Building a World-Class Sales Force

Gallup Management Article
http://gmj.gallup.com/content/331/building-worldclass-sales-force.aspx

Forget Slide Decks - Metrics!!!

While most Angel List profiles include incredible product photos and videos, there is one startup that stands out among the pack. This is the only photo on the remind101 Angel List profile.

http://startupstats.com/this-startup-reminds-us-why-the-best-dont-need-pitch-decks-2012-02/
Article by the founders: http://betashop.com/post/14249821547/behind-the-scenes-how-fab-raised-40-million-with-a

Keep it Fast and Simple

Selling Power 500

The 500 top companies in America – which employ the world’s largest sales forces – depend on more than 21 million salespeople to achieve their revenue goals


http://www.sellingpower.com/magazine/article.php?i=1318&ia=9152#topArticlePages

More Lessons Learned - Time Efficiency

Now that we have a better idea of who our customer is and what the pain is that they feel, our interviews are getting much shorter and more focused - which is great, because our true customers are high-level executives who have limited time and patience. :)

I've found that we're able to get a lot of the information we need from their subordinates, specifically size of the organization and current solutions. It's basically a qualifying activity, which is cool because we're all about sales, so meshing sales and lean start-up is both fun and obviously necessary.

I've pretty much gotten our qualifying down to 2 questions, though our interviews still lack structure because we still don't really know what we don't know! This is a crazy, crazy life to live.

Nail it Then Scale it / Lean Start Up Lessons Learned

We're trying hard to be smart about this whole start-up business. Limit risk. Sell before we build. Allow the market to create what it needs instead of forcing our ideas on it.

But it's been an extremely rough road. We've interviewed somewhere around 35 companies now, and are finally beginning to understand who our real customer is - and who we should be interviewing.

Here's something I've noticed so far - the people we've talked to can be separated into two criteria for being our customer. The first is their position within the company. Front-lines salespeople are not our customer. They're barely even our user. The majority of the early interviews I did were with front-lines people, who validated the concept to some degree, but didn't give it a really strong reaction either way. That made it extraordinarily difficult to understand the feedback we were getting. It wasn't negative... but it wasn't positive. So I felt like we were on to something, but hadn't really nailed it, and had no idea what to change to get to the right answer.

Then we interviewed a couple sales managers, and they were all for it. Some of them. Which led to our second conclusion - size matters.

Smaller organizations are too intimate to need a tool for management. The managers interface with their people every day and know exactly what's going on.

Larger organizations, however, do need a tool for performance management. We've hypothesized the threshold to be at about 10 salespeople. We've interviewed a few that have teams of 7, and they give validation, but not very strong. There seems to be a very strong correlation between size and need, with the largest organizations (300 and 100 salespeople) being the most adamant about the value of this concept.

Why to Mechanize while your team is still small

If you have a small (less than 10) sales organization, you should still Arena Machines because if you wait until your team is bigger, you'll have to force a major culture change on a much larger group of people and get them all to adopt it. If you do it now, it's just a good idea for one thing, and for another, it will aid in disciplined use of the methodology as you grow. No transition needed later. Boom.