Sales Prospecting in the New World for Startups

Disclaimer — This post was intended to be a lite paper, i.e., a condensed version of a much larger post. Also, this post is designed for startups who are finding the need to grow revenues in the harsh realities of the funding bubble burst. This post tries not to be prescriptive but does speak about best practices and frameworks one can use. All of this is based on my experience in the industry which is almost 9 years. Finally, this is intended for all those startups that are struggling to sell their products/services.

Most startups in India face issues with sales. Revenue generation in India might be difficult, but the fact remains that selling is among the core requirements for startups that have established Product-Market fit (PMF). I’ve worked with and consulted several startups on revenue generation, but the answer has always come down to sales. Whether it is product-led growth or actual selling and revenue collection, startups have found the need to invest heavily.

Mark Cuban has stated time and again that sales cures all. Of course, he is a salesman. But, there is a deeper perspective one needs to consider. Especially when investments across the board seem to have dried up, startups increasingly find the need to ensure sales happen.

The evolution of sales

My first job in 2015 was that of a sales executive. I was tasked with selling coffee machines to corporates who might have required the same. At the time, LinkedIn and other prospecting tools were in their infancy. My day started in the office at 9 am where I had to plan my day and map out the exact locations of my meetings. If there were no meetings, I would pull out a map to check where I would need to be to find companies that were possibly interested in my product.

At around 11 am, I would leave the office for the field, most of the time at the insistence of my boss. I would return at around 4 PM, send emails, finish my day by 6 or 7 PM, and repeat the same the following day.

This had been the practice for several years where sales executives were expected to be on the field. An executive in the office was looked down upon and was always urged to step into the field.

Sales v Growth

Today, the evolution of LinkedIn and other growth marketing tools has seen salespeople run campaigns to set appointments before going onto the field. This has also seen increased productivity in sales teams in such a way that prospecting has become almost 80% of the job as opposed to closures.

To complete the story on evolution, today’s sales teams are a lot more enabled than the ones before. Today, the entire sales function has been split into field sales and inside sales. Both have similar KRAs but the goal largely remains the same.

Let’s start with inside sales. In startup lingo, inside sales is more of a growth hacker. This person is responsible for:

1. Running campaigns — generally these are cold email campaigns or LinkedIn (sales navigator) campaigns. This is done to find a first-level connection or find someone within an organization to start a conversation about products or services.
2. Building a database — The process of running a campaign generally starts with building a database. this database is built on a spreadsheet comprising of prospects. The details found here include names, designations, influence in the organization, and contact details such as email IDs. Before 2016, a sales executive would have to go out onto the field and ascertain this information from gatekeepers. Today, tools such as Zoominfo and Crunchbase are used to build databases.
3. Building a database is your intelligence work. In a sense, the inside sales executive or growth hacker needs to do as much homework as possible. I draw a parallel with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a growth hacker’s role. The CIA’s primary task is to build intelligence on terrorist targets. Similarly, a growth hacker’s role is to build intelligence on prospective customers. This should be done to such an extent that the hacker knows exactly how his product/service would fit into the prospect’s needs.
4. Cold calling — A successful email campaign generally has a few opens and responses. In terms of best practices, these opens elicit callbacks. At times, a really good email campaign brings a response. These could be responses in the form of a simple acknowledgment or a newsletter signup. In the case of B2B products/services, a really good response requests more information or perhaps even a callback request.
5. Cold calling is highly effective in qualifying prospects. While the growth hacker might face significant rejection (and demoralization), it is a critical piece when trying to bring prospects on calls or webinars.

All of these activities are carried out to set up meetings for the field sales executive. A field sales agent closes deals from leads provided by the inside sales team. However, in addition to this, a field salesperson is responsible for revenue generation and collection of payments. In some organizations, this role is managed by an Account Manager.

Framework for Effective Prospecting

For startups, it makes sense to split the entire business development function into inside sales and field sales. This way, there is a proper handoff to delivery teams as well and customer success does not get compromised. This will be covered in another lite-paper where we look at best practices for field agents.

In the 1950s, IBM came up with a framework called BANT. Despite there being several variations to this framework, it remains among the most robust frameworks while trying to build an effective sales pipeline. Before seeing how to use it, it is important to understand what BANT is:
B — Budget. Quite straightforward in trying to ascertain the budgets of the prospect.
A — Authority. Who is the decision maker in the prospecting organization? Is there a committee that makes decisions?
N — Need. This is perhaps the most important piece of information required. If there is no need, there is no point.
T — Timeline. This is connected to the ‘need’ in a certain sense wherein a timeline is only set if there is a need in place.

The framework I use in the Org

While it is important to know what the BANT is, here are a few best practices to get the most out of this framework:

1. Asking good qualifying questions is key to building intelligence on a prospect. Across all four parameters, one needs to ask the right questions and build intelligence to better understand the prospect’s requirements.
2. Among the most critical is knowing who the decision maker is. Given the number of lead generation tools available in the market, building intelligence on organizations has become easy. A field sales executive might take several months to reach a decision maker, but he/she can find details of decision makers in companies’ sign tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, and so forth.
3. Building intelligence before cold calling is important. This means knowing what a prospect requires or would probably require going forward. Taking a consultative sales approach is important when speaking to a prospect to give the assurance that homework has been done. This helps immensely in building trust in the prospect that an organization is capable of delivering value.

Further Reading

As mentioned, BANT is a highly effective framework for teams working in sales enablement. Hubspot’s blog carries a wonderful blog post on BANT and its usage. The post also talks about qualifying questions a salesperson needs to ask. For best practices around qualifying questions, I would recommend ‘Questions are Answers’ by Alan Pease.

Sales and growth will continue to evolve. And individuals or teams involved in this must evolve as well.