The Startup sales dilemma

One of the key dilemmas we are seeing for sartups is the need to drive hockey stick sales numbers in and around the time of second stage funding. The specific challenge is that at this critical point the venture typically does not possess specialist sales operations or management capability. Nevertheless sales personnel must be recruited and one of the founders typically takes responsibility for the selection, onboarding, training and management of the sales team. From hereon, trial and error largely drives the sales process whilst the solution itself may well be morphing or making pivots ahead of the sales function.

The best practice we are facilitating is the engagement of a one or two day time equivalent sales expert who possesses start up experience at this key juncture; ideally a resilient, adaptive and innovative individual who can design, build and then tweak the sales process and tools ongoing, as well as coach the individual sales staff with impact. We may well train and execute two or three alternative sales processes concurrently as a way of identifying the optimun sales process more quickly.

In what is now fast becoming a dinosaur sales environment, the equivalent work we have executed in call centre environments over the past 10 years involved us studying 200 - 250 recorded sales interactions, grouped into successful and unsuccessful. We identified the tactics and dialogue that predicted success, mapped them and then retrofitted the entire sales team with the proven winning skills and tactics and literally huge conversion increases ensued.