This SalesCast is brought to you by SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this episode, Scott and Lincoln discuss the concept of time to first value, customer success and customer acquisition. How to have a successful pull through rate for potential customers and the cost of free. Key areas we cover are:
Detailed Notes:
This episode is brought to you by SalesQualia. If you’re a startup looking to Find Customers, Grow Revenue and Build Your Sales Process, check out the Startup Selling Program.
In this episode, I interview Peter Cohan, most known for his “GREAT DEMO!” system and training – teaching software companies the RIGHT way to demo their products.
Key areas we cover are:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
Podcast Notes
01:55 – How did Peter get into teaching demos.
04:30 – How to assemble data on a when a sale happens.
07:35 – Doing it right the first time your demo’s going to be much shorter and you might only have to do one of those and get you to the finish line.
09:00 – No such thing as a standard customer/demo.
15:00 – Doing discovery, ask sufficient questions to be able to design a demo that fits the customer’s need.
23:18 – The curse of knowledge, when you have seen it all before and you forget that every customer is unique. Put the knowledge you think you have behind your back and ask the right questions.
26:05 – Pre answering questions before they are asked takes away the role of the audience. Takes away the ability to interact.
28:47 – How to address having new people in the meeting that you haven’t had a chance to do needs assessment with.
33:46 – Always start a demo that has people you haven’t interacted with before with three questions; what’s your name, job title and what would they like to take away from the demo.
41:18 – Turning the demo from being all about the vendor, to being all about the customer.
46:33 – Have the fewest number of steps to complete any particular task.
50:27 – Manage your infrastructure. Expect your hard disk will crash! Be ready for anything.
57:17 – Do the last thing first, don’t teach people how things work but show them what good things you’re offering to help them solve their problems.
Resources mentioned or related to this podcast
Key words: startup selling, sales, product demos, scott sambucci, salesqualia, startups, enterprise sales
This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this episode, our special guest Patrick Campbell, Co-Founder and CEO at Price Intelligently, discusses the hardest parts of pricing products for startup CEOS, the fears associated with not making a sales because of price, his survey method for identifying the price prospects are willing to pay for your product, and how to deal with raising a product’s price and the associated retention drop off. Key areas covered:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
Podcast Notes
03:26 – The hardest thing for companies to learn about pricing their products.
08:50 - How does an entrepreneur deal with the fear of not wanting to blow a deal?
11:56 – Always make sure that your price increase is worth it.
14:50 – Guidepost suggestions to try.
16:10 – Four main questions recommended to ask.
24:00 – Finding the value metric and making sure reinforce value with your price.
25:10 – How to handle customers who are used to pay per user and how to overcome that bureaucratic barrier.
31:20 – How would you recommend handling that price question when it’s too early to actually give a price?
39:30 – Recognizing the problem children.
42:00 – Handling a price range that’s large.
43:20 – When you’re better off charging more than trying to charge less.
48:30 – Should your price be exactly 100 or can it be 99?
Resources mentioned or related to this podcast
This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this episode, our special guest Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist for The Bridge Group, Inc., gives advice on hiring Sales Development Reps for startup CEOS, discusses the importance of hiring veterans and how beneficial they are to young companies, as well as a plethora of other great tactics and tips. Key areas covered are:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
Podcast Notes
02:15 – The Trigger event for Trish to write the book “The Sales Development Playbook.”
04:13 – How do you define Sales Development for people?
05:20 – The Five Whys. Why listen? Why Care? Why change? Why you? Why now?
06:45 – What advice would you give a team to stop doing now and start doing right away relating to sales development.
07:55 – What is the one thing startup CEOs should do that they’re not already doing?
10:00 – What’s the first thing startup CEOs should do where they misstep early in the process of setting up the sales development process?
12:56 – Why a 50/50 breakdown making a good hire.
13:30 – If you can’t afford to hire more than one, should you hire one?
14:15 – Reasons why outsourcing Sales Development Rep functions to a vendor fails.
16:05 – Why don’t startup CEOs spend more effort on the time piece of the investment?
18:15 – Why military to civilian transitions and job shifters are good targets for potential SDRs?
20:00 – The one question to immediately ask to vet out if a candidate is worth pursuing in a formal interview process.
25:03 – After passing the 40 second interview, what’s the next part of that call that makes for a good SDR call.
26:45 – How do you use numbers if you don’t know those could actually apply?
32:00 – How do you vet out whether or not somebody has budget early on?
34:28 – Why to choose a scale of 1 to 4.
36:05 – A skeleton key question to make a person not guarded or have their armor on to open up.
40:00 – Shutouts to make sure people hear the message.
41:02 – How to reach Trish.
Resources mentioned or related to this podcast
SalesCast 18 – Revenue Acquisition Portfolio
This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this special, On the Road with Scott Sambucci episode of the Startup Selling podcast, Scott discusses the idea of Revenue Acquisition Portfolios; a way of looking at the amount of time (investment) you place into different lead funnels versus the return on that investment (sales). Key areas covered:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this episode, Scott speaks with special guest Melanie Wong from Box.com about her experience transitioning from being a lawyer into becoming a top prospector for big customers at Box.com. Key areas covered are:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
Podcast Notes
02:15 – What Melanie is working on.
04:53 – Law is cool and fun.
06:00 – What was most frustrating making a conversion to get into sales.
09:05 – An example where a cold call, has turned a client into a mega client.
11:30 – How to find these project engineers.
15:00 – The pitch to start off on a cold call.
16:50 – What is the pattern to use.
24:10 – How to start the email, “I’d love to introduce you to our executive team.”
27:17 – The job of an SDR, Sales Development Rep.
28:24 – In that cadence of call, call, email, email, how to craft that out in a way that is effective.
31:21 – What are the early signals that a deal is going south?
34:41 – What constitutes a hard question to know they want to get into this now.
36:44 – The strategy to navigate through trying to find multiple people.
Resources mentioned or related to this podcast
This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.
In this episode, Scott and Robert discuss the 10-Day Sales Call Challenge, a short, focused project to help build familiarity towards the sales process and understanding how to develop metrics for success. Key areas we cover are:
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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!
Podcast Notes
02:00 – What is the 10 Day Sales Call Challenge?
03:30 – How to be ready and able to do the 10-day challenge.
08:10 – What are you doing to keep that pipeline filled or to keep up with 10 calls a day.
11:55 – How to make that first contact with a prospect to go into the whole 10 calls.
17:05 – Try and create familiarity towards a sales opportunity
21:00 – How much better of a response you have in an InMail message versus just doing straight cold calling.
24:05 – What are some other you know avenues, some other portals you would use to try and yourself out there, try and find some more of these prospects for your 10 days sales calls challenge.
28:40 – Suggestions to finding good and worthwhile channels, and how to create metrics of success.
33:05 – What is the biggest piece of learning that you have made so far?
36:10 – Things to really stress on.
Resources mentioned or related to this podcast