STARTUP SALES MANAGEMENT

Seedcamp Sales Tales

Are you Happy with your Sales?

by Stephen Allott, Venture Partner, Seedcamp

Watch my 7 minutes of unconventional wisdom at Sales Confidence

VOLUME 1: WINNING YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS

1. Seedcamp Sales Tales — the Blog Series
2. The first sale is the hardest — it’s a trial
3. Enterprise sales closing checklist and tactics. The 12 step programme
4. Your Customer Success team target is reference-ability
5. Lead me on — all sales start with a qualified lead. Go forth and educate — make it personal
6. The greatest sales deck ever by Andy Raskin
7. How to write a business case: ROI business case development using ROCE trees
8. Pricing issues (high or low, bundle or menu)
9. Handling legal contracts and T s & Cs,

VOLUME 2: BUILDING YOUR SALES ENGINE

1. Sales is a 3 Act Drama. How your Founder sales role evolves thru Search/Focus/Scale
2. You are selling not buying when sales hiring
3. The first sales hire is the hardest
4. Sales organisation expansion guide / Role and Territory design
5. Recruiting Sales Reps: Top Ten Tips to catch the best
6. USA market entry / when and how to open an office
7. Sales / Pre-sales / Implementation / Customer success: how they fit
8. How to sell to Government: its a different ball game

VOLUME 3: MAKING SALES A MEAN MACHINE

1. Using your weekly sales meeting to drive innovation / find the money
2. Make your sales forecast about action
3. Sales rep Onboarding and Training … talking to Tim Frankcom
4. Commission plan design / Monthly or quarterly targets?
5. Using channels and “partners”: when does it make sense?
6. How to Diagnose and Fix sales problems from Wayne Barker
7. Competitor playbooks; how to win every time from Wayne Barker
8. Sales Stack from Sales Stack 2020

SEEDCAMP SALES TALES

The Series consists of 20 Sales Tales attracting over 10,500 views on Medium. Closing trials has been the stand out most popular topic. Sales rep target design has been attracting recent reader interest. Lead generation is always a key concern and the 3 Act Drama explains how your lead generation approach has to evolve through Search, Focus and Scale.

In addition to the 20 published, 4 further articles (by other authors) are recommended making 24 in total

Please comment giving any other topics you would like us to cover.

As a software CEO and Chairman, I have had to build, target, direct, motivate and repair sales teams of all sizes and types. They range from:

1. Redgate Software selling developer tools using digital and desk based sales to sell to the US and Europe from a building in Cambridge and growing from 10 to 300 people to
2. Micromuse (NASDAQ:MUSE) selling enterprise software in 20 countries and growing from 10 to 800 people down to
3. Start-ups and scale-ups I have chaired and advised.

The Micromuse logo

My management consulting firm, Trinamo, was flooded with work. When I asked if someone was happy with their sales and explained what we did, they wanted help. Wayne Barker worked for me at Micromuse and Trinamo.

The Seedcamp portfolio asks me more questions on Sales than any other function. It’s high impact to get sales right. In fact, sales is the business. Research shows that once you have product market fit, Sales is the biggest single performance lever. Recent workshops show that the top 3 topics are:

• Digital lead generation and customer case study webinars
• The transition from Founder led sales to the first sales hire
• Sales commission plan design

Survey by the author at Business of Software 2018

Sales covers not only 3 channels: digital, inside and field but sales management also covers 9 separate areas. I asked the audience at Business of Software which of these 27 topics they were most interested in and here are their choices which are strikingly consistent.

• Lead generation
• Designing an inside (desk based) sales team
• Sales process design
• Target and commission plan design

The Seedcamp team