Designing Your Sales Stack so that Customers Come to You

Designing Your Sales Stack so that Customers Come to You

Two proven sales experts on how to build a process and team from the ground up to consistently boost revenue month over month.

Featuring

This article is by both Altschuler and Soto, explaining how they tackled their respective challenges and what they learned in the process so that their wisdom might help others.

If you’re anything like us, the fundamental issue with building a sales process at a startup lies in the fact that you need to generate more revenue month over month without the ability to leverage more resources. Most companies need to rely on outbound sales (prospecting and outreach) to generate revenue and close deals.

For the lucky few of you reading this that are running on inbound sales only, good for you. But you’re not pushing hard enough. You should always have someone on outbound, even if it’s a fraction of their time, reaching for target accounts. Think Fortune 5000.

There’s an art and a science to outbound sales. Yes, technology and data availability has made it easier and more efficient than ever before. But the best thing you can do is turn more of your outbound sales into inbound opportunities. That's what we hope this article helps you accomplish.

Before we jump into things, it’s important to know that the modern salesperson lives by two mantras:

Understanding Inbound

Inbound is the term we use to describe traffic that's driven to a site organically or via marketing campaigns such as advertising, social media, content or other things. This is also known as Inbound marketing and covers digital marketing and content marketing as well.

The part of Inbound that we’ll focus on most is an area in which most startups spend a significant amount of their marketing budget: Online advertising.

As startup founder or early employee with something to sell, I’m sure you’re familiar with how AdWords, Facebook ads, retargeting or really any online ad network works. More likely than not, this is what you depend on for signups and lead generation.

Now what does that process of creating this ad look like? We'll walk through the Facebook process as an example.

Step 1 - Choose the goal or objective of your campaign.

* Choose destination. Place pixel on your site so it can track.

Step 2 - Choose your target audience.

* Pick your ideal audience by selecting certain demographic details. This allows you to target your ads better.

Step 3 - Find the right image, description, call to action.

* This is your message that hits your target. They must be able to relate to it.

There are many problems with this type of campaign:

  1. Even though you can pick your audience, that's about as far as you can go in your targeting. This might be great for getting views on your website, but not as much for conversions or engaging people in a buying process.
  2. It can be very expensive with almost no real transparency and very little to show for it.
  3. Because of both 1 and 2, you have very little control. You could very likely be throwing money into the wind.
  4. Do you really think decision makers at large companies are spending enough time on these networks to come through a Facebook or Google ad? Anyone who has bought or sold software before at or into a large organization will tell you they absolutely do not.

Now what if I said you could target deeper and segment lists so that the message you craft is almost always 100% relevant to the recipient? Oh, and it will cost you less than the campaigns you’re running on ad networks.

Here’s how you turn outbound marketing into inbound interest to close bigger deals, faster, and more frequently.

It’s very important if you go down this path of turning outbound into inbound, that you follow the steps to a T. If you run outbound campaigns without doing your homework at the top of the funnel, you're just another jerk spamming. Just like in ad campaigns, it’s all about finding the right message and the right person at the right time.

To illustrate the process of turning Outbound into Inbound, we’ll use a step by step process similar to creating an ad campaign. At the end of each section, we’ll add our Sales Stack of services you can use to automate or complement the process we described.

Step 1 - Figure out your target audience or ICP

In sales, we call this target audience our Ideal Customer Profile. This is the type of person and company most likely to buy your product. The ICP is broken into two parts: Company and Job Title. This can be broken out even further as you get more advanced for Company Size or Industry.

The better you can target and more granular you can get with your customer profile, the more successful your outbound campaigns will be.

Once you’ve figured this out, you’ll want to build massive lists of these companies. Here are some good places to look to start building lists of your ICPs:

Here's how to use Datanyze to target based on condition, industry and technology.

Sales Stack: Datanyze, BuiltWith, iDatalabs

Step 2 - Get the Right Contact Info

By now, you should have a few lists built of companies you know will want your services and an idea of who the right person to talk to at that company would be.

Sales Stack: SalesLoft Prospector, Toofr, DiscoverOrg, LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Step 3 - Research, Messaging and Call To Action

Now that we have our “right person,” it’s time to work on the “right time” and “right message” parts. This is called lead research, and it’s a very important part of the process. Without this, you’re just another spammer.

Sales Stack: FunnelFire, Spiderbook, InsideView

Step 4 - Cadence and BTMO

Cadence refers to the amount of emails, messages, phone calls or any sort of touchpoint in the sales process, and how often you do it.

Sales Stack: ToutApp, Cadence by SalesLoft, Outreach.io

To Recap...

In Step 1, we did advanced targeting to find your Ideal Customer Profiles in both companies and individual employees. Then we found their contact info in Step 2. Step 3 gave us the context we needed to reach out and Step 4 was all about the delivery of the message and optimizing as you go.

Udemy and Mopub were both able to use these strategies effectively, allowing them to see unprecedented growth and lap the competition.