This week we had Matt Cameron, CEO of SaaSy Sales Leadership, join the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast to discuss "Early-Stage Enterprise Sales."
Here are some of the main questions and ideas we discussed in the podcast:
1. Let’s start off with some basics. What do we mean when we talk about Enterprise Sales? Is there a specific deal size or company size or sales cycle length that we’re referring to?
2. One of the challenges I often see with early-stage companies that are selling into enterprise with a sales cycle that’s ~8-12+ months long, is that they can't afford to find out after 8-12 months that what they’re doing isn't working. In other words, they need their feedback loop to be much shorter than their sales cycle length. How do you think about this?
3. If you’re a founder in this scenario, not only are you trying to get feedback on your sales process to see if you’re on the right track, but you’re also trying to figure out if you have the right people in seat. Any thoughts on how to figure out if your reps are on the right track when you have a sales process? There’s a long unknown ramp time, and you also don’t have a lot of sales enablement and training built out yet… what do you do?
4. What are some other challenges you see early-stage companies face when trying to sell into enterprise? I could see limited social proof as being a big challenge, what else comes to mind?
5. When you’re coaching early-stage founders and sales leaders on selling into enterprise, what are some of the key strategies or tactics you focus on - multi-threading, using certain channels, ABM, etc.?
6. Any other best practices you want to touch on when it comes to early-stage enterprise selling?
7. Any final thoughts, tips or tricks for folks to summarize?
Big thank you to Matt for coming on the podcast and sharing his insights with us!
Matt Cameron is the managing partner at SalesOps Central and founder of SaaSy Sales Management, Silicon Valley’s Sales Management training and leadership community. A regular speaker and columnist on the topic of SaaS sales leadership, Matt partners with venture firms to build world-class B2B sales leadership within portfolios. Formerly as the WW Head of Corporate Sales at Yammer and a RVP of Enterprise Sales for Salesforce.com, he enjoyed building sales engines for high growth companies, which continues to be his passion.
If you liked “Early-Stage Enterprise Sales” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.
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