Podcast episode
Building trust when selling at early-stage companies (Miles Kane, VP, Sales @ Tenderly)
30 Minutes to President's Club22 Mar 202332 min
Description
Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Grow your existing pipeline 50% by asking for referrals. Use these 3 common PLG (product-led growth) triggers to engage freemium users: sign-ups, increased usages, and multiple users on one account. Don’t immediately sell your roadmap. Instead, find customers who are 80% aligned with the vision and use the roadmap to bridge the 20%. If you’re selling early-stage, focus on the early adopters / innovative buyers. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB VP, Sales @ Tenderly Director, Enterprise Sales @ Drift VP, Sales @ Altocloud | Acquired by Genesys Director, Sales @ SmartBear RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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and goals. Love it. Round us out, Miles. What's number three? Yeah. So third one, I was thinking about ways to kind of get your year off to a quick start. And I've got an idea of how to grow your existing pipeline by up to 50% with just one question. And I actually want to give both of you guys a shout out here in terms of the virality that you guys are building on the podcast network here. “It's asking your happy and healthy customers for warm introductions.” Every rep that's out there has a little bit of experience and has got either two, three, five, 10, 20 customers in their book of business. Asking those current customers of yours that are happy for introductions into their network. Like one thing I know, like myself as a sales leader, I've got a lot of friends in my network who are in similar types of roles and positions.
more manageable. From there, okay, you've got 10 deals you have to close, well, how many actual opportunities do you need there? Again, you can go back in history and see at your company for the top reps, what is the actual close win rate percentage of qualified opportunity? Let's say it's on the conservative side, let's call it 30%. “Okay, well, if it's 30%, that means you need what, a little over three X of pipeline to” get there. So if you're going to close 10 deals a year, that means you need 30 opportunities. Okay, again, 30 opportunities over the course of a 12-month annual year, like that sounds doable. But let's say you're talking, you've got the total amount of opportunities that you want to go after. Let's break that into actual quarterly exercise.
In Funnel math
was bringing the team together on what we call power hours or prospecting hours on a weekly and consistent basis, where we had time blocks. It was typically either Monday mornings or Friday afternoons to kind of not get into the actual meat of the week, where people had it on their calendar, blocked off. “And unless you had a significantly serious closing call or something else, like you could not block over it.” And so committing to that focus across the team and having the leaders from the top down show up and help actually prospect with them to know that it's a company-wide initiative. But we've all seen it happen where reps that do that and forget about prospecting. Next year, they show up on January 1st and they've got no pipeline and they're screwed and they've got to spend six months doing it.
It was typically either Monday mornings or Friday afternoons to kind of not get into the actual meat of the week, where people had it on their calendar, blocked off. And unless you had a significantly serious closing call or something else, like you could not block over it. “And so committing to that focus across the team and having the leaders from the top down show up and help actually prospect with them to know that it's a company-wide initiative.” But we've all seen it happen where reps that do that and forget about prospecting. Next year, they show up on January 1st and they've got no pipeline and they're screwed and they've got to spend six months doing it.
Can you give me a sense of what the communication timing looks like here? So you get a Slack notification. Somebody signs up. How soon do you contact them? Through which medium? Yeah. So we've built some pretty powerful automated campaigns with our marketing team so that anytime a user signs up, like they're getting the auto email so they know about, you know, the login and sign up and all that kind of stuff. “I think there's a fine line of being helpful versus being annoying.” And that's something that we're always trying to toe the line of like making sure they're getting value as quickly as possible, but not feeling as though they're getting a call every single day from a salesperson. So we try to get in touch with folks within 24 to 48 hours of those new signups. We want to make the outreach so that they know that there's somebody there to help. We don't usually expect a response right there just because, again,