CEO of Novus Laurus. Business and transformation strategist. Digital technology, film and food investor.
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I was most entertained when a marketing consultant and ex-colleague took a client-side job and said, “Marketing lands you on Pluto, but the real objective is sales, which would require you to come all the way through the solar system to the sun.” The notion of a lean repeatable sales cycle has been around in startup land but is rarely implemented either in startups or in established companies, and definitely not in channel or outsourced sales or by marketing.
Lean Repeatable Sales Cycle
In a nutshell, the idea is to evolve a sales process with a well-known set of steps at a reasonable overall cost. The requirement is that this process be repeatable, guarantee a sale at the end and that the steps and cost leave you a margin of profit. This sales process and cost must include everything from lead generation to prospect qualification, to meetings, to negotiation and close. Every step in this process needs to be understood for each product or service or sale. If not, sales are left to chance.
Finding the most appropriate leads and not just any list of leads can only be done after one has identified in great detail who the ideal customer is. Whether demographics, company size and sophistication or geolocation, the more detailed a characterization of the customer that can be made will lead to the most likely set of leads.
Despite this, not every lead is ready to buy. Prospect qualification via research or via dialogue or perhaps via data needs to clearly indicate that there is a need, budget and urgency. If not, salespeople will waste time trying to get meetings or close.
Meetings and negotiations must only be attempted after prequalification. Such meetings should only be scheduled with decision-makers rather than anyone who will take a meeting. Salespeople should be armed with both knowledge of objection handling as well as the authority to be flexible in deal-making. Without these, sales are still unlikely to close.
All of the above should be clearly documented so new salespeople can be quickly trained and sales can be scaled. This is the stumbling block that must be overcome before the expectation that sales will be scaled or a chance at a Series A funding round.
Cannot Scale Without It
Most companies—large or small, established or startup—take one of two paths. They either throw marketing dollars expecting sales to materialize, or they hire sales folks who have no idea how to identify and establish a successfully repeatable process. As is usually the case, either the marketing dollars yield abysmal results or the salesperson is let go after a short tenure. Few companies have the discipline or know-how to set themselves up to succeed at the task of creating a margin-yielding and reliable sales process. Unfortunately, both startups and established companies are shooting in the dark and cannot scale sales without it.
Two other developments are causing many companies to lose sight of their sales process responsibilities: channel or outsourced sales and AI sales disruption.
Channel Sales
I once had an entrepreneur pitching to me for investment who clearly had not sold much of his product yet but was confident that he could engage with channel partners and piggyback on their sales process enough to scale his company. He was unable to tell me clearly who his ideal customer was or how he could tell whether they were ready to buy his product. He definitely did not have clarity on objection handling. I did not invest in his company.
All sales folks are looking for easy sales. Whether engaged directly by you or as part of a channel sales deal, if the particular salesperson is not trained enough to be able to sell the product easily, they will spin their wheels for a little while and then just give up. Evolving and training them on a sales process that works is the responsibility of the product owner.
AI Sales Bots
LinkedIn recently found that there were a number of AI-based profiles on their systems, which were mechanically generating leads and sending them to their owners. While this initial foray is rather clumsy, I fully expect AI sales disruption is coming. It is just that AIs have to be trained on the appropriate data to succeed. Imagine AIs armed with a prospect’s click history, demographics, social media trail and company data that could put in front of them the most appropriate offer, no matter where they are, at a time when they were actually searching for a solution, knowing approximately their budget and urgency. Imagine the AI actually negotiating either price or terms and then upselling or cross-selling.
I predict this will happen in the next three years and that most sales will be done in this manner. I also predict Google, Apple or Meta will build or acquire such technology shortly. It could be the death of atrocious amounts of money spent on advertising CPM and CPC and the end of fake CPC and junk marketing messages. And I believe any marketing organization that will not be held responsible for actual sales will simply not survive. In the next 10 years, messages that interrupt us will disappear as only sales offers based on AI assessment of your readiness to buy will reach you.
Already a startup’s chances to be funded are heavily dependent on being able to demonstrate a margin yielding repeatable sales process. All sales scale in all companies depends on such a lean process. Finally, the training and data required for AIs to take over the tedious and repetitious process of selling is much more likely to result from first documenting such a manual process for the particular product or service that is being sold.
The sooner companies understand and establish efficient sales cycles, I believe the more likely they will succeed and the quicker we will get rid of irrelevant marketing chatter and its unnecessary cost.
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