early sales development for b2b startups
TRANSCRIPT
Early Sales Development for B2B Startups
Mark Birch @marksbirch @Enterprise_Sale
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•Focus on big results with little investment •Go broad and narrow down as you
analyze results •Do first, learn how to improve, then
outsource or delegate •Scale the process before you scale
the team
Key Points
• Lack of sales people
• Early stage with limited capital • Crowded market or market that requires
significant education • No one knocking down the door to use
your product
• Product/market fit still nebulous at best
Need to generate enough leads to fill the pipeline
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Challenges
Intersection between your product & prospect need is small
Your Prospects
Your Product
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The Fundamental Sales Problem
• Hire an outsourcing firm
• Hire an appointment setting firm
• Hire an SDR team
…all large upfront commitments
Be wary of the investment in capital and time without certainty in results
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Possible Solutions
• Simple process and flow
• Works with minimal people
• Requires minimal investment
• Immediate and actionable results
• Allows you to measure and learn
Before you scale the team, scale how you do things
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A Better Solution
• Source the Leads
• Scrub the Data
• Create a Hook
• Build the Sequence
• Measure, Improve & Repeat
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The Scalable Prospecting Stack
Finding Your Source
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Question Why did Willie Sutton rob banks? Because that’s where the leads are of course…
• Find groupings of prospects that fit your target market – Online professional networks such as
LinkedIn, AngelList, niche industry networks
– Tradeshows & events
– Sales intelligence tools
– Paid industry lists
– Inbound traffic
The cheapest sources are often the best and most reliable sources
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Common Lead Sources
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Easy to use search on multiple parameters
such as industry, title, company size, etc.
– Provides number of people that fall within each search – are you targeting too wide (over >5000) or too narrow (<500)
– Allows you to view 3rd level connections
• Salesloft, SellHack, or SellIntelligent – Provides key data points about prospects
(company, title, location, phone, etc.)
– Fills-in best guess for email address
– Extract into spreadsheet for processing
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Lead Acquisition Tools
• All lead sources have some percentage of bad data
– Tools that provide email addresses are simply guessing at the proper formats
– Some people do not update online profiles often
– Information grows stale quickly
You can recover bad contacts through quick cleanup
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Scrub the Leads Clean
Lead Scrubbing Tools
• Kickbox.io to weed out bad emails – Protects you from getting lots of bounced
emails which hurts your email “deliverability”
– Provides helpful explanations as to why email addresses will bounce
• Data.com to get full email or domain – Recover bad emails by uncovering the
correct domain & email pattern
– Get “free” credits by uploading a portion of your contacts into Data.com
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• Find one thing that grabs the attention of prospects that matters to them – Big upcoming event, topical news item, major industry
report are useful starting points – Think relevant and applies broadly to target market
• Write very short, very direct message as many emails are read on a phone
• Personalize, but limit to just a few fields like name, company, and attention grabber
• Personalizing subject line is a big winner when it comes to opens, increasing open by > 40%
Ask yourself, is the message relevant, to the point & personal
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Hook Your Audience
• Subject: Bob, catch you at Hack-a-mania 2015
• Body: Hi Bob, I am attending Hack-a-mania next week and wondered if you were also going as well. The reason is that I was hoping to chat about hacker tools and was curious what Big Enterprise Co. is using today.
My company HackerTools offers a mobile hacker tool focused on helping hackers code faster and we work with lots of folks in the gaming industry. When would be a good time to meet for a quick chat?
Mark
Hook!
Personalization!
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Example of Target Email
• Use a sales tool for automating the prospecting process such as Outreach.io, Salesloft, Reply, etc.
• Focus on email to start – Inbox is still where business gets done – Calls are not as effective a channel early on
• Start with sequences of 4 – 6 steps – Each step is an email based on personalized template – Open / reply rates improve the deeper within a sequence – You can add more steps as the
• Consider using a transactional email service like SendGrid or Mandrill to improve
The more touches, the better the results (within reason of course)
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Build Your Sequencing Engine
• With data, it’s easier to see what does not work i.e. is it the prospects or the messaging?
• A/B test for the most impactful things such as subject lines, hook, industry focus, lead source
• More touches matter and email is often more effective than calls
• Use outsourcing to help on time consuming tasks like list building & data cleansing
Experiment often, review data, understand results, iterate
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Measure, Improve & Repeat
• Read my blog Strong Opinions on sales http://birch.co
• Tweet at me, I generally reply if you are nice @marksbirch
• Connect over LinkedIn and mention this article https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch
• If you sell to enterprises, join us for the Enterprise Sales Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/
• If you are focused on prospecting, join us for the Sales Development Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Sales-Development- Meetup/
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Let’s Talk
Q & A
Questions about the presentation or on general practices in scaling sales development? Please
question away…
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