A couple of months ago all of our sales team quit.
That’s a dramatic intro: the truth is we had two salespeople to process
inbound leads- but they both did leave the company last quarter, and we were left with
no team- and after they left we closed our best sales months ever.
It was a massive rebuilding and re-thinking of our entire funnel, we had to re-thinking everything.
Team shake-ups like this force you to act on the spot,
to re-assemble resources- but also to zoom out and figure out what is not working.
So today I want to share our lead structuring process,
how we think about leads, the tools we use to process them and tell you how
we essentially built a new sales organization from the ground up.
OK so let’s start from the basics. I believe you can simplify
company growth tactics into three large groups: Self-Service, Inbound, and Outbound.
Self Service You have to think these
as B2C: these are broad marketing campaigns where customers
have an individual journey from brand discovery to conversion.
This may start with ads, organic traffic, social media, Youtube-
but essentially, customers are on their own.
If you signed up and converted to platforms like ClickUp or Amazon Web Services,
you probably did it yourself- with speaking to a sales agent.
Inbound Sales You have Inbound Sales
when a website is built to capture leads, but those leads will require a sales touch to convert.
This happens with many B2B SaaS products,
especially if they are in they are above $500 or $1,000 per month.
You rarely convert to those products without assistance-
many of these products don’t advertise their pricing on their website,
or require you to book a demo instead of giving you access to the product.
Outbound Sales Last but not
least you have outbound sales. This usually applies to B2B or even Enterprise products,
where you have sales agents reaching out to prospects via email.
You may also have business development agents navigating their networks to sell.
As you go down this path, closing a deal gets more expensive.
If you have a good lead flow or a good ad campaign running,
you might be able to close a sale for, say, $50-$100 via Self-Service.
But when you involve a sales organization, humans talking to leads, you are going to end up
with customer acquisition costs in the hundreds or thousands of dollars,
so your products need to be priced accordingly.
It’s a very curious thing, but many SaaS products are not expensive because of server
or software costs- but because of what it costs to sell them. The
price you pay is covering your own customer acquisition cost.
Anyway, as you probably figured out already, Self-Service is our bread and butter.
While Slidebean focuses on startups, so it’s technically a B2B product,
our customer acquisition works like a B2C product: broad reach campaigns like Youtube and SEO.
I think companies can excel at one or two of these channels but rarely
do all three. Maybe really large organizations like ClickUp, Slack or Hubspot play in all three
categories because their products can range from $10/mo to $1,000s per month,
based on the organization size- but most companies will do one or two, tops.
In our case, we have two products whose pricing determines how we sell them. Our SaaS platform,
which is this fundraising OS for early-stage companies; and our Agency branch, a team of
analysts and designers that helps companies prepare their pitch decks and data rooms.
_______
OK, so let’s get back to that diagram I showed you earlier on.
We’re a lead capturing machine! About 40,000 leads land on our lap every month
They discover us through one of these broad marketing channels and download a resource,
register for our forensics newsletter, sign up to the platform,
book a call with sales, and in rare occasions book a project self-service.
For those large groups of users, we have an email automation
team that takes care of the drip campaigns.
The sales team is vital to processing those inbound leads
that want the sales call.
and pointing them in the right direction.
usually selling them a project, which the cost of these projects justifies the cost of having that sales team.
Now like I said, last quarter all of our inbound sales agents left.
at different times and for different reasons
We were suddenly left with zero people to process those conversions,
which meant that the entire 7-digit Agency revenue line, could drop to zero.
Them leaving obviously revealed that the commission system we were using was not
working and that we had to re-thinking to be able to recruit a new team.
We started doing that immediately after we got the notice- but we were not going
to be able to have a team in place by the time the previous one left.
So we decided to transform our email support team into a sales team.
Now for you to understand this part
The role of the email support team had always been
reactive: they respond to customer requests and assist customers with questions.
Their KPIs always revolved around customer satisfaction and response times, but out of need,
we understood that they were probably the most qualified to speak to these leads
(I would have helped myself, but I was shooting our Startup Planet series in India at the time). So it was just impossible!
We immediately started training them in calls and processes.
Hubspot sales was rather easy to adopt- and we were using a platform
called Wingman, mainly to monitor sales calls and provide feedback to the agents.
We had been using Wingman for the team managers to monitor calls and provide feedback around those
interactions, but it suddenly became the source of knowledge for this improvised sales team.
We set up folders with some key calls to use as reference,
and create a cheat sheet of common questions from the transcripts.
A couple of weeks later, the support team began taking calls as the other team was phased out.
But here’s the first accidental success: we suddenly turned
our support team into a sales team.
This was a massive breakthrough that we had missed for years.
These guys work with that bulk of 40,000 leads,
maintaining and optimizing the email drip campaigns that we send.
We had always thought of those campaigns from the customer success side, yes,
thinking of conversion- but never of sales.
By giving that team the tools, the knowledge to sell, and combining that with
a commission system, we suddenly found ourselves with an endless pool of leads.
Of course, it wasn’t about turning every interaction into a sales pitch- but instead about nurturing those customers with a sales mindset.
A mindset that there's a commission to be earned if this customer eventually converses.
This lesson, this thing that we had overlooked over years, redefined our entire recruiting process. We ended up hiring
an associate-level agent, who now leads the team.
We promoted one of the customers support team members to the sales team
after she closed more deals in a month than any of the previous sales agents.
And we added a second new hire, with a sales background, but who actually joined
the email team- to bring some sales knowledge and experience into our email automation.
The new commission system now applies to both sales agents and the customer support team,
which keeps them motivated to close deals. We also
now see a fair share of deals that are closed via email, without the need for a sales call.
We saw almost more sales calls after the transition, mostly from email conversations
turning into prospects. Sales for April grew by about 80% compared to February.
Again, was pretty crazy for us.
here are some key takeaways from this whole process:
Retain your team: a team member’s compensation is a balance of a lot of things: market salary,
benefits, growth opportunities inside the company, but also the risk of them leaving.
I think we completely underplay how risky it was for those guys to leave all at the same time.
If your company will be in trouble if that person leaves,
then you need to be extra careful with keeping them happy, motivated, and well-compensated.
The second point here is
Oversight: sales is not my expertise. We had a single senior salesperson,
and we trusted them to establish our entire process- because
the other process didn’t feel we had the capacity to question it.
I now believe it’s worth getting second opinions on some of these
things, especially if you as a founder don’t have the criteria to judge or to decide.
This might be, for example, hiring a consultant to understand the process and make recommendations,
or to benchmark it against other equivalent companies.
That's something we have done a couple times, just hire somebody with an external view of what we do
to understand if it's working or not.
You should do that with a process that you're not an expert on.
Next topc is Documenting your processes: another big problem we had was that none of the processes were properly
documented. In startups, things often move to fast to spend time documenting- but it is worth it,
especially when only a handful of people are aware of how things work.
and again they may leave with that knowledge.
Now, we originally deployed Wingman to fine-tune our sales process and have a bird's eye view of
deals in action, but we honestly got lucky that we were able to repurpose Wingman for a very
different use case. We used game tapes to help our new reps quickly understand how to answer
common sales questions. Some team members also set up sales battle cards - which would be triggered
by what was being asked during the call - to help with the process. BTW, I asked the Wingman team
(who I had the pleasure of meeting in person while in Bengaluru) to include a deal in our platform.
They kindly offered a 10% discount deal for
our Youtube viewers and an even better deal for customers on our platform.
They also agreed to officially sponsor's today video,
but again we were using them long before they sponsor this video
Last but not least, necessity is the mother of invention- experiment! We had to reinvent
the sales process because circumstances pushed us to do so, but that shouldn’t be the only reason.
Our sales process was working, but we had no idea of how much more efficient it could be.
Don’t be afraid to force those drastic changes- half measures vs full measures.
Hope the story was useful! Another shoutout to the Wingman team for sponsoring today’s video.
We are doing a Fireside chat with their CEO- it’s
part of our weekly event series for the Slidebean Community.
So it's available for all our Slidebean customers.
Make sure you sign up and tune in.
See you guys there!