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Startup Selling: Talking Sales with Scott Sambucci

Over the past twenty years, I’ve led three Silicon Valley startups to their first customers and revenue, and sold everything from financial data, enterprise software, and vaporware to cabinet doors, amusement park daily programs, and “would you like fries with that…?” My customers have included the largest financial institutions in the world, top US Universities, cabinet door makers and people that eat at Applebees and go to amusement parks... I’ve learned a lot, and made a few, ahem, well… a lot, of mistakes. Here in The Sales Podcast with Scott Sambucci, I share the lessons learned from my past two decades of selling. In each episode, I discuss a specific topic in selling and sales strategy like how to find new prospective customers, how to manage leads, how to run an effective sales meeting, uncovering customer needs, and developing pricing strategies. Episodes are a mix of guest interviews, observations from the field, and sales techniques that I’m using every single day. And people that care about such things, I’ve written two books, been a TEDx Speaker, been featured on CNBC, The Financial Times and NPR. Oh… I’m also a husband, a dad, and a three-time Ironman triathlete. Build your sales process so that you can have the company you imagine. The Sales Podcast with Scott Sambucci will help you get there.
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Now displaying: 2017
Dec 5, 2017

David is the leading expert when it comes to sales compensation. His book - Compensating the Sales Force - talks about building out a sales team: how to build a sales team, compensate your sales team, decide between paying commissions vs. bonuses, and so much more. Aside from David’s book, Compensating the Sales Force, he is also the author of The Sales Growth Imperative, and he publishes the Sales Compensation Almanac annually. He is the Senior Vice President at the Alexander Group where he works on Sales Compensation.

In this episode we talk about the difference between Professional Sales ‘Producers’ and Sales Representatives, when to use stock options for sales compensation, why it’s important to adjust quotas on a regular basis, the cost of selling, and much more.

Show Notes
0:33 - Introduction to David and his book, Compensating the Sales Force

3:00 - What The Alexander Group does and how Sales Compensation fits into the broader spectrum

7:30 - The 3 Modes of Startups - Start Up, Ramp Up, Scale Up

11:00 - Sales Professional as Shakespearean Actor vs Playwright
12:20 - Market Makers - Part sales / part marketing. Situational Job b/t Founder Selling and Professional Scalable Sales Organization
15:00 - Two types of sellers :
1) Producer  - Real estate agents
2) Sales Representative - Buying Labor, Paying for Persuasion, Base + Commission; Quota-based.
20:30 - When to use stock options for sales comp, and why it shouldn’t be a significant amount of compensation
22:55 - The risks of the Producer Model

25:16 - Expiring vs Flat Guarantee
29:25 - Varied revenue types and sales models

33:30 - $100,000 and $160,000 are the standard pay levels for the tech market
34:23 - Why you need to adjust your quotas all the time
36:30 - Why you shouldn’t do a draw commission, no clawbacks
38:00 - Paying SDR-AE-CS
40:50 - The Cost of Selling & Persuasion Responsibilities
46:12 - Commit to the Money, and not the Mechanics

Resources:
www.alexandergroup.com
https://www.worldatwork.org/
https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/08/inside-boxs-updated-s-1/

Nov 17, 2017

Guest: Stacy McKenzie

Stacy McKenzie is the director of Lucid Studios--at Lucid they are developing the next level of camera technology to enable VR and AR content creation with real-time image processing. She is also the founder of Optical North, a San Francisco based video and film production team dedicated to bringing vision and creativity to every story.

Show Notes & Topics:

  • Description of what Stacy does
  • “Hour glass effect” model for scaling business and growth
  • How startups should leverage video to market and sell to their target market
  • The importance of building long-term relationships with clients
  • Know your message
  • Reasons to use video; e.g., appeal to mobile users, tutorials, company introductions
  • Video is like a personal conversation, solves problems with first impressions
  • Stats and sales benefits; e.g.,  email campaigns, Google stats, ROI
  • Think “one on one” conversation with ideal customer
  • Video based on vanity or branding strategy--what’s the goal of your video?
  • Have a platform for sharing video
  • Look smart as an authority in your market
  • Video is the “hook”
  • Tradeoff: low-end quality video vs. professional video
  • Starter package for cadence of low-end and high-quality videos; e.g., elevator pitch, call to action, video blogs
  • How to get seen in your target market
  • Qualification questions for hiring video companies
  • Find videos you like and refer to those when qualifying a company
  • Document special events
  • Communication is key between you and video company

Links & Resources:

Stacy McKenzie on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stacymckenzie/

Contact email: opticalnorth@gmail.com

Lucid Studios: http://getlucidcam.com/

Optical North Productions: http://www.opticalnorth.com/

Optical North videos: https://vimeo.com/user28608336

TedX Talk on Virtual Memory with Stacy McKenzie: https://vimeo.com/200733646

UN Women, inequality in the workplace: http://www.unwomen.org/en

He for She Campaign, Emma Watson: www.heforshe.org/en


 

 

Nov 7, 2017

 

Guest: Steven Benson, CEO of Badger

Badger’s tag line is “automating busy work for outside sales reps to save ten hours a week.” Badger is #1-selling sales app in the Apple App store. The app optimizes and plans sales routes. Prior to founding Badger, Steven was a sales manager for Google and IBM. He’s also a contributor to The Huffington Post, and has written over 180 LinkedIn posts on sales, company management, and running a startup.

Show Notes & Topics:

  • An explanation of Badger and what their app does.
  • Description of the Traveling Salesman Problem
  • One of the most important hats that founders wear in business is sales.  
  • Sales as a trade or craft
  • Three basic tips for how a founder should think about outside sales, instead of solely relying on inside sales, including price and deal size thresholds
  • Ways to create a valuable reason for someone to want to meet you
  • Using referrals to gain meetings.
  • Leveraging LinkedIn to prospect and set meetings.
  • Tips on how to move deals forward faster
  • Building and managing a multi-day meeting itinerary and using “anchor meetings”
  • The purpose and outcomes of a face-to-face meetings vs. phone meetings
  • The value of cold calling; where and when cold calling is most appropriate
  • Other key questions for company founders to ask when building their sales process: What is your go-to market strategy?  Should you be making cold calls over the phone? Should you be selling with partners?  Should you be selling with an inside sales team? Should you be selling with an outside sales team?
  • Treating sales as an experiment.
  • Field sales is underutilized right now. If you’re not doing field sales at all, then you could be missing out a huge opportunity to generate some leads.

Links & Resources:

Steven Benson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenbenson/

Badger Maps - Route Planner for Sales: Mention The Startup Selling Podcast (http://salesqualia.com/the-sales-podcast/) and get two months free of Badger mapping for free at www.badgermapping.com!

Badger Maps on the Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/badger-map/id789934914

The Traveling Salesman Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Steve’s recent article on Huffington Post – 4 Valuable Leadership Lessons From My Google Days: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/4-valuable-leadership-lessons-from-my-google-days_us_59e5e6c0e4b08c75593ce659

Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, on Selling Fax Machines door-to-door: http://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/10/how-selling-fax-machines-helped-sara-blakely-invent-spanx.html


Sara Blakely on the James Altucher Show: https://jamesaltucher.com/2017/02/sara-blakely/

Nov 1, 2017

Episode 35: Scott Sambucci

Today’s featured guest is…. me! – Scott Sambucci – your podcast host and Sales Geek extraordinaire.  I’ve spent more than two decades building and selling technology products, leading three Silicon Valley startups each to their first millions in revenue.

Now with SalesQualia, I’m the Founder of SalesQualia where I work with enterprise/B2B startups on achieving scalable revenue growth. I’ve authored two books on Startup Selling, spoken at a TEDx and presented at The Lean Startup Conference (to name a few accolades I’m awfully proud of…)

Outside of work, I tackle crazy long endurance events, including three Ironman triathlons, marathon swims across The Catalina Channel, Uberman and most recently, the Tahoe 200 – a 200-mile foot race circumnavigating Lake Tahoe. Call or email anytime at scott@salesqualia.com or (415) 596-0804.

With SalesQualia, I help early stage B2B enterprise startups achieve scalable revenue growth.

  • Find our website here: www.salesqualia.com
  • Follow us on Facebook here where I host a weekly Facebook Live Sales Q&A: https://www.facebook.com/salesqualia
  • Our clients span across several verticals and industries, including AI, FinTech, EdTech, RetailTech & HeathTech, to name a few including companies like Octane, Butter, Shift Messenger, Kanopi Studios, Better Manager & Data Dwell. Our clients include graduates of accelerator and incubator programs such as Y-Combinator, TINC and All-Turtles.

Show Notes & Topics:

  • Why me this in this episode?
  • What is the ONE sales activity in your company that matters most?
  • I've worked with hundreds of startups either in a 1:1 relationship, and via live webinars workshops. And almost in every single case, as I'm first starting conversations with startup teams, I hear are things like, "Hey, I need to work on my pricing, and I need to work on my slide deck, and I need to work on my demo, I need to close more deals, I need to do a better job prospecting, I'm trying to figure out cold emailing."
  • Obviously there's a lot of places in your sales process, but… The reason, that I'm asking the question I’m asking in this episode is that in every case with clients and workshop attendees, there is ONE specific sales activity that matters most.
  • The problem is that most startup teams fail to 1) Recognize that ONE activity, and 2) Focus on that activity as a key driver to growth.
  • In this episode, I’ll dive deep into three startups where I’ve worked as examples – Altos Research, Aplia and Blend – to illustrate this point.
  • By recording this episode, my hope for you is that you can begin to identify the ONE sales activity that matters most for YOUR startup, so that you can achieve sales velocity and scalable revenue growth.

Links & Resources:

Love the podcast? Leave a review on iTunes right here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-podcast/id1044359904?mt=2

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsambucci

Request Your Sales Audit: www.salesqualia.com/salesaudit

Altos Research: www.altosresearch.com

Mike Simonson, Founder & CEO @ Altos Research: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonsen/

Aplia: www.aplia.com

Paul Romer: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/paul-romer

Blend: www.blend.com

Oct 15, 2017

Guest: John Roberts, Successly

 About our guest…

 John Roberts founded Successly in 2016, a company dedicated to helping Customer Success teams make a big impact. John recently moved to Silicon Valley after a successful run guiding his previous startup – Buzz.Report – in North Carolina.

3 Key Takeaways:

  1. Customer Success is a Business Model.
  2. If you have to choose between Customer Success or Sales, choose Customer Success first.
  3. Customer Success should be at the head of the table for every company.

 On moving from the Research Triangle (North Carolina) to Silicon Valley

  • If you want to sell B2B software, there's no better place than San Francisco to be close to your customers, and being face-to-face with your customers is one of the most valuable parts to being here.
  • We've seen other regions (Atlanta, Austin, Portland, Phoenix, Boulder, Denver, New York City) emerge, but the density of opportunity is not the same outside of Silicon Valley.
  • You don’t have to have the whole team in San Francisco.

 

Customer Success: Definition & Importance

  • Why every subscription company is only successful when you retain your customers because the real value is how long you can retain those customers.
  • How can you make that customer successful in a way that creates value?
  • Completing 290 Customer Success Interviews with VPs about customer success 

Customer Success & Its Role in the Sales Process

  • What are the goals we're striving for over the next year with the product?
  • Should Customer Success teams have veto power over new customer acquisition?
  • Aligning top-line sales growth while avoiding churn and misaligned incentives?
  • How can you make sure the customer success team is compensated Renewals?
  • Casting in the sales process – Sales focuses on education and Customer Success focuses on implementation.
  • Focusing on the “jobs to be done.”
  • Customer Success is the crucible of all communication and activity.
  • Why Customer success should be at the head of the table in product companies.
  • Customer success as a business model.
  • Customer success teams and capturing the voice of the customer. 

Organizational Design for Start-up CEOs

  • The case for why Customer success should be the first team to build.
  • Questions to ask: What’s the experience with the customer?  How can we watch the customer use the system or product?  How can we understand every aspect of the customer’s interaction with the product? 

Customer Success teams vs Product teams

  • Customer success should focus on what the customers needs.
  • The Product Team should focus on best feature to build in response to the customer success team’s list of problems. 

Hiring customer success teams when someone wants to be the sales or the product manager:

  • Set expectations very clearly.
  • All other departments relate to customer success.
  • You’ll be seeing is more salespeople in the customer success role in the future. 

Links & Resources: 

John Roberts on LinkedIn

Adam O'Donnell, John’s cofounder @ Successly, on LinkedIn

 Website: www.Successly.io

 

Check out Successly Live video-cast/podcast: Interviews with CS Executives and leaders from companies like MixPanel, Coursera, Splunk & HelloSign

 

The Podcast Version on iTunes & SoundCloud:

May 30, 2017
About Allbound: Problem & solution
 
Definitions: Channel Partners vs Referral Partners vs Co-Marketing Partner vs Reseller vs Affiliates
 
When should I start thinking about External Partners? 
  • Affiliates & Co-Marketing - Never too soon for these. Make sure you and your partner are speaking the same profiles/customers. Co-marketing tend to be “nice-to-have"
  • Referral Partners - Once you’ve identified the right Product-Market fit. Have an ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Personas built
  • Reseller Partners - Most resellers want to own implementation. Make sure your product can support a reseller. Every Reseller is assigned a Customer Success Manager. One reseller could equal 10, 50, 100 customers
 
“Partners” - The best partners provide you a predictable revenue stream.
 
Structuring Programs:
  • Look at other firms and partners. Learning from Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce
  • i.e. 10% of first year revenue
  • Evolve the program
 
Implementation:
  • Things fizzle. Partnership is a relationship.
  • "Partners are people too.” 
  • Train, educate. Treat your Partners just like a brand new sales rep.
  • Channel people are massively under-resourced
  • Outline and structure - online meetings, vs in-person, self-serve. Be transparent and map out in a Agreement.
 
4 Pipelines:
  1. New Customers
  2. Renewals
  3. Professional Services
  4. Partner Pipeline
 
4 Pillars:
  1. Content - The way that knowledge transfer happens. Access to content (ie. training, internal price sheets, playbooks, data, research); PLUS end-user
  2. Collaboration - Include your Partners in your product communication, pricing, services
  3. Customer Success - How does my customer want to buy? How do they want to be serviced & supported?
  4. Culture - Touches every part of your business & approach
 
The Honest Conversation - Sometimes the timing isn’t right. Be honest. Let’s come back to this in 6 months, 1 quarter.
 
Exclusives: Think really 
 
MyChannelScore.com
 
Unusual: 
  • Completely different vertical or space
  • Expand
 
Show Links:
May 23, 2017
This episode of the Startup Selling Podcast focuses focuses on cold email strategies and best practices when hiring and developing an early sales team. 
 
My guest is Damian Thompson, the Cofounder and Chief Customer Officer at LeadFuze, a company that provides automated lead generation software that helps B2B companies find leads and have more sales conversations automatically. Damian has led sales teams in a dozen countries, coaching 200+ professionals to more than $100 million in sales.
 
In this episode, Damian and I went DEEP into specific cold email outreach strategies. 
 
First, Damian talked about the mistakes of cold emailing that most startups make, most notably, taking a specific strategy they’re read in a book and applying it directly to their company. That just never works. Damian talked about why you need to customize and build YOUR process for YOUR market and YOUR company.
 
 
Then Damian walked us through his "Cardinal Rules of Cold Emailing.” 
 
Here are a few we discussed:
 
 
1 - Passive-Aggressive SUCKS (my words…): Sending a second or third or fourth email to someone that read – "I haven’t heard back from you…” is really bad. It’s not the prospects fault they haven’t replied – it’s yours. Would you want to receive this email? Would you respond? How do you feel when you get these emails?
 
2 - Brevity: Assume email is read on mobile.  Don’t use wasted words. 
 
Bad: "I found you on Angel List…” or “I know you’re busy so I won’t take much time…”
 
3 - Don’t be apologetic: As Damian said – "if you target your market right, you’re offering something of value… They [your prospects] WANT to work with you.”
 
4 - Start your email with questions, then offer a quick value proposition then close with a call-to-action. 
 
Ask yourself: What are the 1-2 biggest problems/pains of customers? 
 
Reverse engineer biggest objections.
 
4 - Think low friction. The goal of your cold email should be to start a conversation. Don’t ask your prospects to call you or try to book a meeting right away. That’s too much to ask.
 
Be happy with ANY reply. There’s no such thing as a negative reply. If you’re getting NOTHING, that’s the worst outcome. 
 
5 - Subject Lines Matter: Shorter is better. Five (5) words or less is ideal. Using the person’s first name or company name works really well. 
 
It’s okay to be aggressive. Damian’s best-performing email subject line was “You’re doing it wrong,” but be sure to link subject lines to email’s content and ultimately, write emails that match your personality. If you’re just not comfortable being aggressive, do something else.
 
6 - Provide value in every interaction and outreach. Give prospects something quick that’s useful, and offer a few more ideas.
 
Once you nail your message and market, the find a way to do it a scale because, as Damian said “using Lead Generation to validate a market is a disaster."
 
Remember that NO ONE buys for your TECHNICAL SOLUTION. Customers buy to increase revenue, reduce costs, o to get a promotion. There’s some other motivation, so find it and write to it.
 
Finally we talked about building your sales team. 
 
A few key ideas:
 
  • "If you’re gonna hire one, you’ve gotta hire two.”
  • You cannot hire someone to build your sales process. YOU have to define your sales process, THEN you can bring on your sales team.
  • Once you hire, you’re going to spend more time, not less, doing sales.
  • You cannot hire a commission-only salespeople. It sends bad signals to the company.
  • Align metrics and incentives directly to the outcomes you want of that role. For example, paying an SDR based on long-term customer retention is really bad.
  • Before you ask an employee to do something, ask yourself: “Have I done this successfully?”
  • When hiring, it’s not about money for most SDR hires - your middle career salespeople care about money, but arly hires want company and personal growth. 
 
People & Mentions from this episode:
 
 
May 3, 2017
Dan Waldschmidt is a best-selling author, motivational speaker and business strategist. He’s been an successful entrepreneur, a failure and a successful entrepreneur again. Dan also came within a whisker of committing suicide – he had a gun to his mouth, about to pull the trigger. But he didn’t. He decided that his life’s story wasn’t meant to end that way – that there had to be one more chance, one more opportunity, one more way forward. 
 
His book – Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success” – is a 9-time best seller. The Wall Street Journal calls his blog, Edgy Conversations, one of the Top 7 sales blogs anywhere on the internet. 
 
Dan is also a champion ultra-runner. He’s training to get down to a 2:20 marathon and has a personal goal of setting the world record for the most running miles covered in a 24-hour period, currently set at 180 miles.
 
Fasten your seatbelt. He’s intense with a purpose.
 
In this episode, Dan and I apply his EDGY Framework to life as an entrepreneur and startup CEO.
 
EXTREME: What is the AWESOME that you want to achieve with your business? What are you tolerating in your work and business that’s holding you back? 
 
3 Steps to Start:
  1. Take the time to sit and be quiet. Figure out what your mission is for your life and your business. 
  2. Identify the resources available to you – people, money, time
  3. Take action and ask for help.
 
DISCIPLINE: Are you putting in the right time and the right effort to achieve your awesomeness?
 
GIVING VALUE: Give until it hurts. Give until it makes no sense that you are giving so much.
 
Y(H)UMAN FACTOR: How can I make my startup more human? What’s the danger of not being human? What are the things that you’re doing that are SLOPPY or DON’T CONNECT with customers?
 
Links & Resources:
Mar 9, 2017

Marylou Tyler is the author of Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting. She has worked with a number of few co-authors and produced a book that will certainly help any startup company out there. Being one of the best sales enablement strategist, she is an expert when it comes to maximizing your resources and is always willing to share her knowledge to everyone who needs help.

This podcast focuses both on the incredible things that a startup business owner can do to improve sales and the common mistakes everyone should avoid. The following are some of the topics tackled by Scott and Marylou:

  • Internalizing Your Competitive Position
  • Six-Factor SWOT Analysis
  • Developing an Ideal Account Profile
  • Compel with ContentTM
  • McKinsey’s MECE model
  • How you can send your emails wisely, and so many more

Podcast Notes:

05:10 – The three sections of Predictable Prospecting: Target, Engage, Optimize

05:42 – Internalizing Your Competitive Position 

07:25 – Six-Factor SWOT Analysis

14:00 – Importance of taking a break

15: 33 – Developing an Ideal Account Profile

20:16 – McKinsey’s MECE model and Issue Tree 

23:33 – Compel with ContentTM

25:07 – Common mistakes start-up businesses make in the selling process

27:42 – Emails and when to use each type

31:38 - Mass personalized versus Hyper personalized emails

37:47 – Eight-Touch, 13-Business Day Email

39:01 – Customer Referral Program

48:12 – Campaign Formula, Appointment-setting and sales funnels

53:26 – Neil Rackham, “The Professor of Professional Selling”

Quick links:

Feb 21, 2017

Dionne Mischler is a sales expert. She is the CEO and Founder of Inside Sales by Design, which helps companies to be “deliberate, intentional, and successful”. Aside from that, she is also the Founder of Sales Enablement Society.

 

In this podcast episode, the main focus is on how you can hire the best people for your sales team and when you should scale it up as a startup selling company. Scott and Dionne tackled a wide range of topics:

 

  • How to hire and when to hire;
  • How and when to scale up your sales team;
  • All kinds of really specific practical tips and frameworks that you can use;
  • Understanding and being clear about your view of time versus your customer’s view of time;
  • How to map out a customer’s organization;
  • The signals you can use to identify when you should be ramping up your sales team; and so many more

 

Podcast Notes:

 

5:37 – Why Dionne chose the appendage “…by Design”, why “Inside Sales by Design”

9:00 – Scalability of Inside Sales by Design

12:00 – The importance, process, and options in conducting market validation

18:45 – Why I do what I do at SalesQualia

20:53 – Dionne’s presentation “Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan”; Different views of and approaches to time

31:05 – Sales process; the importance of good customer experience; how we can keep our current customers

35:17 – How we can influence people’s perspective on time; our ideal customer

41:57 – Account-based Sales Development; what you should do in using the account-based approach; who’s who in the zoo

53:54 – Mistakes people commit in hiring more people for their sales team; Realistic revenue expectations, underestimating how hard it is to find good talent

58:50 – Signals that tell whether or not you are ready to ramp on your sales team

 

Websites mentioned:

 

Dionne Mischler’s LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/dionnemischler

Inside Sales by Design: http://www.insidesalesbydesign.com/

Sales Enablement Society on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/15155218

Jan 26, 2017
About this episode: 
Louis Jonckheere is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Showpad. Showpad activates millions of pieces of content for over 850 companies around the world, including Johnson & Johnson, Fujifilm, Audi, Intel, and Kimberly-Clark. 
 
Topics we discussed included:
  • What types of content works best to drive sales prospect engagement?
  • How Showpad uses a 14-day free trial and “Soft Contracts”
  • The importance of video for your sales and communication
  • Company culture and hiring practices
  • Customer engagement and customer success
 
Podcast Topics & Notes:
0:00 - Introduction to this episode
 
3:00 - How Louis answers: “What do you do? What is Showpad?”
  • 90% of sales and marketing content is going unused
 
6:00 - Using modern sales tools to gain better insight into customer engagement with marketing tools
 
9:00 - What’s the ONE content piece a startup should build and use for sales? (Hint: It’s video!)
 
12:30 - Using video messages with clients
 
14:30 - Account-based sales and marketing & designing a landing page for each customer (a.k.a “Showcase”)
 
17:30 - Using Facebook Live, social media & texting
 
20:30 - Why a 14-day free trial (vs. 30-day free trial or freemium) and “Soft Contracts”
 
24:45 - Customer Success & Engagement
 
28:00 - Company culture & hiring techniques
    
35:00 - Corporate social responsibility as a startup & The Showpad Cares program
 
39:00 - Biggest lesson and mindset transition from early stage CEO to growth mode, and Showpad’s decision to move to the US
 
43:00 - Where to go for peer support, help and advice
 
 
Websites & Resources mentioned in the podcast:
 
 
 

Find Louis across the interwebs here:
Jan 19, 2017
About this episode: 
Lauren Bailey has been voted "Top 25 Most Influential Leaders in Inside Sales" by The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016. Lauren is President of Factor 8, an award-winning Inside Sales training and consulting company.
 
After spending nearly 20 years launching and leading Inside Sales organizations around the World, Factor 8 President Lauren Bailey has put her dual background in sales and training leadership to work for companies launching, scaling, and optimizing Inside Sales teams. She's worked with IBM, SAP, Ingram Micro, Microsoft, Grainger, HP, Staples, and many more.
 
Factor 8 works most often with the Vice President of Sales to benchmark their Inside Sales Organization and deliver hands-on training classes for Reps and Managers.
 
Podcast Topics & Notes:
0:00 - Introduction of the episode and Lauren Bailey
 
5:45 - Where do I start selling my startup product if I have no idea what I’m doing?
 
6:30 - Inside Sales vs Field Sales for startups
 
10:00 - Establishing an inside sales cadence for efficiency’s sake. 
  • Call and email on Tuesday & Thursday afternoons from 12-4pm to MWF appointments and demos
  • Call people when they are in their office
 
11:30 - Call the CEO of your target company. Act as if…
 
14:00 - Outsourcing your lead development and appointment-setting
 
15:45 - About SalesQualia & The Startup Selling Coaching Program
 
18:45 - Imagine you’re calling your college buddies instead of a “decision-maker."
 
21:00 - Using your “rock star status” as a startup CEO as leverage
 
23:00 - What to do when someone actually answers the phone...
  • The first 10 seconds are the most important
  • The key to the intro is to get the person to stop typing or looking at their email
  • Say their name first, then do a quick value ear perk, then end with a closed, rote, qualifying question.
 
31:00 - Selling the next step & mapping out your touches
 
37:30 - Why product demos suck
 
45:00 - Tips on hiring and outsourcing sales
 
52:30 - Recommendations to finish a sales year strong, and boost for next year
  • “Is this something that’s interesting to you this year?”
  • “Do you have budget that you need to spend this year, or should we just focus on introducing our product?”
 
Websites & Resources mentioned in the podcast:
 
 
 

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