviewed so far. And yet it's still underperforming. Because there are easy ways to get your deal qualification methodology really high really quickly. Where do you see the kind of deficiencies occur and in the startups that we talked to, where are they, where are they struggling? Or were they missing stuff in the deal qualification methodology.

Kiran Gill 19:29

I've had several conversations this year from startups who have got a lot of deals that are stuck in their actual pipeline. They were probably expecting things to move on a little bit better. And I think all of us have had that kind of experience this year. 2024 didn't kick off much better than the end of 23. So what we have is a lot of stuck deals where how to unstick deals is by qualifying them. Most people will say oh yes, we call them mollified. However, qualification isn't a one time trick. It's something that you're supposed to do throughout the deal cycle. And what you notice, if you do deal qualification correctly, is you're suddenly noticed that a deal that you might have scored high several months ago when you started talking to him, has now suddenly fallen off the cliff. And it pretty much isn't a deal any longer. And you're going to have to start it from scratch, though it's sitting in your CRM, still at 75% the way through, and you're expecting it to close in 30 days, though that 30 days has been pushed on about seven times. So doing your qualification is the easiest thing that you can do. And by just implementing it into your sales process, what takes nothing but more than 10 minutes of really thinking about doing it? Because one thing that we do have is our product, and I've posted it there in the comments there in our LinkedIn comments, which is revenue coach and revenue coach is a deal qualification tool. And it's free currently. So you should be using that if you haven't got anything. It's a great tool to use. It has a simple way of setting itself up. If you need help setting up I'm happy to talk to you about it. The candidates in the comments, go there, sign up, start deal qualification, start your deal qualification straightaway on your deals and get those deals that are stuck currently unstuck. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 21:27

nice. Thanks. So a revenue coach is a personalised sales coach for the price of a coffee. Currently free. We're on the paywall soon. And we know that it's important right being able to do one of the things that a revenue coach does brilliantly is tell you what the next move is. And you have to be dynamic within deal closing. It's absolutely essential. McKinsey found that 86% of sellers struggle while closing the deal to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of buyers. So essential that you are dynamic. And using a tool like revenue coach can help keep you on your toes still. The sixth area we're going to focus on is customer success. And within that customer success process, underperforms quite badly, it's really important only gets 33.3% on average. And obviously, you know, the startups that we're talking to they're focused on revenue growth, they're focused on income growth, they're looking to grow, grow, grow, land deals close and move on. And often they're neglecting sending that early part and beyond customer service. So what are you seeing in this area here, and that is a troubling, troubling area.

Kiran Gill 22:49

And just just to give you a quick anecdote about this, I was speaking to a VC not so long ago. And one of the metrics that they look at, when they look at your company, is if you're looking to IPO or float it or sell it in the future. One of the things that VCs look at and when assessing a company is retention of your clients, because they're not going to invest into you, they're gone are the days when people used to just throw money at startups. So your retention is really important. That means your customer success process needs to be tip top. The easiest way to do this, and what I have seen in a lot of the startups or we've just been to and assessed is that there is no process and it's pretty much been made as it goes along. It has to be in your sales playbook. And if you haven't got a sales playbook that is covering all of your sales process, then you probably are behind the curve, and you're not kind of professional, and your agencies are going to be off. So just implementing a sales playbook that has that process in there, showing you exactly what you're supposed to do when a client is, you know, when you onboard a client, when you need to send a certain email to them to make sure that they're using it when you need to reach out to them to see if there's more users, whatever it is, you need to have your playbook that gives you that gives whoever is running that side of your business, the cadence to make sure that you don't lose customers. Because tell you the truth. If you're looking to sell or you're looking to grow, people who are investing into your company are going to look at those numbers.

Alastair Cole 24:24

And it's that for me, you know, if you always start at the beginning of your journey, your customer success journey, it's really about what happens immediately after that sale. So, you know, looking at a three month plan of what should happen to customers, once they've purchased, obviously, there's a good chance that they're, you know, they'll have a free trial, a 14 day free trial or something at the start. So looking after them immediately is a quick win. Because, you know, in that initial period, there's a chance they, you know, turn away from the software or they're going to rebook a second month's subscription. So it's really important to show them a lot of love. Early on And that can be done quite quickly thinking about what message are they going to get, even if it's handwritten to start with within the first week, the first few days, the first month, and then and then beyond. So that's the first 100 days. So that can be done quite quickly, again, you sit down with a pencil and paper, it might just be a really heartfelt welcome message that goes out to thank them for either signing up or becoming a paying customer. So really important that early part of the customer success process. And then the last, final seventh and final area is within continuous improvement. And we see that sales team skills and training is very poor, very low down 36.7 is the average score across the 53 startups that we've put through so far. What are your thoughts on this area of continuous improvement and, and sales, team skills and training, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 25:55

So it tends to get overlooked, especially in startups, we think we bring people in, or we don't really have to worry about training people because we expect them to have the knowledge. However, all things are just moving so rapidly now in sales. So you need to have a real understanding of what the new techniques are there. You know, if you're bringing in new tools, so carving out a bit of time every week, where you actually fundamentally say to your team, or yourself, if you are the team, to say, hey, you know what, one hour, two hours a week, we're going to dedicate that to training and we're going to try to make this you know, trying to make a formula, not a formula, but make you feel reality of making it week on week, and that we keep on make sure that we're just making that we have everything in place. Do we know that the new techniques out there are we've got everything in one place, just making sure that you're keeping to it because it's easy to let training and skill just slip away, you've done it once, don't need to do it again, learning on the fly. But you don't know if you're doing the right thing. So just spending a little bit of time watching a few videos can be something that can be opening up your eyes straight away, going to a seminar look, making sure that you're constantly developing yourself into the best salesperson you could potentially be. And you've

Alastair Cole 27:13

talked a little bit about a big number kind of, we talk a lot about sales actions, there's a big number you keep throwing at me, remind me what is that?

Kiran Gill 27:23

I think the number is 618, that I've kind of done a bit of work in the background of how many sales actions per month you probably need to do to close around four clients. This is for a product that is medium priced. So we're talking anywhere between 1,000 to 5000 pounds. And what you're looking at there is around about a 90 day sales cycle. So if you do it that way, what was the other 70 Coming deals should be close to

Alastair Cole 27:57

18. I think May 6-18 is the number four for deals. And you know, it sounds really daunting, but that includes automated actions, right? That yes, products are doing for us. And, you know, you talked about AI earlier. Garner sees that 27% extra bandwidth can be generated or created for sellers if they're able to harness AI sales tools, really important that you can pick up in the sales skills. And if technology is harnessed properly, positively, then you think we see a 43% Higher quota than those who are overwhelmed by technology. So really important that those skills are worked on. So that's the end of those seven, those seven quick wins across those areas. As I mentioned a lot of that data, or all of that data, all those numbers that all comes from the startups that have been through our 360 sales diagnostic, obviously, the data is anonymized. And you can read more about the 360 at partnership.com. Forward slash 360. We showed a screen earlier of our dashboard, but this is what it looks like when you get your score. We break down into each of the seven areas with recommendations and traffic lights on each of the 52 metrics. And there's a rolling dashboard of progress in the last 3060 and 90 days. So that's the 360 website forward slash 364. No more. Before we wrap up, we've got quite a busy month, this month with live events.

Kiran Gill 29:38

Oh, sorry, I might. So next week we're at London tech week. So we're going to be in London. Both Alastair and myself are going to be at London tech week and Olympia. We're then going to be moving on to tobacco docks, which is also in London for the AI summit towards the end of the week, and I think that's the tour 11th from the 12th and right, yep, that's it. And then we move on to our additional, what we'll be having in two weeks is the big three takeaways that are going to be coming from London tech week in sales. And that will be in two weeks time and then two weeks after that. So you've got the whole month planned. We're going to have our big five foundations for 2025.

Alastair Cole 30:24

Awesome. Yeah. So basically lots going on in the uplift world. You know, you can find out what's happening over at our events page theupliftpartnership.com/events. That is loosely how we're going to be treating each of the networking opportunities during the day in the evenings. Next week is going to be a huge week with tech week and others. And there's a lot of information there on as Kiran said, our next show is two weeks today, next live show two weeks today, where we'll be bringing from London Tech Week Three big sales takeaways very much focused on sales. Well, that's all for today. Thank you very much for your time. Kiran. hugely appreciated.

Kiran Gill 31:04

Thank you very much. Same here. All there

Alastair Cole 31:07

it is now to say thanks, everybody for watching and goodbye. You say bye bye