In this episode of the Startup Selling Podcast, I interviewed Cirrus Insight Co-Founder Brandon Bruce. 

Brandon is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Cirrus Insight. Since founding the company in 2011, Cirrus Insight has been listed in the Inc 5000 ranking for three years in a row — A list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

Cirrus Insight is an all-in-one sales productivity platform with world-class Salesforce integration. 250,000 people use Cirrus Insight and its sister products Attach.io and Assistant.to to work faster and smarter from the inbox and calendar. It allows you to Track emails, schedule meetings, set follow-ups, and more, right from your inbox.

Brandon grew up in Los Olivos, a small California town of 800 people, and had only one classmate in grade school.

He loves endurance sports and raced his bicycle 508 miles across Death Valley in 2002 as part of the Furnace Creek 508 (https://www.the508.net/). He finished in 35 hours and 7 minutes. He also enjoys hiking, camping, and building with Legos. Brandon lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Tricia, and their two children, Sonoma and Carson.

Brandon’s advice for Entrepreneurs and Founders:

“Stay curious.” & “Have the ability to make decisions.”

In my conversation with Brandon, we covered a lot of the early days at Cirrus Insight. We focused on how Brandon and his Co-Founder, Ryan Huff, built the company from 0 to +250,000 users.

Some of the topics that we covered are:

• Getting their first users.
• Converting them into paying customers.
• Pricing in the early days Vs Pricing now.
• Making their first sales hire.
• The bottom-up sales strategy.
• Creating your product roadmap based on feedback.
• Using partners to sell your product.

Links & Resources: 

• Brandon on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbruce

• Cirrus Insight – https://www.cirrusinsight.com

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In this episode of the Startup Selling Podcast, I interviewed John Roberts.

John 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 from this podcast:

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.

Customer Success: Definition & Important notes:

• Why every subscription company is only successful when you retain your customers is because the real value is how long you can retain those customers.
• How can you make Customer Success 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. Think about these:

• 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 the best features 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:www.linkedin.com/in/john-roberts-92bb0438

Adam O'Donnell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamfodonnell/

Listen & subscribe to The Startup Selling Show here:

BluBrry | Deezer | Amazon | Stitcher | Spotify | iTunes | Soundcloud | SalesQualia

Thanks so much for listening! Tell a friend or ten about The Startup Selling Show, and please leave a review wherever you’re listening to the show.

In this episode of the Startup Selling Podcast, I interviewed Damian Thompson.

Damian is the co-founder 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.

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 prospect’s 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, find a way to do it on 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, and 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 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:

• Damian on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/damianthompson

• Damian on Twitter: @damianthompson
•  
• LeadFuze: www.leadfuze.com

• Episode 130: Predictable Prospecting: Target, Engage & Optimize Your Sales Funnel, and Why Introverts are the Best SalesPeople: An Interview with Marylou Tyler

Listen & subscribe to The Startup Selling Show here:

BluBrry | Deezer | Amazon | Stitcher | Spotify | iTunes | Soundcloud | SalesQualia

Thanks so much for listening! Tell a friend or ten about The Startup Selling Show, and please leave a review wherever you’re listening to the show.