High Velocity Sales

Selling is one of the least understood areas of business and it does not help that generally people don't like sales people.

One of the approaches to sales is to build a high velocity sales organisation. While most organisations would love not to have sales people the modern combination of social media, effective marketing and management of sales processes is creating a new set of metrics for sales process. And it is not about calling people executives, consultants or directors to impress clients — it is about doing the work of selling.

Companies are revolutionising the sales process by effectively combining inbound marketing through search engines and other social media with good sales tools and effective follow-up strategies.

The Numbers

Sales Cycle 45 days

New Deals per month per month 45

Deals per rep per month 6.5

ACV per deal 16K (average)

ACV quota per rep per year 1.2M (100k per month)

Target 8% conversion to sales

Rough efficiency model = 80K ad spend plus 80K salary spend yields 1M in ACV per month.

Rep Profile

The average age of the current sales reps is in the mid thirties. The company looks for people with SaaS, domain and inside selling experience and specifically for people who do not have field rep experience as historically they do not work culturally as they cannot transition to the pace and urgency needed for inside selling. The reps are trained for 2-3 weeks and nurtured by the VP Sales with a goal of getting them productive within 3 months. The training is around the product, the value proposition, the sales model (and metrics).

Their hiring model has reached a steady state where they are replacing about one rep a quarter. All of the metrics are public in the company so the culture drives the performance. You can't walk into their sales area without seeing the whiteboard with all the stats. If you want further details on how the reps are compensated in this model, drop me an email and I'd be happy to share my insights.

Sales Process

The sales process is an eight step methodology that is implemented through (no surprise here) Salesforce.

Step 1 (10%) — lead is qualified (interest, project has requirements, timing is <6 months) If a rep doesn't act on a lead in two hours it is sent to another rep.

Step 2 (25%) — product identified, value estimated, pricing discussed, discovery process, demo scheduled

Step 3 (50%) — demo completed (prerecorded, webinar or 1:1), tech requirement reviewed, decision maker identified

Step 4 (60%) — trial in progress, SE engaged, verified requirements

Step 5 (75%) — selected as vendor, pricing sent

Step 6 (90%) — awaiting signed paperwork, verbal commit

Step 7 (95%) — received paperwork, submitted to finance for review

Step 8 (100%) — received payment

The sales reps run the process and use the SE's for running demos. The company uses an prerecorded demo heavily and have tracking to see when a prospect views it. The SE's run webinars three times a week for contacts that the sales team has in process. Private SE demos are used for well qualified customers and larger accounts that identify themselves early.

Metrics

The process is heavily followed by metrics on a weekly basis. They have weekly commit and review meetings to follow the progress. Typically a rep needs to have somewhere in the area of 30 active deals to make their monthly numbers so this is watched closely. Successful reps are at a >25 calls per day volume. They have found that tracking bookings alone is not enough — you need to pull out the underlying activity rate to get a good pulse on the process.

Tracked (by rep by week):

Activities (moving people through process)

Total call volume

Ave Daily Calls

High Quality Leads

Demos driven (broken out prerecorded, webinar, 1:1)

New trials

Net new deals

Net new large accounts

Seats

MRR