Success Starts with Sales Process: An Intro to B2B Prospecting by Jake Reni

As the founder of an early-stage startup, it’s likely that you’re still trying to figure out the direction of your organization. In the best-case scenario, you’ve made a few deals and you’re looking at the data, trying to figure out why those deals were successful and what you can do next. In the worst-case scenario, you haven’t sold anything and your team is furiously spitballing things at the wall, trying to find leads in anyone that will give you the time of day.

The reality is that this early on, you shouldn’t be doing the latter. More leads are not always the answer, especially when you’re still trying to gain momentum. At this point in time, you should be focusing on what it is that your company needs, why you need it and how to move forward with intention.

In order to start prospecting and selling in a strategic way, there are a few key things you need to do.

Establish a Performance-Driven Culture

When I ask my founder friends what their number one fear in building a sales org is, the answer I hear more than any other is maintaining culture. Every founder, after all, wants their company to grow. But once you start ramping up and hiring new people, how do you maintain a unified mindset?

The answer is that you need to establish a culture of performance from the get-go. The foundation of your sales org should be performance-based and outcome-driven. Everyone on the team should understand not only what the product is and how it’s made, but why it is valuable. Every member of your team should be as inspired by the product as you and your co-founders.

Inside the Sales-A Team

When I started at Adobe a few years ago, I came into a sales team that was really comfortable. People generally respond to their emails and answer their phone calls. It was easy for them to get in from of buyers. Everyone and their mother knows what Adobe is so they never had to do much in the way of explaining.

Honestly, it drove me a little bit nuts that their job was so easy. They never had to remind themselves why the company was so great. After six months of watching them grow more and more passive, I decided it was time to work on the company’s culture. I wanted to create a cultural mindset around why we grind and hustle for the company every day.

I gathered my team and, collectively, we came up with what we call our “18 Values”. Short mantras like “intentional improvement”, “make our buyers heroes” and (most importantly) “life matters” became the groundwork for our unified team culture. Our team, which was comprised of a bunch of misfits (they were all either the greenest employees or seasoned ones who were just too stubborn) outperformed every other team at the company that year.

Experiment with Methodologies

If you don’t have an established methodology, your sales aren’t repeatable and you’ll never be able to scale your organization. Without a methodology, your salespeople are just going to do whatever they think needs to be done in order to sell. You won’t be able to make sure that you’re training the right way and driving the right process.

There are dozens of different methodologies out there to choose from. You might prefer spin-selling over value-selling or BANT over impact-driven selling. Early on, you should spend some time trying things out. Choose a methodology and stick to it until you figure out whether or not it works for you. As you start to identify how your sales process works, the proper methodology will start to become apparent.

With that being said, however, if you choose a methodology and execute it with intention, you will be successful. What you can’t have is one employee using one methodology, another group of employees using a separate method and a guy in the back of the office doing god-knows-what. Do some research on process and training, commit to your decision and see what happens over time.

Identify Your Process

Process is what’s going to allow you to make sure that, from Step A to Step Z, there’s a set way to accomplish outcomes. Once you figure out the process that works for you, you’ll be able to repeat it every time. Knowing how your process works and how long your sales cycle is will help you to plan for each quarter and hire sellers who align with your organization.

The good thing about sales process is that can evolve and change. You don’t need to be obsessed with doing it the exact same way forever but you need to make sure that you learn from your experience. Over time, the process will give you hints and clues about what generates success.

Customer-centric Selling

You should be thinking term terms of how your customers want to buy, not how your team wants to sell. If you’re currently working with a sales process that’s built around the way you want to sell things, forget about it. If your sales process doesn’t align with the way your customer buys things, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to close a deal with them.

When developing a sales process, you need to account for the purchasing cycle of your buyer. What kind of research do they do before they buy a product? How long does that research process take? Ideally, you’ll build a sales process that enables you to get in front of your buyer while they’re exploring their options, not after.

Your sales process should align with the size and nature of your market. Enterprise, mid-market, SMB and freemium businesses all have different sales cycles and will generate different amounts of revenue.

It’s also important to understand your sales process because it will inform who you hire. If you bring a really smart VP of Sales onboard in hopes that they’re going to help you dominate the industry, make sure that they align with where your company is. It doesn’t make sense to hire a high-salaried VP (or any VP, for that matter) when you’re averaging 3 contracts per month at a rate of $5k each.

Before you hire anyone, think about where your company is, what your sales process is and what type of sellers you need. As you grow in size and your process becomes more sophisticated, you can start thinking about hiring more specialized sellers.

Don’t Stack Your Tech Too High

Technology should never be a crutch that your salespeople rely on to close deals. It should only ever be used as a force multiplier. If you have a phone in your office and a pair of shoes on your feet, you have everything you need to close deals. Later on, technology can help you to create velocity but don’t spend too much money on it until you get your process down.

In my opinion, the two things you should have in the early days are a CRM (ideally a free one) and a LinkedIn Sales Solutions license. Account planning software is great but a LinkedIn account can generate all of the leads you need during the first few years of business.

Enable Your Sellers

We need to enable our sales team to be successful. If we don’t focus on training, enabling and coaching then they’re going to go somewhere else that will. When you’re an early-stage company, you can’t afford to lose great salespeople. You need to focus on fostering success so that they want to stay with you.

Today’s sellers aren’t in it for the coin-operated mentality of the last generation. Most of them are motivated to sell because it’s meaningful to them. They want to make an impact on the world and work for companies that provide opportunities to progress.

I have sales reps who all live in a tiny apartment together with one person sleeping on the floor. They don’t really care how expensive it is to live in San Francisco because they want to work at with a great sales organization and they know that we can make them better. By building a culture around enabling your sellers, you can start to accumulate a smart, dedicated team of salespeople.

Common Knowledge ≠ Common Practice

Remember, just because everyone on your team knows what needs to be done doesn’t mean that everyone will practice it. You need to be deliberate about your enablement. When something goes wrong, figure out what happened and make sure that you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Unfortunately, less than 50% of all B2B sales organizations meet their quota. The #1 reason that sales reps give for not hitting quota is that they’re unable to articulate the value of their product. The best thing you can do, therefore, is to establish programs that can help them to think about the value of the product and practice conveying that information to customers.  

It’s also important to normalize the concept of failure in your team. Remind them that it’s okay. Your culture should be built around iteration and practice. No one wants to be a part of an organization that thinks in terms of winners and losers.

Organize Your Team

The way your organization is structured will be a big indicator whether or not you’re going to be successful. This is where understanding your market and process is crucial. If you’re selling to SMB, your organization is going to look a lot different from one that sells at the enterprise level. If you have a high-velocity sales cycle, you’re going to organize your department to accommodate that cycle.

At the moment, everyone on your team is probably a generalist. You and your co-founders are probably making all of the sales. As you grow and become more sophisticated, however, you should start developing and hiring specialized roles within your team. You’re going to have folks who specialize in inbound selling and others who are selling outbound.

You’ll have account managers, lead generations and closers. Once you understand the sales process and the skills are necessary to sell to your specific customers, you’ll be able to hire according to those job requirements.

Final Tip: Track That Data

Everything I’ve outlined above is nice to know but none of it matters if you’re not tracking your data. How are you going to know how many leads generate an opportunity if you don’t keep track? How can you possibly hire the perfect sales reps if you’re not sure what the sales cycle looks like? No methodology is worth a dime if you can’t point to the numbers and say, “This is how we know it works for us”.

According to CSO Insights, 25% of companies have no documentation of their sales process. If you don’t have a process and you’re not documenting what you do then you really don’t understand how you achieve successful outcomes. Once you start documenting the outcomes of each lead, you’ll start to have a much stronger grasp on your sales process.

Jake Reni is the Head of Adobe Sales Academy. He manages the experience of all sellers who join Adobe from the moment they walk in the door until they head out into the field. You can find him on Twitter @jakereni or connect with him on LinkedIn.