Sales-land Status Update 2019
Like Startups and SaaS, today we review the State of Conversation Intelligence 2020. What’s unique about this Chorus.ai report is that you can customize your view based on your deal size and sales cycle.
What tale can Sales Team Churn tell?
Vik Singh, cofounder of Infer wrote about STC in his post in Latka B2B SAAS Blog and it brings a simple yet arguably a very effective way to assess the health and state of a startup (or any company for that matter) and apparently VC’s are paying a lot of attention to what Vik calls “STC”.
Sales in Early days: Founder is the key
There is no question that in the pre product market fit days the Founder has to do the selling, however the problem is much more complex than we give credit for. I found this series of articles by Martin Casado, General Partner at A16Z, which is absolute gold. Do you remember prepping for questions like “why is your solution better than everyone else?” or building the competitive quadrant pitch decks? Martin writes – “founders fill it in with a comparative set that’s often populated with so-called competitors that aren’t likely to be included in an actual sales bake-off ….so what you’re really positioning against is the status quo.”
Content Marketing – are you paying attention?
SEMRush hosted their maiden marketing show in Bangalore which was surprisingly well attended despite being a fully paid event. The very first presentation was by Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing on The State of Content Marketing Report 2019.
50 to 1000 customers using data
How do you go from 50 customers to a 1000? Let’s make it more interesting – how do you go from 50 customers to 1000 in 18 months?
Now that I got your attention I would love to point you to this great session at Saastr 2019 by Romain Lapeyre, Founder & CEO of Gorgias – a customer service platform for e-commerce stores. I will not dilute the focus of this piece by talking about the $14m round they just raised, but would rather focus on the task at hand.
3 Journeys of the buyer
Marisa Kopec of SiriusDecisions produced a report in 2015 where she analyzed inputs from over 1300 B2B buying executives across North America and Europe. The study shows that there are three distinct buyer journeys and they call it committee, consensus and independent. $B companies making purchases that are upwards of 100K up to a million will engage in this process that could stretch over 6 months and 18 touch points. I would like to believe it is likely to be a lot more.
Startup (sales) troubles
I spend a lot of time meeting and talking to startups. Not only because they are a potential target group for our Buyer Seller Engagement platform Pitch.Link, but because as a product startup I naturally spend time continuously in the ecosystem, be it Canada or India. I love to see how people pitch their business ideas and figure solvable pain points. One universal one, Sales.
Why buy, Why you, Why now?
Product led growth and self selling self serving saas can go only so far – $50 to $100mn but rarely beyond in the same manner. Enterprise sales needs to kick in for hyper growth and this article by Mark Cranney in the A16Z blog of 2014 has some interesting insights. Mark headed OpsWare – a data center automation services company it outlines a model for attempting Enterprise sales. True job of sales people is not to communicate value to customers but to create new value for them.
Cold emails – what works?
Cold outreach response rates continue to plummet as buyers push back on unsolicited contacts. However practitioners are finding wide ranging success and Sales Hacker conducted a study about a year back and I found that hugely educative.
Getting a face to face with a prospect is a major problem.
Our Selling Pains Survey 2019 pointed out a bunch of problems folks on the ground are facing every day. Over 80% sales professionals surveyed admitted having a problem getting a face to face meeting with an identified prospect between 20% and 60% of the times in varying degrees.
