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

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/

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