account executive Archives - Daryl "Entrepreneurial Ninja" Lu

account executive, business development rep, continuity, customer success, relationship continuity, sales

Sales Relationship Continuity

From Common Roles in a Startup, I mention an excerpt from Predictable Revenue, specifically the batons (“processes”) that crosses functions. To keep our teams aligned and to ensure the best service and delivery for our customers, our teams overlap during the sales process.

Here’s how this might look:

Business Development Rep (BDR) àAccount Exec (AE) – the BDR ensures the prospect is sales qualified and ensures the demo with the AE is performed.
AE à Onboarding – the AE works hand-in-hand with the onboarding team on who and what is needed to launch a pilot. This starts when the AE has received verbal confirmation of a pilot.
AE à Customer Success (CS) – the AE involves the CS upon verbal agreement of a buy decision. CS now has the who, the pain points, the pricing needs, and other educational aspects of the deal.

Each prospect and customer is hard-earned, and so it’s crucial each transition point is seamless for the customer while enabling better engagement from the internal teams. Some overlap provides the benefit of redundancy and alignment… and ensures batons are smoothly transitioned.

February 21, 2017/by Daryl Lu

account executive, business development representative, marketing qualified lead, mql, sales, sales cycle, sales development representative, sales qualified lead, sql

Marketing vs. Sales Qualification

Want to continue from the revenue-theme from Tuesday – Common Revenue Roles – and quickly look at the differences and the importance of two types of leads – marketing qualified and sales qualified leads.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – these are prospects have been vetted to be the right type of person to engage with. Commonly, these leads could have taken some action like filled out a gated content form that has effectively identified this lead as someone to engage with.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – these are prospects that are typically engaged by the BDR or SDR, and who are viable opportunities.

It’s important to understand the differences between these two to effectively engage and sell. If leads are not vetted from an MQL perspective, SDRs can be wasting a lot of effort speaking with leads who either will not buy for many months down the line, or worse, never buy.

Market-qualifying leads includes verifying the lead fits the target market for the product or service. For SalesWise, we are [currently] looking for companies typically in the 50-750-employee range, technology industry, use Salesforce, have a complex sales cycle, etc. This does not mean we cannot serve a 1500-person company or one in manufacturing. Instead, this means that this particular cross-section of companies is where we fit very, very well. Perhaps, too, the lead fits into one of our buyer personas.

Without being sales qualified, account executives (AE) can waste loads of effort on follow-ups, and not spending appropriate time to close riper deals. Account execs can be the most expensive resources, so it’s important to leverage their capacity effectively.

Evaluating leads for sales qualification may include ANUM – Authority (to buy and making decisions), Need (there’s a problem or opportunity right now), Urgency (a pull to take action timely), and Money (they have budget).

Figure out who your target audience is, and who your target personas are. Drive MQLs and SQLs. Doing so early and with a strong process will make the sales cycle smoother and faster.

February 16, 2017/by Daryl Lu

aaron ross, account executive, ae, bdr, business development representative, closers, customer success, isr, marketing, predictable revenue, revenue, roles, sales, sales development representative

Common Revenue Roles at a Startup

“Pay special attention to “batons” that cross functions. Whenever a process crosses teams (Marketing handing leads to Sales, or Sales passing new clients to professional services, etc.), a “baton” is passed. These handoffs are the cause of 80% of the problems and defects in your processes. Redesign how the batons are passed to ensure they are passed smoothly and aren’t dropped.” Aaron Ross, Author, Predictable Revenue

As we continue to scale at SalesWise, it’s important to pay very special attention to our sales process, and the many different hands involved in sales. Especially as I’m hiring in both sales and marketing, it’s important for candidates and existing team members to understand the flow.

Here are the roles for us throughout the revenue-side of the business:

Marketing – Can go into many facets here. Specifically, the different ops sides of marketing, but from the beginning, it’s likely marketing is involved to serve up leads for sales to then engage on. (More on these later.)
Business Development Rep (BDR)/ Sales Development Rep (SDR) – In Aaron’s book, he cites the importance of bifurcating prospecting from the actual closers. The BDR/ ISR is the early stage of the sales process charged with contacting leads, qualifying leads, and hopefully, setting a conference between lead and the…
Account Executive (AE)/ (Inside or Outside) Sales Rep – These are the organization’s closers. These individuals are charged with working with the prospect to close the deal. They may build relationships with prospects to move the opportunity forward and through to close.
Sales Engineer (SE) – “SEs work closely with AEs during the heart of the sale and play the role of trusted technical advisor. They are tasked with translating technical details into business value and mapping technical solutions to business problems.” – Keyuri Yagnik, Sales Engineering Consultant
Implementation/ Onboarding – The onboarding team in our case overlaps with the engineering/ product team for now – they help launch a pilot. Given we have some setting up on our end to create dedicated servers for customers, we are hand-holding these implementations before building an AE-admin board and perhaps a self-servicing admin panel.
Customer Success (CS)/ Account Management – This role is about ensuring a customer’s on-going engagement and education of the platform. The CS provides feedback to the engineering team of what they’ve found from existing customers. CS teams can also be responsible for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities; thus, it’s common for some CS teams to carry quotas.
Customer Support/ Customer Service – Different than the Success team in that this role is not assigned to customers, typically. Instead, they provide levels of support from troubleshooting to more technical. They help “fix” issues.

February 14, 2017/by Daryl Lu

Sales Relationship Continuity

Marketing vs. Sales Qualification

Common Revenue Roles at a Startup

Interesting Links

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