Sean O'Shaughnessey

It is critically important that the succinct time you have in the elevator is memorable because you just don’t know when you’ll get that chance again. You are a young company. There are more companies out there that don’t do business with you than do business with you. While that is probably true of almost all companies, young or small companies take that anonymity to a new level – your market share is 0.0001%, and… 

Navigating the move from enterprise executive to VP of Sales or Chief Revenue Officer is not for the faint of heart. However, for successful managers, the disruptive nature of startups can be cathartic. You are probably a lot like me. You went from an individual contributor or a front-line sales manager for a big company with lots of resources to a team lead at a small company with limited resources. A sales manager at a… 

Do you watch Shark Tank? If you are in sales at a young or small company, there is probably no other television show that is as relevant to your life as Shark Tank.

Shark Tank is the television equivalent of a VC conference. Entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to five extremely wealthy people and try to get them to invest. In a startup, if you are not personally responsible for talking to investors, your manager probably is doing it.

There is one consistent sign that the entrepreneur is going to be rejected by the Shark Tank panelists. It is when the founder starts to talk about how massive the market is for their product. Mark Cuban is usually the first to pounce on this aggressively, and often it is his reason for not funding the startup.

If you are brand new and haven’t sold a single product, then regardless of your targeted market, your market share is 0.00000000% (take that out to an infinite number of decimal places). As soon as you start to sell, the number of decimal places gets fewer, but most of the time as a startup, you still have well under 1% of your market. You can have an incredibly successful startup and have a meager market share.

If you are like me, you probably have years of experience selling for great companies where you refined your sales skills. You were a front line and second line manager for several years. You may have also helped some startup companies that didn’t really ever start.

Now you are in a new young company, and you are trying to sell a product that has never been sold before. There are a lot of very talented people in the startup. Like the fable of Damocles’, there is always an unseen yet prevalent pressure. And what you do to hit your sales forecast is to fall back to old habits. For example, you probably designed your sales force around a similar structure from a prior company. If your background is big software sales like mine, you brought on a couple of big hitters and enticed them with stock options (because you couldn’t promise them a pipeline). If you are used to channel sales, you may have recruited some sales partners to bring your product to the market.

Whatever you decide, you need to question it. Here are some ideas:

Every day at a small or medium-sized company has challenges. You know this. Having been in your shoes, I find that developing the first sales pitch can be both heartbreaking and exciting. Starting from scratch and being ready to take on the world is noble, yet the downside is having absolutely no historical examples to jumpstart the creative process.

You may be lucky. Your company may be biting at the heels of one or more big competitors. If this is the case, you simply position yourself against their value proposition and say that you are better at something then the big guys.

Maybe you are also cheaper than the big guys (I hope not because pricing can always be lowered due to competitive pressures). Creating a value proposition that is “cheaper” may not be enough to differentiate you in the long run, but there is no question that it can be an advantage if your cost model still allows you to be profitable.

Do Not Internalize Doubt

But what if you need to create a unique value proposition and you cannot copy the value proposition of anyone else? What if your offering is so unique that it is hard to find another company and copy their idea?

“I need leads!!!” Did any salesperson not say those words?

It is even more frequent with a startup or small company.

There are no leads. There are very few references (maybe none). The product is relatively unproven.

It takes a unique customer to buy from a startup or a small or medium-sized company, and it takes a special sales team to work for a small company.

Sure it is exciting to build something from scratch. If it works, it will be incredibly rewarding (hopefully personally and financially). You rolled the dice! You are all in!

But even with all of that excitement, it is still hard work. The leads are not there. There is never enough.

Every day is straightforward even though it is tough. Here are my thoughts that get me through the day.

My postings on this topic won’t be on a guaranteed schedule but will be the random thoughts as the outsourced VP of Sales for small and medium-sized companies. This first post will be to give a little bit of background on myself, but more importantly, to offer some advice to salespeople that are just beginning their career in business-to-business or enterprise sales. The software sales industry has evolved dramatically since I first started selling software.…