This series on mastering ‘B2B Sales for Startup Founders’ is authored by Himanshu Goel who has 30+ years of experience in creating & executing businesses, pricing options, and sales strategy for Motorola, IBM, Microsoft & Cisco. Himanshu is also an active angel investor on the LetsVenture platform and a mentor to startups. His latest adventure was a self-driving expedition to the Mt. Everest Base camp! In Part 1, we addressed how you can arrive at your sales strategy & build your sales team.In Part 2, we got into B2B Marketing and explored why sales & marketing can’t be divorced from each other.In Part 3, we looked at how you can build a solid sales pipeline and manage it.In Part 4, we talked about pricing options in the B2B ecosystem.In Part 5, we traversed through the legal implications in B2B sales.In Part 6, we understood the key to selling in a slow down.In the final part, we will order the madness & look at B2B sales as a whole!
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Ordering the madness in B2B Sales
A weekly sales meeting to review overall pipeline with new leads generated, validation of each lead and conversion opportunity, movement across various sales stages, forecasting of deals closure by month (if not per week) and most importantly capturing and acting on help needed by the sales team will make the organisation mature and predictable, very quickly. As the start-up matures (and has over 20 opportunities, more than 2-3 sales locations, few salespersons) the following will help you institutionalise sales effectiveness:
- Sales operations: Someone in the organisation, could be from finance, sales or corporate, should be designated as the ‘Sales Operations SPOC’. He/she should collate the information around opportunities and tabulate in a simple Excel sheet and circulate before the sales review calls. This avoids wasting time collecting the information during the call.
- CRM tool: Have a simple CRM tool which allows the sales team to run their business i.e. keep a history of customer engagements, a repository of sales collateral/pricing, customer contracts, run all internal approvals, flexible weekly/annual reports for all stakeholders, execute all sales & marketing campaigns.
- Information template: The weekly sales review template should be thought through and should have:a) an overall summary of where the sales stand i.e. annual target, pipeline multiplier, current revenues, the status of collections, sales quota and the quarterly/annual outlookb) a opportunities / pipeline should be sliced and diced by product type, size, sales stage, probability, new sales / up-sellc) Prior week’s action items and their status
- A monthly sync up: This should be between the sales team and extended teams like product, finance, customer support. This will ensure that the revenue engine runs smoothly. These sales meetings should also include a review of existing customers' success with the products and possibilities of up-selling new products or features to them. A quick view of collections status will go a long way in developing a robust revenue stream.
The above actions will help give a clear picture of sales as a function and create a robust action register. All these sales functions decide an organisation’s fate apart from a great product or service
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This brings us to the end of the B2B Sales Playbook – if you have any questions, our comments section is open.
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