Sales is a bugbear for many startup founders and executives, particularly those who hail from a technical background. They shirk it, battle it, and eventually either conquer or are destroyed by it.

To explore this problem, Red Canary enlisted the help of Joanne Poirier, Steve Kraner and Andy Aicklen: three executives with experience in guiding, teaching and running tech companies.

Resoundingly, they said that sales – and an organization’s sales process – must be embraced and led from the top.

Startups often start off on the wrong sales foot
An engineer by background, Steve Kraner is now the CEO of High Tech Guru, a company that helps software executives embrace and develop their sales strategies.

Steve confesses that he too disdained the sales side of business early in his career. A mistake, he says, that’s often repeated by ‘techie’ founders and CEOs.

For those who insist on segregating sales from their responsibilities, Steve points to hard data that shows sales-lead companies consistently beating technology-lead companies.

Steve admits that he had to learn to love sales – and says that so do startups if they want to win. According to Steve, many technology leaders don’t like selling, so they hire salespeople instead of embracing and leading the sales process. The result, he says, “is a technology company with as many sales systems as salespeople: a company that cannot forecast, team sell or scale.”

In sum, a company that’s going to lose.

Nobody thinks they have an ugly baby
From selling for a then-fledgling Oracle corporation, through running his own startup, and now as Canadian VP and
Managing Director for Mercury Interactive Corporation, Andy Aicklen has two decades of technology sales experience.

“The result…is a technology company with as many sales systems as salespeople.”

What smart leaders do
While Andy agrees with the idea that founders must internalize and support a sales methodology, he believes that smart leaders must separate themselves from a ‘lead’ salesperson – an individual who is passionate enough to drive early sales, but not so in love with the product that they won’t push it in a new direction to exploit a larger market.

The problem, in Andy’s experience, is that initial success can give a sales-leading founder tunnel vision.

“I know how to sell this [product] because I sold it to company XYZ, I sold it to the university of X” is a mantra common to early-stage founders, he cautions. “To these founders, their product is their baby – and nobody thinks they have an ugly baby.”

Two decades of selling has taught Andy that change is inevitable – for both a product and the markets it is sold to. In his experience, “what they, (the founder) define as their market, how they sell it and who will buy it – 75% of the time that changes in the first twelve months.

The key to turning that change into sales, says Andy, is communication and trust between the founder and the sales lead: “If they listen to each other, if they work together, they’ve got a chance. If not, it will be a train wreck.”

“Initial success can give a sales-leading founder tunnel vision.”

Joanne Poirier, a principal at Critical Path Strategies, concurs, noting that early stage tech companies tend to sell to customers or through channels that lie along the path of least resistance.

The result, says Joanne, “is a feeling of success followed by a lack of traction with their broader market”.

A wiser approach, Joanne suggests, is for company leadership to embrace selling and apply a methodology that includes a sales process that constantly seeks new opportunities.

A sales process template for early stage companies
When asked how a company with less than $10 million in revenue and limited tactical resources should build their sales process, Joanne, whose company has helped refine the sales processes
and strategies of giants such as Microsoft and IBM as well as greenhorn startups, supplied the following directives:

1. Identify stakeholders of the company’s selling function
2. Define the current and desired future (6-month) state
3. Take two or three drivers of “future state” and make them “projects”
4. Define stages of the sale
5. Identify opportunities in each stage
6. Define best practices for moving them forward
7. Develop strategic and tactical ‘value alignment’ – test and refine with early adopters and then feed to marketing strategy
8. Leadership should briefly review pipeline and define best next actions to move forward
9. For opportunities that are qualified, develop an opportunity critical path

While this is a simplified example, an effective sales process is not r ocket science. Nor is it something that needs to be built from scratch.

“Sales as a discipline has been evolving for a century, and successful methods are well documented,” says Steve Kraner, CEO of High Tech Guru.

The problem, Steve says, is that even an airtight, self-correcting method is impotent unless it comes from the top. Why? Because a top-down process becomes part of the corporate culture, no one is better positioned to correct and champion it. Early stage companies should keep it simple and be ready for change.

How a strong sales process helps build more than revenue
Building and barbering an executive-driven sales process is not just a ‘first step’ for sending sales skyward. A plan that relies on a system pays dividends down the line, says Joanne Poirier.

“It [a sales process] can give a sales organization scalability. If a process can be replicated, it can be trained and coached.”

It can also give sales teams a common language, says Steve Kraner of High Tech Guru. He adds that it can help forecast business more accurately, and building a process that can be measured and improved means better traction.

Perhaps the most important benefit of an executive-driven process, according to Joanne Poirier, is that it improves the quality and quantity of the pipeline. That means hard, crunchy numbers that can validate your business model with both prospects and investors.

“Early stage companies should keep it simple and be ready for change.”

Touching on the sales process for growth-stage startups
Like gangly, hormonal teenagers, most startups suffer from disorganization and uncertainty as they enter a growth stage. While some degree of adjustment is normal, severe sales disruptions can be fatal, and a company without a unified sales process may do more than good. According to Joanne Poirier, standard practice at this stage is to pursue and hire experienced sales managers. But unless a company has a strong methodology and the discipline to enforce it, she warns, those managers will import sales processes from their previous employers. The result is an open invitation to inconsistency
and turnover.

Andy Aicklen drives this point home with a story about how a systematic sales process helped see Oracle through a breakneck growth phase:

“When I was at Oracle we were hiring 5 people a day – if they could tie a tie we’d hire them.”

Conclusion: getting the bugbear off your back
For the founders of young companies, embracing sales starts with the fact that your vision and your product, your ‘baby’, may need to change in order to propagate.

Tactics and methodology aside, a sales process is an extension of your ability to listen to your customer, to keep asking them – and yourself – some tough questions. Having a process and the guts to back it up gives your company scalability, flexibility and encourages everyone – not just sales – to think customer-first.

The resulting approach will address your customers’ pains, improve positioning fornew products and generate customers who are ardent champions of your offering.

If you aren’t a sales convert, you’d better become one.