Global lean sales presentation at #PNCamp by Pallav Nadhani, Founder, FusionCharts

1. Dancing with the elephants
SALES
BOOTCAMP

2. Sales is the lifeblood of any organization
It fixes everything!

3. Pre-requisite to online sales
Product and Positioning

4. Know thy customer
• Have the discipline to answer which kind of customers do you want to
serve?
• Know the size of customer you want to serve, what people in a company
that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate & the
channels needed to reach them
• For the most part, avoid the low end of the market. It’s too elusive and
hard to shake enough money out of them.
• Understand customer’s pain points & position your product benefits against
those pain points

5. Now answer the question, and keep repeating it, till you
can say it in deep sleep
Why buy mine?

6. Selling through the web, your goal is to get email
address of prospect through various means, segment
them, qualify them, nurture them, close them, and then
up-sell/cross-sell.

7. Customer Acquisition Funnel
• Awareness (ads, blog, event, word-of-mouth…)
• Initial Visit
• Different channels / different ROI
• Best channels = low cost, high ROI
• Engagement
• Trial, case study, whitepaper, anything that could give you email AND
other information
• Nurturing
• Mix of product, marketing and sales
• Sales job: get the customer on the call and do aggressive follow up
• Closing
• Handover from sales to client success.
•Repeat business through subscriptions, up-sells or cross-sells.

8. Pillars of online sales
• People
• Hiring
• Training & coaching
• Compensation
• Incentives
• Tools
• CRM
• Marketing Automation
• Content distribution
• Data on prospects
• Process
• Metrics-driven
• Qualification
• Culture

9. Evolution of sales team
Stage
Sales Composition
Qualifying criteria
Objective
Validation
Sales team == YOU
Zero revenue
Validating the product.
Product Management.
Babysteps
Couple of sales reps
15-25 new leads per day
Establishing sales process.
Lots of experimentation to
figure out what works.
Growth
VP/Director of Sales, Multiple Sales reps, Client
Success Reps
- Metrics for sales
productivity established
- More leads than sales
reps can handle
Growing revenue
aggressively. Increasing
sales efficiency through
automation.
Scale
VP of Sales, multiple directors (regional/vertical
bifurcation), sales reps performing different roles
(generating leads, closing, appointment setting).
Partnerships/Alliances/Channels head.
- Optimized sales
metrics available
- Market large enough
- Revenue continuing to
grow
Finding new channels for
revenue

10. Sales compensation
• You do not have any data to start with. So start with industry benchmarks
and then customize it to suit your requirements
• VP / Director of Sales: fixed + variable based on overall company revenue
(say 20L + 10L)
• No upper limit to what s/he can make. Have an accelerator on
overachievement (Say 150% of variable, once quota is surpassed)
• Sales reps : 2L + 1L x number of years of experience
• Depending on role, quota could be based on appointments set, calls
made, revenue, number of closures or a mix of all of it
• Initially, quotas could be set based on historical data. Later, they can
be revised (quotas could be revised quarterly)
• Sales operations team : depending on city
• To enable sales team to focus on what they do best – selling; and to
abstract everything else (agreements, invoices, mundane stuff) from
them.

11. Some industry metrics
• Ramp up period: 3-6 months (you cannot have a sales rep productive ASAP)
• Fixed / Variable ratio: anywhere between 50:50 to 80:20 (in India, 70:30 is
common)
• Annual Quota: $600k-$800k annually, or $5000 Monthly Recurring Revenue
• Percentage of sales reps who achieve quota: 70%
• Average number of dials per day: 39
• Average conversations per day: 9
• Number of touches before moving on: 5
(Source: http://www.bridgegroupinc.com/resources/InsideSalesReport.pdf)

12. Tools of the trade
• CRM e.g., SalesForce or SugarCRM. The most important investment in your
sales process.
• Implementation and adoption of this tool is very important, as it has
to support you during scaling up of sales engine.
• Brings visibility into entire sales process and for individual reps.
• Marketing Automation e.g., Marketo or Pardot for automated nurturing of
leads, segment them, doing A/B testing of content (and use, cough..
cough.. VWO!)
• Data directories like Jigsaw or other tools that give additional information
on prospects to sales team
• Social media mining tools for similar purpose
• Webex / VOIP for calls
• Inbound US number / online chat tools

13. Sales Mantra
Higher Sales =
Volume
x
● More leads in
funnel
● Better leads quality
● More leads
handled per sales
person
● Enough sales
people to handle all
leads
Productivity
● Better qualification
● Better closure rates
● Metric driven
pricing
● Better routing of
leads to right sales
reps / partners
● Due diligence on
lost deals

14. The most experienced sales reps are the ones who know
that the 3 most important things to do with a sales lead
are to qualify, qualify, qualify
Though, what really is qualification?

15. Typical sales cycle
• Lead generation through: marketing / database / outbound prospecting
• Qualification and appointment setting: role typically requires calling and
qualifying and setting appointment
• Closing - also called account executives or hunters
• Nurturing - called client success reps, account managers or farmers

16. Things that help your sales cycle
• The goal in your early meetings is to get the customer to trust you enough
to talk about their existing problems
• Ensure that your sales reps understand BANT (Budget, Authority, Need,
Time)
• You can only sell effectively when your sales cycle matches the customer’s
buying cycle
• Do SOMETHING that makes you stand out. Learn how to tell stories…for
every type of engagement. They stick.
• Create artificial accelerators for closure, and reward if done within that
milestone.

17. Sales culture
• During induction, make organizational philosophy very clear
• When not to sell products to a prospect
• How to approach competitive products
• What takes priority – customer or numbers?
• Make everyone’s performance public
• Sales people are competitive. Let them compete
• Track aggressively and do random audits
• Always set aggressive quotas, the best ones will prove it can be done
• Keep small contests to drive team behavior
• Lunches, holidays, etc.
• Money and gifts really drive sales people
• Recognize that sales people are different
• Don’t expect them to behave like engineers or marketers, and don’t
ask them to design their collaterals (they suck at it!)
• Remember that sales people WILL ALWAYS ask for a better product, or
more discounts, or more marketing or …

18. Customer reference-ability
• Get testimonials, case-studies, even better customer videos
• Having reputable people from reputable businesses reference your
company makes all the difference in the purchasing decision
• Customers like to compare your solution to something else on the market
• Customers seldom like to buy unless they perceive they have options
• Building reference-ability in pricing as well

19. Perception
• A company that looks and sounds good inspires confidence
• So don’t be cheap about getting a professionally done:
• Website
• Logo
• Collaterals
• Voice Mail / IVR
• Ensure that your communications and touch points look global
• Invest in good web design, sales collaterals and professional sales pitches
• (Unfortunate) fact is that customer form perceptions quickly which
are hard to shake later on, and those perceptions linger on to product /
service as well

20. Pricing – your product can actually be “too
cheap”
• Use pricing as a signal
• Some customers (particularly enterprises) will not even try your
product if they feel the product is priced too cheaply
• Just because our services economy works on cost arbitrage, doesn’t mean
products have to work this way
• Customers like price anchors to be able to compare
• Pricing more important in B2B
• A $2000 deal v/s $10,000 requires the same process, so why leave
revenue on the table

21. Partners
• 2 types of resellers: vanilla resellers, who will only fulfill demand, or
resellers who can generate demand for you. Use vanilla resellers in nonEnglish speaking countries.
• Implementation partners who can add value to your product. Use them for
large orders like government tenders etc.