We worked with over 1200 businesses including ASOS, RedBull, Dominos, RAF, PWC and many more. For context, it's a business to business (B2B) sales model with sales ranging from £100 to £15,000 per month. We were helping brands connect with students through various advertising packages and products.
We never exceeded £800,000 within a single year attracting over £2.2m in revenue over the first five years of the business. Note: this is revenue not profit. While our sales process was strong, other elements of the business weren't.
Before I jump into this blog - I want to thank the team at Oversubscribed for helping me pull these blogs together and support with my social content creation. If you are interested in raising your profile online, head over to Oversubscribed.
Within this post I will share:
How I got the first sale
How to personally get better at selling
How to get companies to call you
Systems we used to enhance our sales and gain repeat customers
How I hired my first sales employee
How the sales team were managed
How we scaled our teams
Challenges we faced
How I’d do it next time
Recommended books
"Out of all the skills I've learned since launching the business, selling is by far the most important. Without sales, you don't have a business"
Before I go into it, I can't stress enough how much our business changed when we mastered digital marketing and getting companies to call us. Within a B2B environment, brand awareness through marketing, coupled with a motivated sales team, will lead to successful on-boarding of clients. Drop me an email chris@wearemedia.london if you want to know our lead generation strategy.
How I got the first sale
Getting the first sale was difficult - I didn't have anything to show them, no website, no media pack and no product. I wouldn't recommend doing it this way as it was difficult. But even if you have all the sales material and best product in the world there is no easy way to get started.
I simply had to pick up the phone and call 100 businesses in the hope one of them agreed to listening to what I had to say. Here's my 5 step process I followed early on:
1. Identify your customers - don't bother trying to sell to anyone if you aren't speaking to people that can benefit from your product.
2. Call through them - if you call 100 people expect to get 10 decision makers on the phone (this will improve).
3. Build rapport - getting people to like you will make the whole process go a lot easier.
4. Use an 'angle' - to get their attention and confirm the need; let them know the reason you are calling with a strong angle.
5. Learn about them - once you have their attention, start to understand their situation and whether or not you can help.
6. Present the product - show them how it can help solve a problem they have or improve their business (only if you can).
7. Ask for the sale - While they are unlikely to buy from you that easily, it will start the buying process.
This isn't the best sales approach by any stretch of the imagination and below I outline how it developed, but having never sold anything before this was how I got the first £20,000 in revenue.
The biggest thing I reminded myself of regularly was that selling is 100% a numbers game. The more qualified people you speak to, the more likely you are to get that first customer. It's all about getting attention (this can also be done through digital marketing).
"Within the first few weeks I was struggling to sell and got recommended to listen to an audiobook by Brian Tracey called Psychology of Selling. Sales became much easier after listening to this and making notes."
How to personally get better at selling
It might be that you are never planning to sell anything yourself. But if you ever want to raise money, convince someone to join the team or motivate staff then learning to sell will be a huge benefit.
Early on I decided to get good at selling for a number of reasons. It's not just to get new customers but in the early stages of launching a business, literally everything is a sale.
The only way to get good at sales is similar to everything in life. Learn as much as you can about the art of selling and practice. I looked at sales in the same way as I looked at my degree, I needed to study it or I had no hope.
For the first two years I studied selling for at least one hour each day and applied what I learned. Like anything, eventually you get good at it. Even if you are trying to sell something to a consumer as opposed to a business I would still study that type of selling for an hour per day and apply what I learned.
How to get companies to call you
We didn't start doing this until early 2017 but eventually managed to get 5-10 incoming customers per week. This still isn't very many and reflected the amount time we invested on it. If we had done this from the start then the business would have grown far more quickly.
We adopted an 'inbound methodology'. This is where content is put out in order to attract customers to your products as opposed to having to reach out to them without them showing interest. HubSpot sales CRM allows this to happen very easily.
How it worked for us was as follows: we would put out advertisements on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram targeting 'marketing managers'. The adverts would offer them some free value before asking for their details to get more insight into the topic.
"Our ultimate aim would have been for sales people to spend all their time talking to people who had shown interest and submitted their details. This wasn't to replace calling people, just to make it more effective as they had already qualified themselves"
Systems we used to enhance our sales and gain repeat customers
This will be different depending on your customers but we used Highrise early on to manage our customers (cheapest option). We later moved onto Salesforce before moving onto Hubspot. Hubspot allowed us to manage our 'lead generation' pipeline all the way through to our sales and finally client delivery.
For us, systems allowed us to monitor and track everything with some of the key metrics being: number of new leads; number of client calls; campaign success rate; re-book rate.
"Perfecting this system took us more than 3 years but it allowed us to have one person doing what would have taken 3/4 early on in the business. It also gave us an operational scalability that wouldn't have otherwise been possible."
This system looked as follows:
Facebook ads >>> Attract customers to fill in details >>> Call and see if we can help >>> Demonstrate how >>> Make a sale >>> Put into our campaign work flow >>> Complete campaign sending them a report >>> Pass pack to account manager for a resale.
"Without a solid sales system that can hold everyone accountable it will be hard to scale. It allowed us to identify any weak areas and fix them"
We currently run this system for over 100 companies and growing. Send over an email if you would like us to set this system up for your business. chris@wearemedia.london
How I hired my first sales employee
Hiring was a skill that I never perfected but learned a lot along the way.
Hiring your first sales employee will be hard. The best thing you can do is prepare in the following ways:
1. Make sure you can afford them
2. Make sure you have all the correct systems to manage them in place
3. Make sure you have a good onboarding structure from week 1 through to 6 months
4. Make sure you or someone within the company can lead them by example
5. Set clear KPIs for them and set expectations
6. Make sure they have all the marketing materials they need
7. Make sure there is a training structure in place
8. Make sure you pay market rate with an attractive commission/bonus structure
Decide if you are going to use a recruiter or job board. We started off using recruiters that cost around 15% - 20% of the sales person's salary. We then switched to using job boards as we had more time internally to go through the applicants.
"Don't hire someone to sell because you can't sell. Learn to sell the product yourself first otherwise they have no chance"
We followed a two step interview process - first was a call where we tried to get an understanding of the person's 'fit for the company' and understand their historic work experience. Following this, we would have a face to face interview where we would role play a sales scenario and try and get an understanding of their ability to sell.
"If you aren't 100% sure, don't hire them - you will live to regret it. It doesn't just cost you their salary"
How the sales team were managed
There are a lot of schools of thought on this and I believe it heavily depends on your product, customer life time value and sales cycle.
What I am certain of though, is that all sales people need to have their activity monitored. Not because you can't trust them to do a good job but because if you don't, you have no way of identifying when they are doing well.
We had 2 types of sales meeting with every sales person:
The first was at the start of every month where we looked at:
1. Previous month's financial performance
2. Going over any areas of weakness they might want help with
3. Going over what had worked well the previous month
4. Setting next month's financial goal
5. Setting 'learning' or 'improvement' goals, something to work on e.g get 10 extra meetings
The second would be a weekly Monday meeting where we went over:
1. Companies to close this week
2. Are we on target for the month - if not what can we do to get on target
3. Any help or support they need
4. Looking at KPIs and making sure they were all okay
"We went through periods where we did weekly training as a whole sales team. We didn't always maintain this but we should have. It was great for everyone even if it just refreshed or gave everyone a chance to express anything that was working for them"
Finally, we implemented a promotional structure that made managing the sales team easier as their incentives and pay were perfectly aligned with the company KPIs.
"The single biggest takeaway I learned pretty quickly was making sure the sales teams KPIs and rewards were aligned with the overall company KPIs"
It is also very important that every sales person is paid what they deserve according to the market. If not, someone else will pay them what they are worth and you will lose them after spending time and money training them...something I was slow to realise.
How we scaled our sales team
The biggest key for us to scale the sales team was to make sure we had at least one person setting an example early on. To start with this was me and later went on to be other people within the team. With a start up I think it would be very difficult to grow the sales team if you don't have at least one person selling the product / service well in the same way in which you want a new hire to.
Anyone new coming in needs to know that it's possible. Once we had that, scaling the sales became a lot easier.
This is just how we scaled our sales team from 1 person to 10 people. We might not do it this way again with a different product or service but this seemed to make the most sense to us at the time with our resources.
The only chance we had of growing our commercial teams successfully was when our products, working environment, marketing material, training, salary/commission structure and vision were all aligned.
Until we had these in place it was an uphill struggle. The second huge factor is making sure you hire the correct people. Again, whenever we didn't, it caused us huge issues and held us back.
The number one thing is to make sure you have a product that can help your clients/customers. Test this by asking yourself whether you would sell this to your mum if she was in the market.
Steps we took after we got everything aligned above:
1. We split our possible market up
2. We hired a 'head' of each sector
3. We hired people below each 'head'
Our sales cycle looked something like following image. To start with, the awareness was all done by calling/meeting possible prospects at scale. Following this, we used targeted digital advertising to gain awareness so the sales team could spend more time on demos / meetings rather than calling people who weren't in the market.
This allowed us to almost double the output of a single sales person.
"We could only scale as quickly as we could maintain clients and not lose them"
A huge mistake we made early on was not paying enough attention on after sales care. Because we onboarded a number of new clients quickly, we didn't have a good enough post sales process to make sure we maintained them. As a result, we would win two clients but lose a different one. It meant we still grew, but at a far slower rate than if we had spent more time looking after clients as opposed to just focusing on winning new contracts.
We had to be in the re-order business not the sales business.
This also had a huge knock on effect to the sales person as they felt the product / delivery wasn't as good.
But once we had inbound leads, good products and post sales aftercare, scaling became a lot easier with less effort. It also gave us a more motivated sales team because they could see the product delivering real results.
Challenges we faced
There are a number of challenges we faced that are worth noting, but the biggest one that slowed down our ability to scale was the economics of the business. When thinking about scaling these need to be taken into account. I will explain ours and then explain what we would have liked it to look like.
Our basic maths on a single sales person: (This changed slightly over time)
Revenue they brought into the business on average - £10,000 per month
Wages + commissions they were paid - £3,360 per month
Leaving £6640 to go towards product delivery, marketing, team etc.
Because we didn't have a subscription model or any huge monthly commitments, the sales person had to fight for this £10,000 each month. With a couple of bad months it would wipe out any contribution they had made for the business.
"If we had a recurring revenue or a higher life time value per client, the business economics would have looked a lot more attractive."
If we had retained clients better, then after a year the sales person could have had £96,000 of re-bookings. Meaning in years two and three they could have hit £16,000 and £24,000 sales per month. While some of our sales team were able to do this, it meant they had to be very good.
If we could have achieved the re-bookings it would have looked as follows per sales person:
Revenue they brought into the business on average - £16,000 per month
Wages + commissions they were paid - £4,060 per month
Leaving £11,940
or
Revenue they brought into the business on average - £24,000 per month
Wages + commissions they were paid - £5,430 per month
Leaving £18,570
For this increase in wages and commissions, the sale person wouldn't have had to work any harder if the after sales care and product ROI allowed an easy re-booking of a client.
How I’d do it next time
Once you have a sales structure, it is hard to change unless you have money in the bank to cover losses that might be seen during these changes. We didn't because of the investment structure we had - but if we did or if we were to do it again, I'd do the following:
1. Make sure the product brought so much value to a client that they wanted to rebook
2. Make sure we had new business 'leads' coming into the business via marketing channels
3. Make sure we had business economics that made sense and were possible to scale
4. Make sure our after sales and delivery were just as much a focus as winning new business
5. Make sure we hired the right people with clear training and progression structure
6. Making sure we maintained KPI standards within the sales team
Recommended books
There are a number of sales books / audio books I'd recommend reading to learn more about personal sales and scaling a commercial team. If I knew the information within these books before starting the business, a lot of mistakes could have been avoided.
To help you increase your personal sales:
Brian Tracey - Psychology Of Selling
Grant Cardone - Be Obsessed or Be Average
Grant Cardone - The 10X rule
To help scaling a sales team:
Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler - Predictable Revenue
Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin - From Impossible to Inevitable
Verne Harnish - Scaling Up
Chris Moss
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