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.
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. So when you guys asked for introductions to that, I was more than happy to do it.
Those are the three key rocks for me that I'm convinced will set myself up for the best chance of success this year. And I can go into kind of the details on each one of those. People, obviously, I'm building a team, pipeline, obviously, the oxygen of our company is building more pipeline. I'm out there prospecting now as our first seller on the ground. And then the process piece is really kind of building that V1 of our sales playbook. “So as we're onboarding reps, they will have some sort of guidance on where to go.” But those are the three P's for me. And then an actual seller that's a little bit more matured into their role, again, it doesn't differ too much there. To me, prospecting is always one of those three bullets there. But then the second and or third are talking about the actual existing pipeline that you do have.
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.
And also gamifying it too, like sellers are freaking competitive. And one thing I've seen happen very successfully is rewarding, making deals that you actually self-source more valuable to somebody. “Paying them a spiff of a percentage point or giving them a gift card or an early vacation or whatever it might be so that they know these deals, I'm going to go out myself.” They're even more valuable than if it's a marketing source lead or a BDR source lead. I remember one thing that we did over at Pave is, and we actually had the managers cold call candidates during those dial blitzes. And the reps loved 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,
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