Sales Success for Startups
Looking for some sales success for startups? Startups face unique challenges from a sales perspective. Typically these challenges include:
- Lack of name recognition
- Lack of education about the problem that your product or service solves
- Lack of confidence in prospective buyers, who don’t want to be burned by being early adopters
- Limited sales and marketing resources
How can your organization compete with a competitor that has years of experience in your industry, 100X more money to spend and a staff that is at least 10X the size of yours?
From my experience, you need to follow three pieces of advice:
1.) Don’t wait for everything to line up. The most successful sales organizations are also the most aggressive leaders in adapting to guerilla techniques such as the use of marketing automation. This makes even more sense when you consider that every day that you delay is an opportunity for your competitors to exponentially increase their advantage on your company in the market place.
2.) You need to either find a tremendous amount of funding to catch up to your competitors; or you need a brilliant alignment of sales and marketing strategies that leverage technology and eyeballs to pay attention to your messaging.
3.) Find your differentiator and champion that message so that you can rapidly gain sole position as the industry leader in that area.
In the last two years, I have seen some impressive results from marketing automation alone. While many lead marketing automation providers do not even use their own technology; I will provide you with some insights into what we have produced internally with our own software:
- 171% increase in revenue year-over-year
- 632% better brand recognition amongst those surveyed
- 980% increase in engagement with prospects
- Our close rate went from 13% to 38%
- 28% of our existing customers upgraded in 2014 as a result of our education programs
This all occurred without increasing the size of our sales staff. We maintained the same budgets +/-10% in all other categories. Of course these rules go for established companies as well. Are you losing market share? Not growing as fast as you would like? Feel like your cost of growth is too high? Feel like your company is unable to compete without additional funding? If so, we’d love to talk with you and share our experiences to see if they might help you.
