Building and Optimizing your First Sales Process – Steli Efti – MicroConf Europe 2016

The MicroConf Europe 2016 Talk Recaps can be found on the central hub page.

Website: Close.io
Twitter: @Steli
Slides:

  • Started as productized consulting offering scalable sales processes to VC funded startups in the Bay Area
  • Stumbled into CRM space by releasing internal software
  • Show up. Follow up. Close.
  • Sales is not difficult. It is just emotionally uncomfortable.
  • You have to push yourself to follow up
  • Ask for the close in no uncertain words

Sales Process Exploration

  • Goal #1: find a predictable sales process
  • 3 Steps to Sales Epiphany
    • Customer Profile
      • Who is ideal customer?
      • How do we qualify them?
    • Lead Sources
      • Scalable sources for high quality leads?
    • Sales Process
      • Most successful way to sell to my market
      • Inbound/Outbound; Emails, Calls, Demos, Outside/Inside
  • Get steps 1 + 2 right; people tend to over-focus on step 3
  • Sales Metrics
    • Activity
    • Quality
      • You need a minimum 15% reach rate – ideal is 30%
      • If you are below that, you’re doing something wrong:
        • wrong channel – try faxes for doctors, cell phones for students, etc.
      • “Reach –> Qualified” rate should be 50% or higher
    • Conversion
      • “Qualified –> Close” rate should be 50% or higher
  • Sales Stages (Hiring)
    • Founder Driven
      • At first you have to do sales all by yourself
    • Founder Managed
      • Then you can outsource parts of it and eventually the whole process with close to the same results
    • Junior Sales Leader
      • Someone from a company that was at your stage a year or two again
      • They come from the future – they have all the answers
    • Senior Sales Leader
  • You are NOT allowed to outsource sales. You can not outsource your key business problem

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About Christoph

Christoph lives in Munich, Germany and is bootstrapping his own SaaS application as a part-time entrepreneur.

He likes to write on this blog about anything of relevance to single-founder bootstrapped software startups.

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