Tutorial, Webinar
Go to Market Boot Camp for Startups: Field Sales
- Scale go-to-market boot camp content from a few hours to several days to accelerate portfolio companies' sales, marketing, and time to market.
- Build sales organizations sequentially starting with demand generation, SDRs, and inside sellers, then adding marketing, customer success, and support before introducing outside field teams; senior sales involvement is required immediately for complex, architecture-driven sales, though product fit may allow for parallel execution.
- Deploy sales engineers, professional services, and marketing support quickly, followed by an inside team to augment field operations once initial customers, customer success, and renewals are established.
- Ensure field sellers have boots on the ground in familiar territories to address large, complex organizations and counter buyer risk concerns that resurface near the decision stage of the purchasing cycle.
- Address three high-level questions—why do anything, why you over the competition, and why now—throughout sales processes of varying step counts, moving from discovery into opportunity execution during the "why you" phase and verifying customer buy-in at every stage.
- Create new value by understanding customer business initiatives rather than merely communicating product value, using a discovery tool to distinguish between executive corporate objectives and user technical functions.
- Develop a value framework and granular discovery tool to qualify opportunities, test competitive standing against "doing nothing," and articulate "as-is" versus "to-be" states with relevant use cases.
- Establish technical validation events, including proofs of concept, pilots, or demonstrations, by pre-defining criteria and building documents that outline buyer questions and prepared answers to set traps for competition during RFI/RFP processes.
- Construct business cases and ROI models that highlight potential savings, such as a $10 million proposal backed by $100 million to half a billion in savings, while presenting conservative and aggressive financial return ranges for different stakeholders.
- Confirm decision processes and build proposal templates with quote tools and ROI models upon answering "why now," offering options that cover the entire environment to maximize deal size and reduce procurement friction.
- Formalize account planning, deal processes, and forecasting by integrating them into CRM solutions, while maintaining inspection cadences that treat the sales and forecast processes as interrelated layers.
- Partner with customer success teams to deploy deployment plans during the sales process, recognizing that the initial deal is a starting point for cross-selling, upselling, and renewals rather than a complete 100% capture.
- Warn that revenue leaders and first-time CEOs may delay organizational needs due to a lack of situational awareness, emphasizing the need to define criteria and influence buy-in early rather than waiting for buyers to set them.
- Leverage the "points of the spear" by identifying early adopters further along the innovation curve to ensure budget availability for new technologies that lack pre-existing allocations.