What image comes to mind when you hear the word “sales”?
A used car salesman? That guy with the fast voice and terrifying energy on late-night infomercials? Or the sound of the ringing house phone interrupting dinner conversation with your family?
These unfortunate images are often connected to the sales profession.
As a startup founder, you probably have zero interest in attaching these stigmas to the day-to-day operations of your job. You founded your company off of creativity and passion – not hooks and pitches.
The problem is, developing a sales process is a prerequisite to building a business model for your company. No matter how Earth shattering and mind blowing your idea may be, you don’t have squat if you can’t attract prospects and turn them into paying customers.
What most founders fail to realize is that sales is a simple, step-by-step process that can be taught and built upon to scale their growing business.
You’re not trying to con people into purchasing a lemon with the miles turned back form 10,000 to 10. You’re not spouting overzealous information at a sea of sleepy viewers. And you’re not calling families in the middle of their spaghetti dinner.
You’re connecting people to an opportunity that could improve their lives, and that’s something worth feeling passionate about – despite the connotations.
Here at Skaled, a company that works with startups on scaling their sales and business development, we regularly work with startups that fall into three specific categories.
The first includes those who have developed a product but can’t identify which step to take next. There are so many avenues and so many options, and they’re frozen between an innovative vision and a solid business model.
The second includes startups with a sales process in place that’s more hustle than strategy. This works for a period of time but eventually the contacts are exhausted and they’re stuck in a rut that doesn’t allow for growth.
The third is the established startups with solid business models. Things are running smoothly, until growth becomes the goal. They try to be too big, too fast, and then they flounder.
Whether it’s figuring out where to start, how to organize, or how to keep up when the ball gets rolling, each of these groups is essentially facing an issue within their sales strategy.
In our upcoming series, “Sales for Scalable Startups”, we’ll be diving into a case study on each of these stages, outlining the issue each startup faced, and what processes we implemented in helping them overcome. We’ll illustrate exactly how we worked with founders to turn their creative visions into scalable sales strategies.
You’re a startup founder, not a sales professional.
But the passion and vision that launched your idea, from the back of a coffee shop or the shoebox bedroom of a Manhattan apartment, are exactly what will sell your vision to clients, and accelerate your business towards success.
You’ve created something great, so now its time to nail down a strategy for sharing that something with the world.
Stay tuned next week for our first installment of “Sales for Scalable Startups” where we’ll break down how we helped Duetto Research, a SaaS platform for managing hotel revenue, jumpstart the development of a scalable sales process that eventually led to $10 million in first round funding.