When I started to do sales full-time at Brainhub (and scaled it from 4 -> 110 ppl) for almost 8 years, I had no idea how to do it. Therefore I:
- Found people who had the experience and bought them coffee to learn from them,
- Read all the books about B2B Sales,
- Went through the internet (blogs, ebooks, webinars, etc.).
Here are my notes, which helped me to get started.
Top Sales Resources I used
So, of course, I started to read books about sales, building sales teams, and in company processes. These resources helped me a lot:
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com — My favorite one. A must-read for anybody building inbound/outbound sales, sales team and all other related processes.
The Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales — The best f**** sales hustler that I have ever seen live. I am pretty sure that this guy could sell snow to an Eskimo.
How to Win Friends and Influence People — Basics that you need to know to make people like you.
Blogs:
$$$ http://blog.close.io/
$$$ http://blog.hubspot.com/sales
$$$ https://www.saleshacker.com/tag/articles/
Growing Sales Through Culture and Values — CHRIS SALLEN / Director of Sales — UXPin
#Culture & Values in Sales
How culture and values are related to sales performance?
Core Values → Company Culture → Actions/Performance
Set your goals and you will find a way to achieve them with your values and culture.
eg. “Surround yourself with only high performers.” This core value keeps managers focused on excellence in hiring and managing employees.
Read more (not recommended by Chris, but I think this article describes the idea behind values & culture together with performance)
How to Plug the Leaks in Your Pipeline and Increase Conversion — SYED ASAD HUSSAIN / Director of Sales — LiveChat
#Follow-up ASAP
You will get way higher conversion rates if you follow-up with your leads as soon as possible. Reply e-mail or send a demo/presentation asap.
Responding to Leads Within an Hour Generates 7x the Conversations
#No differentiation between leads and qualified leads
Understand the customer’s problem. Qualify your leads each time and focus on those qualified first.
#Process, process, process — Storyboard the process!!!! Have a Roadmap
Create a pipeline, predict goals & money flowing.
From start to close. Add KPIs at each level. Predict, what you are doing and create a process to scale your team.
#Follow-up, educate, and nurture leads
Work on your leads, and educate them — Most of them are not willing to buy anything from you without building trust, they need to see an expert in you willing to help them.
#Don’t take no’s to quickly
If somebody says “no” figure out — why. Understand their objectives. Ask 5x Why? Don’t give up!
#Under promise and over-deliver always
eg. Promise to send an answer by Friday — Deliver on Thursday
Surprise your customer by delivering more/faster than expected.
I highly recommend Syed’s Short&Sweet Sales Training Deck
How to Merge Online CONTENT with PAID TRAFFIC to Generate Sales — Ewa Wysocka & Samuel Cook / Founders TRAFFIC & CONVERSION MEETUP
#Spend money on what they want, you will get more money for what you want
Focus your ads to promote free content (ebooks/webinars/courses), which gives added value to users. Don’t focus your campaign on that, what you would like to sell at the end.
You need 5 touch-points with a potential customer before trying to sell him/her something
#Use Facebook video campaigns to warm up cold traffic. Promote some free stuff
#Spend 50% of your budget on front-end view, which means promoting the FB Video.
60” Video Sells Better Than a Thousand Words — Maciej Sawicki / CEO- Mumin’s Interactive, Co-founder Animationb2b.com
#Create short videos to promote your brand
Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated to do.
I used Keynote and iMovie to make my first video (I only spent $50 on it), see my tutorial here.
#Get video testimonials from customers
Share them on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. They are faster/easier to make sometimes for your customers than writing them. Those videos sound more “human”.
Generate sales with videos. Source: http://www.slideshare.net/MuminsINT/pipilene-summit-maciej-sawicki
#Books recommended
$$$ Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance
$$$ SPIN Selling
Of course, Predictable Revenue, too :)
#Tools
$$$ CRM - Start simple https://www.pipedrive.com/ and grow -> (Salesforce)
$$$ Outbound.io
$$$ https://www.upsales.com/learning-center/blog/
#Try to upsell
Contact your old customers to upsell your services/products. Ask them for recommendations/referrals.
#Create additional connections via all social media — people see you as a person
Closed deal by WhatsApp… Building relationships, human connection.
#How to grow so fast?
Focus only on sales.
#Sales Team
7 people
*Processing new accounts/clients,
*Customer success up-selling, building relationships,
*Inbound/Outbound.
How Brand Reduces User Acquisition Costs — MAREK CIEŚLA / CEO- MIMI Group, Woolet, Sher.ly; CO-Founder- ALLPLAYER; Board Director- Indie Designers
#How to create a brand for a new product?
Put your product among other products from already known brands > Test your product with different brands > Measure conversion rates.
In the picture, you not only see the wallet, they are selling, but products like an iPhone, a $20 bill, and a Luminor Panerai watch. Products that are already well-known and expensive. This elevates a value of an unknown wallet to the next level.
Other examples:
$$$ Phone holder for cars -> Put it together with BMW and iPhone and sell it in the UK. Those brands will help you here.
$$$ Furniture made in Poland -> Start a company in Italy, change the company’s name to sound Italian, add a family heritage to it, and sell it abroad as Italian furniture, but made in Poland.
How a Developer Builds a Sales Team — JEFFREY SZCZEPANSKI / COO — Stack Overflow
What is the objective? — Predictable revenue that is rapidly scaling.
#1 Proving Product Value
Understand your market and ensure it exists.
#2 Understanding the sale
StackOverflow -> 98% of sales use humans and outbound prospecting.
Full-stack — One person for the entire sales process
Split Sales — Sales Reps, Account Exec. etc.
Best practices:
$$$ Aggressive Compensation Plan (Only if you have a process ready to scale)
$$$ Your product will always suck to some, admit it.
#3 Scaling the organization
Skills Development = Software Skills Development
Using a burndown chart to see if the Sales Reps are on the way to achieving their goals. They use SCRUM for sales and approaches similar to SCRUM in Development for Sales.
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Those resources are just to start. Try to explore on your own, but this could give you are really good base as a B2B Sales person.
Good luck!