SteliE

I always like to ask "What will it take for you to become a customer of ours?"

The key is to keep following up with questions until you arrive at a point when they say "and yes, then we'd buy"

See more about it here if interested: http://blog.close.io/sales-hacking-kung-fu-how-to-virtually-...

I appreciate the feedback but honestly disagree with you here.

In my experience conflict never escalades because of facts or differences of opinion/approach but almost always because people get too "attached" to their ideas/approach/solution and can't differentiate or argue based on pure facts but get emotional and later "religious" about their side.

One of the Heroku founders once said something to the effect of "We like people that hold their strong opinions loosely"

I loved that quote. It means that you want to have people with strong opinions in startups but not people that hold on to their opinions too strongly and are not open to sometimes trying someone else's approach in the name of progress.

You're right.

I'm a big fan of Lemkin but might disagree here although I'm not sure if it's semantics or if we truly disagree.

I think after you have just 2 reps it's usually too early to hire an experienced VP of Sales although I guess it's fine if you hire someone and give them that title.

Someone who is currently a director of sales or sales manager might be better for phase 2 although you should start looking for a VP as early as 2 reps since it's going to take a very long time to find the right fit.

thanks for asking this question & sorry for the sales lingo :)

when I say sales model what I mean is the most successful/feasible way to sell your product.

is it via inside sales (people sending emails, making calls and giving online demos) or field sales ( people going door to door or flying to large enterprise customers for meetings etc) or a combination of both.

are you getting your leads via marketing (inbound) or do you have to do cold outreach (outbound) or a combination of both.

what tools and process do you use to sell what is the average time it takes you to close a deal what's the average deal size a sales person can close etc etc

all these factors and a bunch more would make up your sales model.

probably a good idea to write a post dedicated to this subject but I hope this clarifies it a bit :)

Spot on!

Creating the right commission/compensation structure is super tough and crucial to create a scalable sales force.

In my experience that's not the first challenge startup founders have when they start their sales team.

First, figure out what sales channels/models are predictable and repeatable for your product/market.

Once you've validated a lot of assumptions reg sales model you can move on and worry about sales execution & scalability etc.

And at that point you better bring in someone who's done it before and knows how to create commission structures that will work for your company

You might wanna try sending customer lifecycle emails to customers after a few weeks pitching them on referring you to their friends and see how well this performs.

I don't have first hand experience in automating this via email. My experience has been exclusively with phone sales so far.

Yeah that's what most people think (and sometimes it's the right approach).

For most SaaS apps your customer had a chance to experience the product on a free trial of some sorts.

If they are convinced enough to buy many will be ready to recommend.

Asking for it at that point only shortens the referral sales cycle (you don't have to schedule a separate call for this since you're already talking to them) and once you've closed the positive feedback loop they can start giving you more referrals (and at that point they've probably been a customer for a month or two).

Starting earlier just makes this gain a lot more momentum faster.

Yeah that's a fair point. If you don't talk to your customers today it might make sense to automate this via email.

Most likely you will have a much lower success rate since the biggest point of conversion in the approach outlined in the post is at the "2nd ask" (which is hard to do via email).

But it's a lot better than not asking for referrals in the first place :)

Would love to hear what kind of results you would see doing this!

Never seen a case where referral sales makes more sense than at YesGraph :) Excited to see the results you guys are going to get from implementing this!

oh that's a good point! I need to edit that into the original post :)

I've found that in B2B you don't want to "pay" for referrals and that people are more likely to make them when they feel like they are providing value to their network without any selfish incentives.

Once in a while someone will ask for it and it's up to you to decide if you want to give people a discount or something else for helping you close new business. I personally think that's reasonable when asked but wouldn't offer it upfront.

That's true for one time deals where you don't care about success but not true for SaaS. Taking money from the wrong customers and running a high churn/high support cost SaaS app will destroy your startup.

The point I'm making is not that it's bad to ask for a discount. I do it all the time :)

The only difference is I don't ask for discounts before trying a product and determining that it fits my needs and I actually want to purchase.

The advice I give is to ask people politely to trial your product first and then offer them a discount if they actually confirmed that they like it

That's totally different and not the use case I discuss in the post. It's fine to ask for a discount after you tried the product. Most of us do it :)

Curious to hear if you really "want to settle into the service" without having used/tested the product at all?

Asking for a discount during your trial is one thing, asking for a discount before trying the product is another :)

ping me if you wanna chat more. maybe I can help: http://blog.close.io/sales-office-hours

I hear you.

What I'm saying is not "leave zero customer surplus"

I say don't create value purely by lowering prices.

More specifically from the post:

"Focus fanatically on this: offering more value to every single customer than you extract from them with your pricing.

Do that by constantly adding more value to your customers life instead of lowering your prices and discounting your product heavily."

Fixed! Thanks. You can tell I'm not a native speaker/writer. Making these kind of writing mistakes way too often (and some of them still show up even after having other look over it) :)

I would need to dig a bit deeper but on first sight $9/mo doesn't strike me as super expensive.

Are you sure you're building something that fundamentally is valuable enough to an audience that is willing to pay money for it in exchange?

Have you validated that that's true?

That's a good point and I'll go back and clarify in the post :)

I do think you want multiple pricing tiers. The question here is what's your baseline?

Most SaaS startups start way too low. And once they get even a little tiny bit of push back they go back to their pricing tiers and lower them again.

That's a deadly pricing strategy and I wanted to call it out in this piece :)

We've automated the invoicing and $ metrics part so there is not really that much to keep track of manually.

I get where you're coming from but the reality of B2B SaaS is that you'll almost always have factors that will make some differences in your $Rev per customer/seat.

Think about a) offering discounts to some customers b) different prices per seat tier c) old pricing plans etc etc

The goal needs to be to increase your CLTV over time and unfortunately this often means increasing prices, changing old pricing tiers/plans etc.

Hey jcater - I hear you. This post is about how to execute the price increase AFTER you decided you a) want to increase prices & b) know what the new prices should look like

we grandfathered all existing SEATS! that's an important distinction. many of our old customers keep adding new paying seats (at the new pricing) and they only got to keep the old prices for all their existing seats + the ones they added during the 14 day promotion.

the 2 quick lessons learned that might be most relevant to you are: 1) make sure you reach out to customers + trial accounts and communicate personally with them on what's coming & 2) make sure to give them a reason to be happy & an incentive to add more paying seats (upsell opportunity)

Really sorry to hear the situation you're in. I've shared my story of failure and entrepreneurial depression here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrUw4S76jFQ

A few people have told me that it helped them in tough times.

I have a small child and another on the way so I can only guess how you feel right now. Entrepreneurship is hard. Ping me at steli@close.io if you ever need someone to listen.

No spambots here sorry :)

Did you watch a bit of the talk? Would love to hear if you think it's not valuable to founders who have to do sales and close deals.

Steli here from the talk :)

Sales hacking in this context means using very leveraged strategies to get to results a lot faster with less resources.

This talk is focused on founders who need to hustle and close customers fast without any prior credibility and sales experience.

I agree that "hacking" is overused these days but I still decided to use it because it attracts the right audience and creates the right expectations if that makes sense

hey! this is steli (from the talk), sorry I didn't have the time to turn the talk into a blog post yet (will do sometime soon).

I have lots of friends on HN so this translates into a lot of praise which is good for my ego but not really useful to the community. srry about that!

Just uploaded my slides to slideshare to give you a bit of content. check it out to decide if you wanna invest 45mins to watch the talk later :)

http://www.slideshare.net/SteliEfti/deal-closing-sales-hacki...

Thanks Darius :)

Here a article on VentureBeat I wrote about why I'm giving free sales office hours and you might want to do that too: http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/28/office-hours/

I <3 you Greg! Thanks for the kind words and support!

This talk is very much the result of hundreds of sales office hours I had with founders.

I hope it helps lots of entrepreneurs out there hustle better :)

Agree! Also love the "Hire Builders not Growers". Lots of founders make the mistake to hire sales people in the very early stages of their startup that have no experience in doing sales for a 4 person startup team (and came from a tech company they joined as employee #400)

That's fair.

What we found especially in B2B is that when people decide to put in their phone number they are actually glad to have someone call and offer help.

I call users every day and never had someone be mad at me or cancel. Quite the opposite, many upgrade as a result of our interaction :)

Hey guys, author of the course here. Would love to hear your thoughts/ideas on what you would like to learn about Startup Sales.

Here is the kind of feedback I've been hearing from Founders/Startup Sales people who have signed up for the course so far (we launched it a week ago):

"I don't think I've ever been so engaged with a mailing list content marketing before. Good stuff, and I can't wait to get more :D"