原创 Devising a sales strategy

The key point I want to make with this blog post is that the sales channel is a living organism. It needs to be adapted and changed as a company evolves, and that’s how entrepreneurs should view it. It’s likely, too, that the sales organization will undergo several changes, and some of those could be painful.

As well, founders must be active participants in the sales activities and cannot avoid being hands-on in the initial sales situations. They have to live and feel the pain of their customers and understand how their solution is helping. Not participating in the sales efforts will undermine the whole strategy. After all, at the heart of the startup is the unwavering belief in what you’re doing and seeing its impact.

Early customer engagements are important and must be nurtured. Each will be unlike another and have different use models than what the founders anticipated. In fact, the sales process will go through many changes until the right recipe for success has been developed.

Of course, the founders should not be part of the sales team forever, unless they want to move into that role. It is only possible for the founder to be acting as CEO plus vice president of sales, engineering lead, and super field applications engineer (FAE) for a short period of time. Eventually, for the company to scale, the bench will be built up and full of experienced sales professionals able to open doors by leveraging their existing network.

Phase one, however, is when the founders work closely with initial customers. The sales team comes in at the next phase, when the product is ready to proliferate out of the original sales engagements, and it’s a quite different scenario.

Many in our industry compare the phases to the Hunter and the Farmer. The hunter is the stalker and is able to stalk out initial opportunities. At this stage, the goal is to identify a select number of targets and pursue them relentlessly. The farmer is the harvester; he or she follows in the footsteps of the hunter. The farmer leverages the initial entry into a strategic account provided by the hunter to proliferate the solution across multiple teams. Naturally, the salespeople fitting those two profiles require different skills.

Hunters tend to operate independently and thrive in unknown territory. The farmer is more of a team player and should be paired with an FAE who has a large role to play. This is the individual who’s living with the customer, and he or she roams the cubicle hallways looking for other prospects, an important aspect of the position.

An important skill for the early sales managers is their skill at analyzing the fit between the solution offered and the customer’s problem. Seasoned sales managers are adept at this and will often recommend how to revise the product positioning to adapt to early customer needs and, later on, to expand from a vertical space to another, broader focus.

As the company grows and moves into yet another phase, sales will need more of an infrastructure. The Holy Grail for a company sales organization is to be able to create a reliable sales process that can be applied consistently across the globe. It should include how to identify the right kind of customer and the pitch that works best. It also encompasses training programs that allow the company to bring on new sales managers and quickly make them operational.

Reaching this level of maturity is a great achievement for a sales organization -- one that will take time and, unfortunately, changes in personnel. Of course, it’s a validation that the technology is a useful tool. It also sends a message to the industry that the company is growing and has momentum. A focus on big customers and proliferating the technology within these big companies will help a startup reach an inflection point.

Sales is complex and expensive, neither of which should be overlooked. Building the right product is only half the story. Sales and marketing is the other half. No company can be successful without both halves performing at their peak levels.

Michel Courtoy

Board Member

Breker Verification Systems