Tallwave: Myths & Truths: Building a Sales System

PRESENTED BY:
Myths & Truths - Building a
Product
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
PRESENTED BY:
PRESENTERS:
JERROD BAILEY
PARTNER & PRACTICE LEAD, TALLWAVE
JON HALL
DIRECTOR OF SALES DELIVERY,
TALLWAVE

AGENDA
WWW.TALLWAVE.COM/SPRINGBOARD INFO@TALLWAVE.COM
Myth 1: You need a product before you can start selling
Myth 2: You need sales experience to sell
Myth 3: Finding new prospects is a networking and phone
calling grind
Myth 4: You don’t have enough time to sell on top of
everything else
Myth 5: An expensive sales guy with a good rolodex is
what you need to grow
Myth 6: A great product will sell itself

INTRODUCTION
JERROD BAILEY
Partner
Tallwave LLC
15 yr start-up operator and
enterprise. 3 start-ups, 3 exits.
Works with Tallwave portfolio and
client companies to build scalable
systems for growth (but hacks his
way to get there).
In a previous life:
● UUNET (first Tier 1 ISP), sold to
MFS for $2B
● Virtela ($70M venture backed,
sold to NTT for $520M)

INTRODUCTION
Jon Hall
Director of Sales Delivery, Tallwave
15 year tech sales leader at Revana
(Built scalable sales teams for
companies like IBM, Sony, Toshiba
and Hewlett Packard.)
Jon knows that successful sales
teams are not built overnight. It
begins with scaleable sales systems
and wrapping them around the right
talent. Jon builds sales systems for
Tallwave portfolio companies and
clients.

THE MYTHS

MYTH #1: YOU NEED A PRODUCT BEFORE
YOU CAN START SELLING

MISCONCEPTION
“You don’t want to sell something that isn’t
ready.”

REALITY #2
If your customer won’t buy off
on your concept, why would
you go build the actual
software?
• Demonstrate market demand for potential investors.
Heck, demonstrate it for yourself!
• If you’ve got a real value proposition, they’ll gladly wait.
They’ll even help you develop the idea.

TRUTH: Sell as early as you have a concept that someone
can react to
Simple Landing Page Clickable Prototype
Cheap or Free
Acquisition
Explainer Video

TIPS:
1. Cheap Prototyping Tools: InVision, UXPin,
Solidify, proto.io
2. Low-cost Outsourcing: Elance, fiverr, or
oDesk
3. Landing Page: Unbounce or Launchrock
4. Explainer Video: GoAnimate
5. Finding Leads: PPC (Google Adwords) or
LinkedIn prospecting

MYTH #2: YOU NEED SALES EXPERIENCE
TO SELL

MISCONCEPTION
“I’m the [marketer, developer]. It’s up to a
salesperson to sell.”
Fear, Tunnel Vision

REALITY:
No one believes in the product more than you.
If you can’t sell it… who can?
The only thing you can count on is that you will have at least
one major pivot before your idea sticks. How quickly do you
want to get there?

THE TRUTH: The best startup salespeople are
engineers and teachers

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,”
Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps

Image: http://blog.healthjobsnationwide.com/different-types-of-therapy-jobs/
The Best Startup Salespeople Act Like
Anthropologists and Psychologists

TIPS:
1. Spend 90% of your meeting asking questions.
Listen.
2. No more than 10 slides
3. Explain your concept in a single picture (who is
your buyer, their current reality, and their future
reality with your product?)
4. Leave jargon, features, at home. Offer up
outcomes and ask if each is valuable
5. Layer in 2 or 3 key facts or anecdotes to support
your most important assumptions

MYTH #3: FINDING NEW PROSPECTS IS A
NETWORKING AND PHONE CALL GRIND

MISCONCEPTION
“If you’re going to sell, you have to pick up
the phone.”
“These are strangers. I can’t even begin to
guess how I would get in front of them!”

REALITY
Prospecting has fundamentally changed in
the last 2 years. LinkedIn and Apps have
hyper-connected us and created better
pathways to discover, meet and sell.

1-3%
Open Rate
1-30%
Open Rate
TRADITIONAL INBOXES

ALTERNATIVE INBOXES
80-90%
Open Rate

• Super List Building: Use
Boolean expressions in
LinkedIn “Advanced
Search”
• The mechanics of
connecting and asking for a
meeting can be outsourced
or automated
THE TRUTH:
YOU CAN FIND INTERESTED CUSTOMERS
TOMORROW FOR CHEAP (OR FREE)

MYTH #4: YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TIME
TO SELL ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE

MISCONCEPTION
“Selling Takes a lot of Time”

REALITY #1
Investors look for traction and your ability to
make progress. You can’t afford not to sell.

Sales is, in fact, a numbers game.
(But you can automate most of it.)

• Specialize your sales.
Break out low-level
functions and find ways to
automate or outsource
them
• Building and
Maintaining Lists
• Prospecting
• Scheduling
• Writing Quotes /
Proposals
• Follow-up / Nurture
THE TRUTH: WITH A MIX OF CHEAP TOOLS AND OVERSEAS
RESOURCES, YOU CAN AUTOMATE YOUR WHOLE SALES
FUNNEL

TIPS:
1. Create great lists of your target customers using Import.
io, SalesLoft, Spyderbook, HiringSolved, and BuiltWith
2. Prospecting via LinkedIn, Twitter, Email doesn’t require
you to do the work. Outsource it (e.g. ODesk)
3. Automate your prospecting with tools like Socedo and
Ofunnel
4. Nurture with Hubspot or Infusionsoft
If you have 2 hours of “prospecting time” per week. Every
minute should be spent actually talking to prospects.
Nothing else.

MYTH #5: AN EXPENSIVE SALES GUY
WITH A GOOD ROLODEX IS WHAT YOU
NEED TO GROW

MISCONCEPTION: “YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR
CONNECTIVITY”

TRUTH: A SALES SYSTEM BEATS AN EXPENSIVE
SALESPERSON EVERY TIME
1. 95% OF A TYPICAL SALESPERSON’S “NETWORK”
IS OLD, IRRELEVANT OR NOT IN A POSITION TO
BUY
2. Having a compelling product and a method to expose that product to many
buyers is the only sustainable path to success.
3. If most people have only 1 or 2 really good contacts, don’t hire them.
Rather, get good at asking for referrals. BONUS: Write a Referral
Agreement.

Sales System vs
Sales Guy
Prospecting Qualifying Closing
15
hrs/week
15
hrs/week
10
hrs/week
Total Cost: $125K
$125K

Sales System vs
Sales Guy
50
hrs/week
233%
20
hrs/week
33%
20
hrs/week
100%
Total Cost: $95K
24%
$80K
$15K

Sales System vs
Sales Guy
90
hrs/week
500%
40
hrs/week
160%
40
hrs/week
300%
$80K$15K
$15K
$45K
Total Cost: $155K
24%

TIPS:
• Every meeting should end in, “who do you know
that would be interested in hearing this?”
• Don’t hire your first VP of Sales until you’ve
achieved $1M in revenue
• Systematize your sales process. Start by
specializing your prospecting function.

MYTH #6: A GREAT PRODUCT WILL SELL
ITSELF

MISCONCEPTION
“Our plan is to completely automate the
marketing and sales process. We’ll have a
self-serve revenue machine with no sales
reps at all.”
Wishful thinking, distorted perception

“Inbound-only
marketing is like waiting
for the phone to ring”
-Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing
Image: http://smsrd.com/blog/making-the-phone-ring/

While 60% of your buyer’s decision is made before
they talk to someone1
, they still want to talk to
someone.
(1) Source: Forbes 2013 http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2013/01/07/the-disappearing-sales-process/
http://icmoly.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/online-learning/who-is-icm-girl-smiling-2/

Hundreds of leads per month through SEO,
Banner Ads and other digital methods.
~30 Inside Sales Reps
30% close rate

TIPS:
• Learn as fast and as early as possible
• You can only learn by reaching out to strangers
• Think in terms of systems, set them up, and let
them run

A 2-WEEK SALES ACCELERATION AND SYSTEMATIZATION
SPRINT
Accelerate consistent revenue
Make yourself and your team 3x more efficient and effective
Offload 90% of menial sales work
Sell more, with less friction and fewer objections
Meet real prospects and see how well your sales machine works
TALLWAVE.COM/SPRINGBOARD INFO@TALLWAVE.COM

PRESENTED BY:
Myths & Truths - Building a
Product
OCTOBER 29, 2014
PRESENTED BY:
PRESENTERS:
JERROD BAILEY
VP, SALES TEAM, TALLWAVE
jerrod.bailey@tallawave.com
JON HALL
DIR, SALES TEAM, TALLWAVE, jon.
hall@tallwave.com

Tallwave: Myths & Truths: Building a Sales System

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