Startup Cocktail Only Prettier This Time

Sales Process Benefits

Role Perception


Identifying and following a specific sales process almost doubles your ability to hit quota.
Over 90% of salespeople do not follow a sales process. In 2009, only 42% of salespeople hit quota. However, of the 10% that do follow a process, 82% hit quota. (Research by CSO Insights)


How do you manage role perception?

1. Preach it
2. Focus salespeoples' attention

Preach it

If you want to be truly inspiring, focus on the why, not the what or the how. Why do you sell what you sell? People buy products / services because they fill needs - they solve problems. Salespeople are the problem solvers of the world - they find those with problems, then help solve them by selling solutions - and people want that. Help salespeople understand that they are superheros, and that there are people out there right now that are searching for the solutions they sell.

Focus attention

Once the sales process is discovered, the path to revenue is extremely clear. It will look something like this: first contact, demo, meeting, close.

Those are the activities salespeople should be spending their time doing. Writing reports, going to meetings, etc. are necessary evils that must be kept to a balanced minimum. In so doing, salespeople will understand that their primary role is that of a superhero - helping qualified leads buy the solutions they need.

In order to focus their attention on those "high-value" activities, they must be measured and reported. Doing so will focus salespeoples' attention on them and will help them understand the true nature of their role.

Performance Improvement

Using a sales process will help your organization improve its selling activities. First off, the simple act of measuring and reporting steps in the sales process will help salespeople focus on those selling activities and devote their attention to activities that will lead to sales.

In addition, they'll be able to see clearly if, where, and when they are getting better or worse at selling.

By measuring conversion rates between key selling activities, your organization will be able to identify company or even product-specific best practices within the sales process. Salespeople who are converting well are obviously doing something right, and knowing who is good at what portion of the process will enable you to extract the best practices of that person spread them to the rest of the team. This is especially powerful because those best practices will be specific to your company and products.

Stress Relief / Confidence Boosting

Once a salesperson's conversion rates have been measured, a work plan can be produced. This work plan will tell a salesperson exactly how many activities are needed to produce a certain sales goal. For example, if a salesperson converts 20% of leads to sales, then in order to make 10 sales a month, he / she must contact 2.3 new leads per day. If the salesperson's performance remains constant or improves, contacting 2.3 leads per day will absolutely lead to 10 sales per month.

Knowing exactly how much must be done to hit a goal (and especially knowing that it's a doable amount) greatly reduces the stress of a salesperson. Just do at least 2.3 leads per day and the goal will take care of itself. Ah. Relief!

Performance Prediction

By measuring key activities and the sales cycle time between them, sales predictions can be made more accurately. This is done by using a simple mathematical equation using past performance history of each salesperson and extrapolating that data into the future, based on deals already in the pipe. Booyah.

Decision Making

Startup Rock Star Cocktail

1. Ideation
2. Idea Validation (customer interview / survey)
3. Business Model
4. Experimentation
5. Task Management
6. Performance Reporting

New Business Ideation

Starting a business for the money is a pretty weak motive.

In all reality, if you're going to start a business, you want to start a business that solves problems you care about. You want to feel like you're saving the world in some way. You want to be driven by a fiery passion for solving a problem that you hate.

This method of business ideation seems to work pretty well. I've done it with myself and a couple friends now and so far I really like it. It's a sequenced list of questions that help find business ideas you're passionate about.

• What are you passionate about? (What do you think about / do in your free time?)
• Why are you passionate about it?
• Pick the 1-3 that you are most passionate about.
• What frustrations do you have with those things? (Start taking pictures or video of the problems you see.)
• What problems have you experienced or witnessed? (Experienced is better because you'll be more motivated to solve your own problems than someone else's.)
• Of those things, what is the problem you feel most passionate about solving? Why?
• Now, brainstorm solutions. (This may take a while.)
• Create a solution and sell it.

Mosiah 29:26

Do your business by the voice of the people.

Create an open-source design page for people to create our products for themselves - then we'll fill in the functionality.

(Use wire frames like Lucidcharts.)

Customer-Action-Based Sales Metrics

How to measure sales performance: by customer actions. In the end, what you want is for the customer to take an action (buy, sign up, create an account, etc.). In some sales processes, there are multiple steps that must be taken to get the customer from zero to buying, and the customer must take an action at each of those steps. Unless you have very lazy salespeople, it doesn't make sense to measure their actions, because they should always be doing what's necessary to move a client down the pipeline. (And even if they aren't, that will be shown by bad conversion rates in customer actions.)

An exception to this is the first contact, whether that's a cold call or some sort of referral contact. First contact attempts by the salespeople should be measured because , but beyond that customer action is what matters.

I worked at Qualtrics on the academic sales team for a while, where I made outbound cold calls to professors and attempted to set demos with them. The sales process looked like this:

1. Call
2. Set demo
3. Do demo with professor
4. Get professor to set up a demo with the decision-maker (usually the dean or dept chair)
5. Do demo with decision maker (and then other professors if dean wasn't convinced)
6. Close the deal

You can see that each milestone in the process (minus the first one) involved a customer action. First, a professor had to schedule a time for a demo. Then, he / she had to participate in a demo. Then, he /she had to give a recommendation to the decision maker. And on and on.

At the end of each step lies a customer action, and that's really what should be measured.

http://amacus.net/blog/2011/01/measure-your-sales-productivity-by-your-customers-actions/