Category: Work

Yours truly on Sales Qualia podcast

I recently had the chance to sit down with Scott Sambucci from SalesQualia on his Startup Selling Podcast to chat a bit about how startup founders be more effective and intentional in their sales approach, not to mention how to avoid some of the mistakes that I’ve made and seen countless others make over the years.

We talked about:

  • Negotiation tactics – how to get your prospects to tell you what needs to happen to get the deal done
  • Designing a pricing strategy that means no churn
  • How much Startup CEO’s need to sell before they should even consider hiring their first sales person

We also discuss some highlights from my career including: starting my own companies, raising a $100M+ in capital, what I’ve learned from interviewing over 1,000 sales people and how to manage sales teams with large targets. #nopressure

This was a fun conversation and there’s are a ton of value shared throughout the episode – so if you’re a sales oriented founder – or if you’re not – hopefully this episode will convince you of the importance of putting as much effort into your selling as you do into building you product.

You can listen to the podcast on the SalesQualia website here.

You can also follow The Startup Selling Podcast on iTunes where you can find our episode, along with a lot of other episodes that offer great sales advice:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-podcast/id1044359904?mt=2

Check it out and let me know what you learned and what kind of questions it brought up for you so we can start our own discussion…

Workplace Trends

Live, Personalized Advice for 100 Entrepreneurs – How can I help?

I have decided that one of my 2018 goals is to help 100 entrepreneurs.

I’ll try to make myself available for any entrepreneur, even internationally. That being said, my priority is to focus on minority and women entrepreneurs, as they are generally underrepresented in the startup community and are likely in a position to benefit the most from helpful advice.

The types of companies I am probably in a position best to assist are B2B (business to business) software companies. These are companies that sell their software, typically on a subscription basis, to other businesses. My specialty is more around mid-market and Fortune 1000 types of target customer profiles, and less so on no-touch/self-serve types of customers.

My qualifications include:

  • Formally advised multiple companies in the past on go-to-market strategies, including Palantir, RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce.com), Addepar, and others
  • Started two venture backed companies that have raised around $100M in combined capital
  • Ran the worldwide sales function for multiple organizations including carrying a $25M team sales quota
  • Personally met with 50% of the Fortune 1000
  • Interviewed about 1,000 sales people in the last 20 years
  • Hired 15 senior executives in the last 10 years

Topics I can usually help with include:

  • Getting your first 10 customers
  • Growing from 10 to 100 customers
  • Ideal customer profiles
  • Pricing and packaging
  • Deal negotiation
  • Hiring your first few sales people
  • Selling methodology and process
  • Venture capital strategies and tactics
  • Building your executive team
  • Executive compensation
  • Scaling your company from 10 to 100 employees
  • Building company brand and thought leadership
  • Goals and metrics
  • Company culture and values
  • Board communication

I think the best format for this work will be a 45 minute call, where we dive right into problem areas or issues you are dealing with. I will try to be as helpful as possible.

This “service” if you can call it that is entirely free. I am not looking for advising roles or anything beyond our initial call, as I unfortunately do not have time to do that. Now, they do say advice is worth what you pay for it. So keep that in mind…

I realize that starting a company is extraordinarily hard, and if I can even provide a little bit of help, even as a sounding board, it may ease some of the challenge in building your own business. That is not to say that I have all the answers, in fact, I am still learning every single day myself.

Ideamensch: Kris Duggan Interview