It is very common when thinking about scaling sales for a startup, for the entrepreneur to think of various tools for sales automation, ads, blogs, and a series of other mechanisms to make the customer buy.

This vision is very realistic in the long run. However, if you are on the way to making your startup’s first scale sales, this is not the best way to interact with the market.

The company works and has the potential to grow healthily. Now, to achieve this goal, it is necessary to visualize the horizon to establish a sales projection.

Entrepreneurship bases itself on two aspects: idealization and hard work to scale sales. Both can be objective data that allow for predictable growth, and it looks to achieve a feasible sales projection.

In this article, you will find out how you can scale formidable sales in your Startup.

Qualities of a startup’s sales area

The startup lives off sales. Selling is the main indicator that the product is good, marketing is working, and customer issues are being resolved.

It is wrong to think that when a startup captures investment, it reduces the responsibility to sell because it has cash on hand the responsibility becomes even greater. Furthermore, it is a fact that startups that do not sell do not attract investment.

A tractioned startup now has more than half of its team in functions directly linked to sales. Even the other areas you can link to help the startup to scale sales and sell more.

Unlike a traditional company, in a startup, the sales area is intuitive. It is as scientific as development, for example, and works with methods, systems, data, and predictability.

Startups with more structured sales areas even dedicate professionals only to the function of analyzing data and information that help the commercial flow to work better and, consequently, to sell more.

The sales team meetings are not the traditional forecast meetings, where the manager collects numbers and the salespeople end up promising even what they cannot deliver to avoid embarrassment.

Engagement with the company’s purpose and culture

Even more important than hitting goals, the startup seller needs to be engaged with the company. The salesperson who hits goals and doesn’t care about the company can contaminate the environment and negatively influence the team, which is bad for the startup.

The engaged salesperson, even when not yet ramped up and hitting goals can be worked on to develop the skills that are needed to reach their goals.

Long-term vision

The startup salesperson accepts to lose a sale when he realizes that there is no fit with the customer. That’s because he knows that the customer will cancel ahead, with the risk of still being dissatisfied with the company.

This long-term vision is not just about being altruistic. This salesperson is concerned about his performance because he believes the business will grow and those new opportunities will arise.

Methods for work’s process

Within a startup, processes are always under construction. When something starts to work, a new business cycle comes and the modus operandi changes again.

Startup salespeople look to see how people who have been in the business longer work and replicate what works. When a process can be improved in the salesperson’s perception, the salesperson brings the subject up for discussion in the group meeting.

Passion for data, indicators, and metrics

A large part of the startup’s success is in experimenting to learn new paths and, therefore, producing a lot of data. When historical data begins to dictate future paths and generate predictability, the team comes to trust it.

A startup salesperson understands the necessary volumes and fees involved to make their numbers and, rather than sticking to promises that can’t be kept, focus on doing what it takes to hit the number.

The importance of the function

While the traditional seller sees prospecting as a less than a noble step, the startup seller goes in search of their customers, not least because their market may still be unexplored and active prospecting is vital to make the number.

These salespeople also rely on inbound leads, but they are not waiting for them to arrive and blaming the marketing area for not having met their goals.

Earn money

Every seller likes to make money, and that’s a fact. The ability to build your salary is the fuel that moves the seller. However, the startup seller motivates themselves with several other factors. For example, they can be part of something bigger and help customers solve their problems.

Steps to make sales for your Startup

Here is a small sales roadmap that can help you to discover:

• prospecting the customer who has the problem;
• some products deliveries what it expects as benefits and changes concerning the problem;
• pitches are in line with the customer’s vision.

The first step in creating this strategy is to create a list of people and companies that thinks your solution is interesting.

Another point is you can have a multilateral platform: social networks, market places, matching places between people and services.  Therefore, you must do this process with everyone involved as users and customers.

3 methods for projecting sales in startups

It’s worth combining different strategies. What matters is to adopt a series of practices that make sense within your business model.

Lead Behavior

Engaging with leads is one of the most important parts of the buying journey. Knowing rich data about them is at the heart of any strategy that includes predictability.

It is from the identification of the personas that we trace behavior patterns that interest your company, based on data analysis.

• The total of your SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market);
• Conversion rate by the source of origin;
• Billing for each source or lead type.

Thus, it will be possible to identify which leads yield the most and what actions they took along the purchase journey. According to the recurrence, this will determine a trend that serves as the basis for the sales projection.

It is important to remember that this method of a sales projection is subject to market fluctuations, sales cycles, and seasonal sales.

Sales Funnel

Using the Sales Funnel is very common in the B2B market, especially in sales that have a longer negotiation cycle. This type of sale, called complex, has several negotiation stages, and at each stage, leads may feel lost.

Accounts

This sales projection technique is ideal for Account-Based Marketing strategies, that is, which make the selection of possible accounts before starting a campaign.

This is the case for specific markets or niche sales. In this scenario, the number of leads is scarce. As such, the focus becomes cultivating lasting business relationships.

The entire dynamic of these strategies is based on reselling, upsell and cross-sell. So you need to have a regular sourcing solution or create a series of products that Startups can sell all together.

A software for monthly subscriptions (SaaS – Software as a Service), for example, works well with this business model.

GitScrum supports your team to better results and effective deliveries!

Set your workflow and board to guide your Agile team, assign Tasks, Subtasks and keep in charge of the whole process evolvements. Allow your Agile team to collaborate.