#sales

The best salespeople have great intuitions for which prospects are most decisive, and how to get access to better contacts. Everyone else wastes their time talking to people who will never buy, no matter how appealing they make it sound.

Startups should try to hire salespeople in pairs. This is particularly important when spinning up a new channel (e.g., launching in a new market, opening up a partner channel, or kicking off outbound sales).

Ambitious projects need ambitious goals, but bad KPIs can do more harm than good. This week, we look at some principles for defining measurable goals within a startup.

It’s easy to convince potential customers to take a risk on your product if you have irrefutable proof that it will deliver results.

Bottom-up SaaS is a sales strategy that targets individual users or teams within an organisation rather than the organisation as a whole. Given large organisations tend to buy slowly, especially when buying critical components of their digital architecture, this can accelerate growth for B2B SaaS startups.

Every startup needs a repeatable and sustainable sales model. This week, we explore the various strategies that work for SaaS products.

SaaS startups should aim for the recurring revenue they earn from each customer to grow over time. This week, we cover the foundational strategies for achieving recurring revenue expansion.

As B2B SaaS startups achieve scale, they gain the ability to achieve massive revenue growth by simply better monetising existing customers. This week, we explore some pricing strategies that make this type of revenue growth easy.

A self-service experience, including a free trial or freemium plan, is a cost-effective way to sell a product that is capable of selling itself. Many startup leaders underestimate how much work it takes to truly make this work, though. This week, we explore how to deliver a self-service SaaS experience, and how to decide whether this strategy for growth is right for you.

Sales model innovation is the most underrated challenge in conversations about product-market fit. Failing to experiment and innovate on the sales layer causes many startups to lose hope in markets, problems, and solutions with huge potential. Founders assume that because their solution isn’t selling, it must be an inadequate solution, or the market and problem they’ve identified are not big enough. Many teams expect product innovation to solve the product-market fit problem single-handedly, so they abandon anything that isn’t easy to sell, and burn their early-stage runway on product iterations. Often, some discipline and experimentation in the sales process could’ve successfully brought their early solutions to market. The problem with the typical framing of the product-market fit mental model is that it suggests that a startup will succeed so long as it finds a big problem and solves it. Unfortunately, it is rarely this simple. I encourage startups to adopt a disciplined, data-driven approach to marketing and sales to expand their criteria for product-market fit to consider the suitability of the sales model to the market and the product.