Sales 101: Presentation given at DreamIT Ventures

Sales 101 for your Start-up
Mark I LaRosa

Things to consider
Who do you sell to? (sniper or shotgun)
Do you market or sell? (both)
When do you hire someone to focus on revenue?
Who do you hire? Blue Jeans or Grey Hair

Different types of sales / salespeople
Type of customer and product drives type(s) of sales functions needed:
Marketing
Business Development
Inside Sales / Tele-sales
Outside Sales
Account managers
Hunters vs Farmers

Pipeline

Deals currently being worked in

various stages

More calls = more leads = more sales
PR is best (driving inbound) = qualified leads
Outsourced lead-generation
Hourly / Success-based

Selling Value over Function

RESIST DEMOS

Embrace the word “NO”
Ask for the sale
No gives the chance to ask why?
No can mean:
Not now
Not in that way
Not at that price

negotiation
If I… will you….
Good Cop – Bad Cop
End of quarter pushes

You never call anymore
Use the phones….
SEO is great, but nothing beats personal contact.
Don’t expect your prospects to do the hard work

Managing sales people
Manage to metrics
Ultimately expect results
Let comp plan do the heavy lifting
Press on accelerating the close
Flush out deals that are not real
Don’t let salespeople trend to the easier conversations
Great salespeople are easier to manager

Compensation terms and basics

Base
Commissions
Draw
Recoverable / Non-recoverable
Bonus
Quota / Accelerator
SPIF (Sales Promotion Incentive Fund)
OTE (On Target Earnings)
Up-side: DO NOT CAP!

Your biggest capital expense

Finding great salespeople is biggest bottleneck for a growing company
Failed salespeople are the biggest waste of capital
Right sales team = life or death
Don’t Scale until you know your head from your feet
Never more than double any sales force

Finding Good people

55% of sales professionals are in the wrong occupation1
Sales professionals that are

job-matched outperform their counterparts by 40% and are twice as likely to stick2

Try all angles: recruiters, job boards, recommendations

20%
A Players
Top Performers
Account for 80% of Sales
55%
C Players
Should not be in sales at all
25%
B Players
Should be selling elsewhere
1. Croner, Christopher and Richard Abraham, Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again, Inner Workings LLC, 2006.
2. Greenberg, Herbert and Jeanne, ”Job Matching for Better Sales Performance,” Harvard Business Review no.80505

What to look for