DEVELOPING A
SALES STRATEGY
Brought to you by Intercom
Crafting a sales strategy is one of the core activities every
business will have to undertake. You can delay it until you've
acquired your first 100 or 1,000 customers, but at some
point you'll need to find sustainable traction in the market.
A well defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful
growth. It's how you'll know who your target customers
are and how you'll sell to them. Get it right and watch your
company's growth trajectory go up and to the right.
Go without one and risk seeing your business flame out.
The challenge for you is deciding which sales motions will
actually drive your strategy forward and leaning into just
those few. It's far too easy to say your initial sales team
will be both SMB and enterprise, inbound and outbound,
hunters and farmers. The reality is that without focus, doing
any of those effectively is nearly impossible. The key is to
experiment and iterate with discipline, so you can zero in
on the sales strategy that's right for your business.
Here, you'll learn from top practitioners in the field about
their winning sales strategies and the lessons they've
learned scaling sales. Taken together, their advice is a
roadmap to identifying and navigating the crucial inputs
to long term sales success.
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
3
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
What it takes to attract
your target customer
Des Traynor,
Co-Founder, Intercom
Regardless of whether you're selling a SaaS
service or a physical good, you need to understand
what it takes to attract your target customers and decide
how much revenue you want to earn from them. That
gives you the ability to plot how you'll reach those
customers, which gives you three options:
These axes were created by Joel York to define the three
key sales models for SaaS businesses and are a great way
to help you understand how to move forward. (The
bottom-right quadrant, a complex sales process with
low value customers, isn't a viable business, so it's not
even worth considering.)
High value
per account
Self-serve
Complex
sales
process
Low value
per account
Enterprise
Transactional
Self-service
Many startups, when using this model
to define themselves, end up in the
bottom-left quadrant because it's the
easiest one to scale in. The problem is
that being in the lower left means you
usually end up with a high amount of
low value customers. This limits how
you can acquire customers. Spending
$300 to acquire customers for a $99
product isn't economical.
So depending on what industry you're
in, picking the wrong quadrant could
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
leave you dead before you even start building anything at all.
Here are some examples:
Some industries are notoriously hard to reach, e.g.
content marketing isn't as effective for dentists as it is
for developers. This means you might need to pay to
acquire customers.
Some industries deal in annual contracts, NDAs and SLAs.
This means you need to invest in a sales process.
Some industries are used to PowerPoint sales presentations,
handheld onboarding and onsite training. This means
you need a high contract value to profit on a customer.
Evaluating if you're able to offer a self-serve experience or a
complex sales process and then determining if there's a high
or low value for each user helps you decide how you should
approach the customer.
Self-serve
Complex
sales
process
Low value
per account
High value
per account
Excerpt from Intercom on Starting Up.
5
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
When you need sales
in a self-serve world
John Barrows,
Sales Trainer
If you're selling something that has
a super low Average Contract Value (ACV),
say, $1,000 for the year, it's hard to justify
having sales in that equation whatsoever.
But, if you're in somewhat of a complex sale
that involves a sales cycle longer than 20-
30 days, and at least two or three calls with
multiple people, sales is a critical part of that
to make sure it goes right.
John Barrows, as heard on the Inside Intercom podcast.
You can only automate and educate people so
much before they want to talk to somebody.
Maybe $5,000-$10,000 is when people get
more uncomfortable putting their credit
card online and buying without talking to
people. But that threshold exists.
6
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Focus breeds
excellence in sales
LB Harvey,
VP of Sales, Intercom
One of my guiding principles as a sales
leader is "focus breeds excellence." Sales reps,
especially new ones, struggle to be fabulous at
multiple sales motions. That means when you're
formulating your sales strategy, you need to be
explicit about creating the right, differentiated roles
on your sales team and ensuring you're incentivizing
and prioritizing the right motions within those roles.
Let's take inbound sales and outbound sales, for
example. Inbound and outbound require vastly
different skills and workflows. The managers on an
inbound team need to be obsessed with analyzing
top-of-the-funnel trends the marketing channels
bringing in high quality leads and increasing the
conversion rate from lead to opportunity with
tactics like live chat. Managers on an outbound
team, on the other hand, need to be able to get
sales reps gunning to go out and evangelize the
product's amazing benefits for customers. The
point is they're different teams, different reps,
different motions.
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Do you know
who your ideal
customer is?
Tomasz Tunguz,
Partner, Redpoint Ventures
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The
perfect customer. Can you describe it for your
startup? The more precisely you can describe it,
the better. That will simplify disqualification. But
articulating the ICP well isn't enough.
Vague ICPs are problematic. The company will
focus on too broad a customer base, waste
time and effort with unqualified prospects and
blunt their sales pitch with irrelevant value
propositions.
Clear ICPs can also be problematic. A clear but
useless ICP might be: a disenchanted thirty-
something mechanic who likes to play German
board games, read Nietzsche and watch MMA. I
can clearly articulate my ICP to myself and others.
The target market is clear (and niche!)
But how would I identify this person if I'm
looking to sell to him? Where would I begin
8
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
generating leads? Mechanics meetups? Board
game conventions? Nihilist forums?
A good ICP must serve three purposes. First,
the ICP should enable me to identify a good
prospect quickly. Second, I should be able to
simply convey the ICP to someone else in such
a way that they can find other ICPs. Third, the
ICP should be defined so systems can be built to
identify them.
A better ICP is: VPs of marketing in GDPR-
affected regions; or heads of sales with teams
larger than 50 people in technology; CEOs of
profitable pool supply companies.
These ICPs are much easier to identify using lead
generation tools. They can be communicated to
teammates simply and computer systems can
be tooled or trained to identify them at scale.
To grow, startups must scale and distribute ICP
identification from one to ten to hundreds of
people. A narrow, clear and identifiable ICP is a
crucial ingredient in that growth.
Excerpt from "An Often Forgotten Characteristic About Your Startup's Ideal Customer Profile."
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Why salespeople
need to think like
consultants
Mark Roberge,
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business
School, and former CRO, Hubspot
When folks ask, "What's changing in sales;
how is it different?" the common theme is that it's
going more and more inside. Twenty years ago,
you had to actually talk to a salesperson just to do
your buying process. They had information that
you needed, and the best reps were very skilled
at withholding that information in exchange for
the information they wanted from you who's
the decision maker? How much budget do you
have? What are your needs?
But today, I can be in my slippers on Saturday
night, after I put the kids to bed, and I can find
the top five vendors in a space. I can find out what
they do, how they are different from one an-
other, and how much they cost. I can try many of
the products for free, and I can buy many of them
right on the site. Why we need sales becomes a
huge question, right?
Excerpt from "Hubspot's Mark Roberge Talks Inbound vs. Outbound Sales, Transparency and Big Data."
We need to do a
better job, when we
engage with someone,
to engage with them
in their context.
Those of us in sales have to step up our game in
order to add value to that whole ecosystem. We
need to be there as consultants and advisers to
our buyers. We need to do a better job, when
we engage with someone, to engage with
them in their context. We need to do a better
job understanding their specific goals and the
specific challenges they're trying to solve, and
translating the generic marketing on our website
to their business. We need to tell the story from
their perspective. That's the skill the best reps
now possess.
10
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
It's never too
early to invest
in sales ops
LB Harvey,
VP of Sales, Intercom
Setting up a sales operations team is
absolutely paramount to your success as a sales
leader. They're a strategic arm that puts your sales
strategy into high gear. For all the talk about sales
hacks and magic, sales operations is really what
helps you nail the right motions for your team.
Let me put it this way: if your sales reps are race
car drivers, your sales ops team is the pit crew.
They're the ones ensuring your frontline sales
team gets deals to the finish line with precision
and consistency. And just like in auto racing,
you can't have one without the other if you
want to put your business into hyperdrive.
That's because sales ops is the collision point for
so many crucial sales initiatives. If you want your
sales reps to spend more time selling and less time
doing administrative work, then you need sales
systems to optimize away the inefficiencies. If you
want your sales reps to be on the cutting edge of
the market, then you need sales enablement to
train them on competitive positioning and to
curate external sales trainers. If you want to own
your pipeline and your forecast, then you need
sales analytics to identify high potential prospects,
flag accounts at risk for churn and set the right
incentives to execute against those goals.
Sales ops is incredibly powerful for your business,
and you can never invest in it early enough.
For all the talk about
sales hacks and magic,
sales operations is
really what helps you
nail the right motions
for your team.
11
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
From SaaS
startup to mature
SaaS business
Joel York,
CMO, Accellion
As a SaaS startup evolves into a mature
SaaS business, growth aspirations naturally
lead to the desire to expand market reach to
new prospects and to expand product footprint
with current customers. The SaaS startup that
enters the market with a customer self-service
SaaS sales model represents the origin of a
natural evolutionary path.
The theory is straightforward. The nimble
SaaS startup that has built a large self-service
customer franchise for a super simple product
starts pumping in new features, develops
modular pricing schemes, adds a few sales
reps and sets off on a quest to increase its
average selling price from $10 of monthly
recurring revenue to $100 MRR to $1,000 MRR
to $10,000 MRR and beyond!
However, the straightforward tactics belie
the tectonic strategic, operational and cultural
shifts required for success. Underlying the
simplicity of the customer self-service model
is a mass market, low cost competitive
strategy. Meanwhile, the enterprise sales
model assumes a highly differentiated product,
usually characterized by cutting edge internet-
enabled innovation.
Maintaining the simplicity of the customer
self-service model as a successful SaaS start-
up introduces more complex products and
Selling up the value chain
Complexity
(CAC & TCS)
PriceHigh
Low
High
Transactional
Enterprise
Startup
Graveyard
Self-service
int
ern
et
ec
on
om
ics
co
mp
eti
tiv
e s
tra
teg
ies
typical star
tup
ev
olu
tion
path
unique
dierentiation
low cost
large scale
12
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Excerpt from "SaaS startup strategy | Three SaaS sales models."
purchase processes in close proximity to the
originally simple, self-service product and
purchase process requires careful planning
and execution. Should the products be sepa-
rate offerings or modules of a single offering?
Should transactional sales arise by skimming
the cream of customer self-service prospects,
or should entirely new lead generation vehicles
be put in place? Are enterprise customers just
transactional customers who are all grown up,
or an entirely different species?
It is often said that moving upmarket is easier
than moving downmarket. This is probably
true, but it is NOT easy to move up without
inadvertently abandoning the down.
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Experiment with
your sales strategy
before you pivot
Elizabeth Cain,
Partner, OpenView Venture Partners
Sometimes a sales leader or founder or
even CEO gets too excited by too many new
ideas. Every new idea is a GREAT idea that
he or she wants the entire company to chase.
Moving too quickly, all in different directions,
and pivoting regularly creates confusion you
hamper your own progress. The most common
risk I see? Moving to enterprise. Companies
close one or two enterprise customers and get
big deal fever. They pivot their entire business
strategy and point the outbound team at ONLY
enterprise meetings.
A culture of experimentation needs to be
established at the top and pushed down into
an organization. It takes guts to test things,
fail and go again. Leadership teams need to
create room for this and encourage creativity
without repercussions.
So how do you actually run a disciplined
experiment? It starts with a hypothesis what
are you here to test? Then you need to identify
the different factors, design a process, agree to
a timeline and be crystal clear on the metrics
you will track to determine if it worked.
After you run the experiment, you need to be
rigorous in your review. If it worked, the next
step is to figure out how to cap out this option
how far can it scale?
How to run
a disciplined
experiment.
Experimenting can
be made simple
using these four steps.
1. Generate hypothesis
2. Design experiment
3. Run experiment
4. Analyze result
Excerpt from "The 3 mistakes every company makes building the outbound sales model."
14
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Be wary of
"happy ears"
with upmarket
customers
David Katz,
Director of North America Sales,
Intercom
There's a classic response people have
when talking to larger companies I call it
"happy ears." It's incredibly easy to be overly
optimistic when you see a sexy new logo walk
in the door. The thing you forget is that at
large organizations, there are lots of people
there who are constantly evaluating tech-
nology and looking for ways to use those new
tools to help them stand out or leverage a
proposal to negotiate better terms with their
current vendor. But out of all these evaluations,
very few purchases are actually made.
As a sales leader, you have to be very dubious
of this situation. The reality is that you
should walk away from 99% of these early
conversations with larger customers. If you
can't get the stakeholders on the other end
to give you straightforward answers, agree
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
to a mutual evaluation plan or meet shared
deadlines, then it's time to walk away. The
absolute worst thing you can do is waste your
time or theirs.
Even if these early conversations do go well,
inevitably there will be things larger customers
ask for that you simply don't have yet. There
are four critical questions you can ask to get
ahead of their needs from the get-go:
What are their must-haves from a current
functionality perspective? And why? Often-
times, this will be things like administrative
capabilities, reporting functionality, security
protocols and integrations or APIs.
What are their must-haves from a future
functionality perspective? And why?
What are the nice-to-haves they hope will
come in the not too distant future? And why?
Lastly, what are your current differentiators
that get them really excited about taking a
bet on you and bringing your tool into their
stack? And why?
If you don't have it, you're not good at it and
the plan isn't for you ever to work on it, be
honest with your stakeholders. The right
early upmarket customer will ultimately be
sold on the vision you paint for them, not
on a checklist. People evaluating software
vendors, especially people evaluating lots
of them, appreciate transparency. It means
you'll hear "no" more often than not, but
getting to "no" faster is preferable. And when
the time is right down the road, those same
people will also remember you for it.
The right early
upmarket
customer will
ultimately be sold
on the vision you
paint for them,
not on a checklist.
16
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Sales channel
partners
accelerate growth,
not create it
Steli Efti,
CEO, Close.io
First, let's get the basics out of the
way: If you're trying to get your first 10 or
100 customers, resellers and sales channel
partnerships aren't the right channels for you.
If you've only just built a minimum viable
product that you're trying to sell so you can
learn from real customers, these aren't the right
channels for you.
If you don't have a steady and stable stream of
customers and monthly income coming in, these
aren't the right channels for you.
Here's why:
1. Resellers and sales channel partners are
strategies to accelerate and speed up existing
growth, not to create it from scratch.
Excerpt from "When (and how) to scale your business with resellers and channel sales partners."
2. They are only good at selling something that
already works. Their incentive is to keep
their clients happy and make money. And if
your product doesn't help them do that if
you can't prove that your product brings
tremendous value to its users then they're
not going to put in the effort.
However, if you're six months to a year in;
have a product that already has traction and
growth; have experimented with and found
success with content marketing, paid ads, and
inbound and outbound sales; and are bringing
in hundreds of thousands or millions in reve-
nue, then it's a different story.
You want to only engage with them when the
time is right and you're ready for that type of
scale. Never before.
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
You can't afford
to treat SaaS
customers like
they're disposable
Stan Massueras,
Director of EMEA Sales, Intercom
Unless your business is transactional,
nurturing your existing customers should be
just as important as acquiring new logos. The
way I see it, closing a deal is just the first step. It's
what comes after onboarding, upselling and
cross-selling, renewal that determines your
customers' ability to grow with your product
and, consequently, the fate of your own growth.
The cost of selling SaaS can be pretty high. The
median SaaS startup takes 11 months to make
back the money spent acquiring a customer.
In other words, you need your customers to
be satisfied and willing to pay you for nearly a
year. Otherwise, you're losing money on every
customer you acquire, which will cause your
company to flame out.
That's why I think it's so important to have
account or relationship managers on your sales
team dedicated to building relationships with
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
customers. It's a difficult job, but an important
one. By being a trusted partner to your customers,
a good relationship manager supports your
business in three ways:
1. Expansion: Growing accounts that are spend-
ing a low amount but have high potential.
2. Retention: Maintaining accounts that are
spending a lot and are at the top for growth.
3. Contraction, i.e. monthly spend stability:
Fighting to keep customer spend at the same
level.
If you want to achieve sustainable growth, you
have to keep your customers around for as long
as possible. The plain truth of the matter is that
companies built on recurring revenue can't afford
to treat customers like they're disposable.

The plain truth of
the matter is that
companies built on
recurring revenue
can't afford to treat
customers like
they're disposable.
intercom.com/sales
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