SalesMVPLab

How we work with founders ⬇️ 

→ We help you learn basic sales skills through courses and coaching
→ You implement a minimum viable sales process in your startup
→ We troubleshoot how things are going through community and AMAs

Founder

Savio Technology Inc

How we work with product teams ⬇️ 

→ We help you collect product feedback from your sales and CS teams
→ You organize your features by number of requests and CRM attributes like cumulative ARR
→ We help you close the loop on what's being built and what's been shipped

Head of GTM (Fractional)

Pavilion

Advanced RevOps School Graduate (June 2022). Learned actionable insights into the core functions of a RevOps leader, like building a successful forecasting model, driving outcomes, developing a GTM operating cadence, and hiring top RevOps talent

CRO School Graduate (July 2021). Learned the key skills and strategies needed as a CRO, including developing a theory of enterprise value, financial modeling and unit economics, revenue team alignment, board management, and building a world-class team.

The Revenue Collective is a private, invitation-only community of sales and marketing executives at growth-focused companies.

Executive Member

Director, Sales Development

Director of Sales

Director, Sales Enablement & Solution Consulting

After breaking 7 records in my final quarter as VP Sales at Proposify, it was time to move on to the next challenge.

I had worked with Q4's CRO Mark Ramsay a few times from a consulting capacity (LevelJump, Proposify), and was really impressed by his revenue leadership. I wanted to join his revenue team full time, which brought me to Q4.

At Q4, I'm heading up sales enablement. I'm working on resources, training, coaching, and aligning sales plans/processes to our increased revenue growth.

Director, Sales Enablement

Proposify

This brings me to where I am today.

Kyle Racki appointed me to VP Sales after successfully rebuilding our sales process from the ground up.

I'm working on scaling the sales team, sales process, and revenue channels so we can reach the next level of revenue growth in the company.

Doing all this, while bringing an amazing product to sales teams around the world, saving them the headache of putting proposals together, helping them increase their close rates, and making leadership teams confident that sales is equipped with the right content and pricing to help grow revenues.

Vice President of Sales

I moved into the Director of Sales position to head up the rebuild of our sales process.

This was not an easy task. I came mostly from a marketing background at early-stage tech startups. And I had only briefly managed an SDR team years prior.

But a lot of the programs I had launched for sales enablement were really taking off. The Executive team wanted to task me with rebuilding our sales process and team from scratch.

There were a lot of trials and errors, but we had amazing team members that really focused on learning and growth, and got us there.

During this time, we were able to get our sales cycles below 30 days, increase our close rate significantly, and triple our average deal size.

We also learned a lot about pipeline growth, velocity, hiring, onboarding, training, and coaching.

Because of this, I was tasked to lead the next phase of growth for the Proposify sales team.

I joined Proposify as Sales Enablement after moving back to Halifax from a 5-year stint in the Toronto startup scene.

I was excited to bring a lot of my learnings to an Atlantic Canadian SaaS startup and help grow revenue.

Initially, I worked on aligning the sales team to the overall objectives of the executive team from a go-to-market perspective.

I got a chance to optimize our process, implement our sales methodology, refine our coaching programs, and get our sales team to close bigger deals faster.

In May, I was asked to rebuild the sales team as we hit the reset button.

Sales Enablement Manager

LevelJump

As my career developed, I noticed that I got the most enjoyment from working directly with the sales team.

I had enjoyed this in previous roles at other SaaS companies. So I wanted to get closer to the Sales Enablement space.

I met with David Bloom to discuss how I could get into the local Sales Enablement space in Toronto, but we immediately hit it off.

After a couple whiteboarding sessions, I was brought on as the first marketer, and fourth team member.

I had to build a marketing engine and sales process from the ground up. I had a chance to get my hands dirty at prospecting, running sales cycles, doing demos, and training reps while I was there, which is not something a marketer would typically get the chance to do.

David and I, along with our VP Product, James Tam, worked on getting the company to product-market fit.

It was a great time - we hired people, made mistakes, worked with great customers, and saw the revenues grow from little to something in just over a year.

Some of the proudest work in my career was done here.

Not only did I learn a lot about sales enablement, but I also developed my project management skills, my accountability, and really honed in on managing up.

I ultimately decided to leave a great product and team so my wife and I could move back to Halifax, NS to be closer to our own family.

Marketing Manager

FlashStock

After having worked at two smaller SaaS startups, I wanted to try something bigger.

I needed a bit more structure for my development, and wanted to hone in on my strategic marketing skills.

I joined FlashStock at around 50 employees, and saw it through a growth spurt to 120 employees, ultimately being acquired by Shutterstock in summer 2017.

My biggest learnings here came from my demand gen partner, Roger Figueiredo, who taught me about the importance of setting expectations around project management and deadlines, and the importance of data cleanliness.

Product Marketing - Acquired by Shutterstock

PostBeyond

After finishing my year at an agency, I went back to a SaaS startup as the first marketer hired on the team.

We were about 10 people total at the time, with some early traction in the market.

I had to build a marketing engine from scratch and support the sales team with leads and content enablement.

I grew a small team of marketers and briefly managed a BDR team too as some sales leadership was transitioning.

This was my first time managing people. I learned a lot about what to do, and what not to do.

I also learned how to build key parts of a revenue engine.

Director of Marketing

SteamFeed

SteamFeed was a passion project that came out of DJ Thistle and I when I first graduated university.

Being in Halifax, NS, with little job prospects at the time, I partnered with DJ to launch an online publication focusing on digital marketing and tech.

Eventually, we had over 80 regular monthly contributors, hundreds of guest writers, and over 120,000 visitors a month.

It was a great project, learned a lot about content marketing, managing a website, managing writers, editing, and growing an idea from nothing.

It supplemented a lot of the stuff I was doing in my day job.

But after almost four years, and multiple promotions on DJ and mine's real jobs, we decided to hang up our hats and close down the website to focus on other things.

Co-Founder, Editor, and Business Strategy

/newsrooms

After having done an early-stage tech startup, I gave a shot at working in a content marketing/social media agency.

I still had in the back of my mind the idea of going to work for a big company.

I learned a lot about managing client expectations. Thinking in projects. Getting great work done.

I learned about data and reporting. Building processes.

But I still yearned to get back to SaaS.

I appreciate my time at the agency. I learned a lot. But the biggest learning was realizing what I really wanted to do.

Growth Manager, Social Media

I help founders learn sales skills | Head of GTM at Savio | Want me to audit your sales process? Send me a DM 💪

What I do →

• I'm the founder of SalesMVP Lab. 
• I help early stage founders learn sales skills and implement a minimum viable sales process
• I also do sales for Savio.io, a SaaS product feedback management tool

The state of product management in SaaS is in crisis mode right now.

What used to be a business function has now become a project-management arm to engineering.

Most PMs don't come from a business background. They don't really have the business acumen to drive revenue growth. They're not fluent in sales forecasts, balance sheets, cost analysis, projecting ROI, etc.

All of these are super important to building a good product.

Many PMs I've met through my career never spoke to a prospect or customer directly. They sent out surveys (which are usually full of biases) or looked at usage data in something like a pendo.

But understanding pain, business impact, and negative consequences? No clue.

They don't want feedback from sales, in an attempt to avoid being order takers or a feature factory. Even though sales usually has a pulse on the market.

They over index on support/CS.

They over index on what the competition is doing.

When you talk to them about revenue, they think it "pollutes" the ability to create a good product.

But customers vote on what's good vs not with their wallets.

If you've done any training on go-to-market theory (Gartner, Pragmatic, Sirius, etc), you know there are 3 components to GTM. Product > Marketing > Sales.

Even the 4 Ps of marketing include product! (Massive consumer brands start with business, then product is a function of achieving the business goal, with engineering being a fulfillment function).

Product is and always will be a core business function. The core metrics for business (in any VC-backed SaaS) is revenue growth. Which comes mostly from Sales until ARR is big enough for expansion to become dominant.

At what point did product lose it's identity in SaaS? How do we gain it back?

Would love to see a world where product managers and project managers are not the same in SaaS. Some do this well, but take a look at SaaS as a whole over the last few years. Lots of "cool" features that nobody asked for. Retention at an all time low. Revenue growth at an all time low.

Let's get back to building products, not just shipping efficiently.

Daniel Hebert

How do you create urgency in your deals?

Why are deals not closing, even if your software is a fit?

What do I do after the first call?

I get these types of questions a lot from founders.

Very common in the early days when you're still learning sales.

The simple answer is that you're likely not doing enough discovery.

Urgency happens when there's a major problem and negative consequence attached to a timeline.

Why your deals aren't closing even if your software is a fit is likely because the pain you're solving isn't big enough for the hassle of implementing new software.

What you do after a first call depends on how your prospect buys.

All of these can be answered by probing further and asking better questions.

90% of your sales learning should be focused on getting better at asking questions.

Spend less time talking, more time listening.

Get maniacal about how you phrase your questions.

The better the questions, the better the answers.

The better the answers, the higher likelihood you'll close deals.

Here's an in-depth guide on how to apply a discovery framework to your deals.

Make sure to share this with other founders who are struggling with getting their first sales process up and running.

Guide: How to do Sales Discovery as a Foundder | SalesMVP

When you don't have basic knowledge on how to do sales well, one of two things happens:

1️⃣ You start getting fear or anxiety. The task becomes daunting. You procrastinate, and build it up to be something worse than what it is.
2️⃣ You overcomplicate your tactics, systems, and processes. You don't know how to execute on something simple and effective. So you take the hard way there.

This is why it's CRITICAL to your success to read books, listen to podcasts, take courses, get a coach, talk to mentors, join communities, shadow peers, etc.

Absorb knowledge about the different tasks in sales. And adjacent tasks as well, which will boost your business acumen.

Then take what you learn, and try it. Modify it for your ICP. For your sales motion.

Then reflect on what's working, and what's not.

Then iterate.

This is how you build a sales process in the early days as a founder.

Learn > Apply > Reflect > Iterate

Then repeat the cycle.

You'll quickly outpace other founders who aren't doing this.

The only thing that's stopping you from achieving your goals right now are your skill gaps.

Constant upskilling leads to success.

You get on a call with a prospect.

You chit chat, get past the pleasantries, and start the call.

You ask a few questions.

Then you start sharing your screen.

You're showing a bunch of features.

For 25 minutes.

Then turn it off, and the prospect says "let me think about it."

You log off, and wait to see if they'll become a customer.

Sound familiar?

I see founders run demos this way all the time.

The problem is that they're acting like it's a training call. Showing every nook and cranny of how the software works. From a technical standpoint.

But they fail to show the most important thing. What workflows solve a real problem for the prospect.

The demo should be like a movie trailer.

You don't need to show everything for a customer to buy. In fact, it's probably better that you show less.

You need to:
-Set the context before you show a workflow
-Talk about the problems related to the context
-Talk about the capabilities they'll gain with the new wofklow
-Show the workflow, in the least amount of clicks possible
-Ask a dialogue provoking question that makes them imagine using the software
-Repeat 2-4 times

Check out this step-by-step guide, including examples, for how to do this well in the early days.

-----

Hi, I'm Daniel. Built many GTM functions from the ground up at early stage startups.

Now I teach founders how to do sales.

🔔 Follow and connect for more content. Or DM me if you need help with you sales process.

Founder-led Sales: Minimum Viable Demo Guide | SalesMVP

Closing deals as a founder is tough.

You don't have the same amount of time a sales rep would have to build the sales process.

But you still need to do it. And for the more technical founders, it's really new. The learning curve is steep.

So what I coach founders on is think in minimum viables.

-Minimum viable sales framework for discovery
-Minimum viable positioning
-Minimum viable sales story
-Minimum viable demo flow
-Minimum viable meeting structure
-Minimum viable sales process

None of it needs to be perfect at first. But you need at least some structure, in some parts of your sales process, to do it well.

I put this 46 page ebook together for founder-led sales. Includes all of the minimum viable processes you need to get more deals to close.

Designed specifically for founders. Includes scripts, templates, and plenty of examples. Also have a companion workbook so you can build your process along.

Usually USD $36. Giving it away for free right now on LinkedIn.

Comment "Founder-Led Sales" to get your copy. I'll DM you both the ebook and workbook.

Here's a problem I see with technical founders.

Most founders underestimate how important sales is to their survival when they launch their startup.

They focus on shipping features, writing code, re-writing code, pivoting, making their MVP "perfect."

They neglect working directly with potential customers.

Here’s the reality. As a founder, you wear every hat. And the most important hat you'll wear is figuring out how to monetize, how to market, how to sell. If you want this to be a full-time gig, or raise funding, this is the main job you have.

But most technical founders procrastinate on this.

"Product isn't perfect, needs more time" is just an excuse.

It's never perfect, you never build once and forget it.

You'll constantly be shipping. But you won't know what good looks like until customers tell you, with their wallets.

Here are 3 things you can do to raise your confidence:

1️⃣ Get a sales coach or mentor that can help you deal with head trash.
2️⃣ Join a founder-led sales community to get peer support.
3️⃣ Implement a minimum viable sales process that you can follow so you don't have to wing sales every time.

You'll build a better product, faster, if you're constantly speaking to the market. The more prospects and customers you interact with, the more you understand about their pains and workflows. 

You'll never be able to guess this correctly hiding behind your code. 

Get out there and sell.

My demos fell flat. Until I did this...

Founders don't spend enough time thinking about their demos.

Which leaves the buyer confused.

But there's a simple step-by-step process that will help you convert more deals.

What you're showing is likely too complicated.

A demo isn't a training call. You're not teaching the prospect how to use the software. They haven't bought anything yet.

You're showing them how specific workflows will solve their problems. The demo needs to be brought into their world, their context.

There's a 6-step formula for how to blueprint your demo in the early days. Helps you edit out everything that's unnecessary.

1️⃣ Organize your demo into 3-5 chapters. Each chapter focuses on one problem, one workflow.
2️⃣ Set the context for what you're about to show. Example of my Savio demo: "You need to go to 7 different places to get the latest product feedback from sales and CS."
3️⃣ Explain the problem with that context. Savio example: "This wastes a lot of time when you're doing feature discovery. You're also missing out on a lot of info, since you need to know where to look, and what to look for, instead of having the complete picture."
4️⃣ Explain the capabilities they'll gain. Savio example: "You get one place to organize all your features, where you can segment based on different customer groups."
5️⃣ Show the handful of features that demonstrates the workflow. Savio example: Show the feature list sorted by ARR. Show customer segments. Show how to filter into something specific.
6️⃣ Ask a dialogue provoking question that makes them imagine how they'd use what you've shown. Savio example: "How are you segmenting your customers today?"

I've applied this formula at many early-stage startups, and some scale-ups. It leads to much better demos, discovery, and conversions.

You need a minimum viable demo, just like anything else in your sales process.

A lot of sales advice is overengineered.

Often reps and founders will latch on to overly-complicated tactics they've heard somewhere.

If it sounds complicated, it must work, right? It sounds smart after all.

Reality - and this is pretty much for anything, not just sales - stuff that really gets results is simple to understand. Simple to learn. Simple to execute on.

If someone is overengineering their advice, they've chosen the hard way of doing it. Which means they either stuck with something that worked once and haven't really tried to improve it. Or they don't really know what they're doing, which is why they landed on a complicated process.

In sales, learn the fundamentals.

Your prospect has a problem.

You need to understand their problem.

You need to show them how you solve their problem.

You need to show them how they'll get started successfully.

You need to help them navigate their buying process.

Everything you do revolves around this.

Think about the different parts of your process in minimum viables.

Minimum viable positioning
Minimum viable story
Minimum viable demo
Minimum viable discovery
Minimum viable meeting structures
Minimum viable sales process

Then write it down.

I'm a big fan of a napkin process - something that fits on one page. Most folks can understand this. Which means they'll be able to execute on it.

So write down your steps. What calls you'll have. What questions you'll ask. What you'll show. What resources you'll need to build to support you. How and when you'll follow up. What the prospects will need to do on their side. What you'll need to do on your side.

Keep it as simple as possible in the early days. Then run it. Then iterate on it. Then make it better. Then make it repeatable.

Then hire sales folks who can run it for you.

When you're thinking about what features to build, where's your feedback coming from?

Lots of PMs over-index on customers and retention, and avoid sales like the plague.

But that's short-sighted, at least if you're under $20M ARR.

Imagine you're at $8M ARR with a 118% NRR. You don't have a churn problem at this stage. Especially with that kind of NRR number.

If these numbers stay constant, your CS leader will bring in $1.4M ARR in expansion revenue in 12 months.

But the target is likely getting ARR between 12-16M at this stage. Which means 2.6-6.6M ARR will come from sales.

Your head of sales has a budget, with assumptions in there. To hit those numbers, they need the right amount of leads.

But they also have assumptions about deal size going up.

How are they going to increase ACV?

Likely from product gaps being filled. Selling bigger deals, going up market, going into a different market, etc., will all require some sort of product change.

So if you're below 20M ARR, the biggest driver of revenue will come from new sales, not expanding existing customers.

The job of a PM is to take raw materials (feedback, ideas, dev hours) and turn it into something that makes the company money.

So become very close friends with sales. They often have a good pulse on the market, what voids exist, and what prospects are willing to pay for. And they usually figure this out 6-9 months before CS does.

One reason why founders don't close enough deals is because they do poor sales discovery.

When you dig into the questions they're asking prospects, they're mostly selfish.

Are they using the tools WE integrate with?
How many seats will they buy?
When will they sign the contract?

Those are all about us and our needs as a seller. Which is really qualification and not discovery (also why stuff like BANT is really outdated at this point).

To really get deals moving - create urgency, shorter cycles, higher ACV - you need to solve a big $million problem. There needs to be a negative consequence on the business of not solving the problem. And the folks involved in the decision need to agree that the negative consequence is severe enough to pay money to solve now.

What problems do they have with existing workflows?
What pain is this causing the business?
What KPI, metric, or strategic objective is suffering because of this?
What happens if they don't solve this in a certain timeframe?

THAT's discovery. Probing into symptoms to get to root cause.

Qualification is still important - you don't want to waste time with deals that you can't help.

But discovery is where deals are made.

Sales people - if you really want to know whether or not you'll be selling a good product, take a look at the ratio of product managers to devs.

You might think that more devs means better product, but it's rarely the case.

Here's why ⬇ 

When the ratios are right, the job of product management is to deeply understand the customers and market, and carefully decide on what to build.

They'll pay attention to sales feedback, CS feedback. They'll do their own customer interviews. They'll do a ton of discovery. Their job is really to take raw materials (feedback, ideas, dev hours, etc) and turn it into revenue.

That's where you'll have the most success as a sales team.

But if the product to dev ratio is off? Here's what happens 🚨 .

PM time is spent coordinating between teams. Less time is spent talking to customers.

If dev gets blocked, PMs are holding up progress. That's super obvious, and seen as a failure.

The more devs, the more mouths you need to feed as a PM. Your work becomes more about feeding the beast instead of figuring out what's best to build.

Instead of spending time understanding customers, PMs spend more time writing specs, coordinating projects, etc. They essentially become project managers.

So one of two things usually happens: They either become a feature factory for sales (just build what SALES wants) - not ideal, but could be worse. Or they become a feature factory for engineering (just build whatever WE want) - which leads to bloated features and software. This is worst case scenario.

So if you want to hit your number as a sales rep, or get good retention as a CSM, make sure that the product managers at your org are ACTUALLY product managers. And not glorified project managers for the dev team.

Your quota depends on it.

I've heard some sales folks say to run sales/discovery call like you're just having a conversation with a friend.

That's a load of BS.

I've bough plenty of software in my career. When I buy software, I have a problem in my business I need solved.

I'm hopping on a sales call to see whether or not you're solving my problem.

The sales rep is hopping on that call to see if I have a problem they can solve.

If we both agree that the problem matches, then we agree to enter a sales cycle.

I have a very clear purpose as a buyer as to why I join a sales call.

The sales rep has a very clear purpose for that call.

That call has an outcome, which is either we move forward or we don't.

Tell me, in what world have you ever had a structured conversation like this with a friend? Where you both enter the conversation with a mutual purpose and mutual outcome. Where there's a back and forth exchange of information with the goal of getting to a yes or no?

That's not how you hang out with buddies. With friends, you're going to cover a lot of different random topics, with absolutely no structure to how the conversation will develop.

So no, don't run your sales calls like you're just having a conversation with a friend. That's not why you run sales calls.

Create a structure that gets both you and the prospect to a mutual outcome. Plan for this. Run your call according to that plan.

Don't wing it.

Check out this founder-led sales guide for how to structure your meetings.

Taplio

Daniel Hebert's Linkedin Analytics

Daniel Hebert

Daniel Hebert's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Daniel Hebert's Linkedin Analytics

Daniel Hebert

Daniel Hebert's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Daniel Hebert's Linkedin Analytics

Daniel Hebert's Best Posts (last 30 days)