Increasing Revenues Beyond Initial Sales

Before starting a B2B company I had never sold anything. Although many B2B businesses are starting to utilize similar strategies to acquire customers as consumer-based businesses, I was advised to understand how to sell.

In my continual quest of learning I reached out to many sales people I knew. One of which in one year made a company go from 400k in sales to 4mm. What follows is the 4 things he said he changed in order to reach those numbers.

1. Finalize a Pricing Model

When he started at the company each sale was done independently. Most businesses start this way in order to determine pricing. Companies also want to be able to charge as much as possible to larger customers who can afford higher price point products.

The first thing he changed was to standardize the pricing model and simplify it. The model was so simple that anyone could understand the pricing. In doing this, an engineer or an executive would understand what the product cost. They created a pricing calculator, distributed it to the team, and put it on the site. Anyone who discovered the service could easily figure out what it would cost.

In doing this it freed up at least one meeting with a prospective party discussing pricing. This meeting is completely removed and helped shorten the sale cycle. In addition, having a simple pricing model allows the company to effectively sell to the high and low ends of the market.

2. Segmented the Market

Once pricing was finalized, he drew a line in the sand. The company was going to focus all of their efforts on larger deals. The company would only reach out to customers who could afford the specific price set. Any customer who came to them organically, but did not fit into the market they were focusing on, they either delayed or explained what the minimum price of the product was.

Although they would lose deals this way the company was not interested in wasting time with smaller players. At least not initially. As they closed larger deals and increased their revenue they could then focus on reaching out to the smaller customers to sell them.

They only cared about large deals and ignored the rest.

3. Quickly Identify Fruitful Verticals

When a sale was made they would identify every vertical the company was in. For instance, if they sold to a company focused on storage they would reach out to every company which had similar product offerings. They would reach out to these customers and explain to them what their value ads were. They identified what was important to the customer they sold to and then used it as the selling points to the next customer.

They would also identify every potential M&A opportunity the company which purchased their product could make and started reaching out to them. This was a very lucrative way to identify qualified leads and a great way to have strong messaging around their offerings.

4. Only Hire People Who Can Sell

Initial sales were handled by one person at the company. However, as more deals started coming in they needed to expand the sales team in order to identify and reach out to more prospective leads.

When they started interviewing and hiring people they were focused on one thing regardless of title. Did the person have a successful history of finding and fighting for deals. They were only concerned with hiring people who knew how to effectively be in the trenches. They would hire people who had no problem cold calling, emailing, and all other sales tactics used by great sales people.

Once you hire a few people you will identify great companies to poach talent from. These companies have already trained sales people on what the values of similar technologies are and had a great understanding of the market. When they hired a great person from one of these companies, and they start selling effectively, they would start looking for other sales people to poach.