Enterprise Weekly #403: Mastering Outbound Sales & Turbocharging Your Sales Team
Given this week's dominating news revolved around more layoffs, Twitter, and FTX, we’re switching gears and bringing you two 🔥 pieces of tactical enterprise content!
How to Master Outbound Sales without a BDR (Yet)
One of the biggest mistakes we see Seed-stage enterprise founders make is hiring BDRs too early in hopes the addition of a dedicated outbound sales team will help produce and close more leads. What founders don’t realize is that hiring, training, and managing a BDR team is a heavy and time-consuming lift.
We recommend staying as lean as possible with founder-led sales until you have a repeatable sales playbook ready for scale. This Enterprise Playbook outlines how founders can conquer their early sales process including best practices, templates, and tool for crafting:
An initial ICP
Best engagement and outreach strategies
Effective outbound messaging
And more
Sales Playbook That Turbocharged Outreach from $0 to $200M ARR
For those that missed our sold out NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (and last meetup of the year), Mark Kosoglow, CRO at Catalyst and former SVP of Global Sales at Outreach, shared the inside scoop on how he grew Outreach's revenue organization at every stage. A sneak peek at some of his tactics:
Craft Narrative Demos: Most sales reps do the “click, show, tell” method in which they just information dump on a prospect during the demo call. However, prospects don’t care about information. They care about solving their biggest problems. The best way to get that solution across is to tell a story. Mark would walk through a typical prospect’s day with and without their product. The purpose of this exercise wasn’t to necessarily close a deal, but to create belief that you can solve their issue.
Master 5 Decks: Given sales is a transactional business, Mark believes if you methodically present each of these 5 Master Decks (discovery, demo, negotiation, information, and onboarding), in order and only with that deck’s specific goal in mind, you will win at a much higher rate.
Ask Better Interview Questions: Identify your company’s top values and interview benchmarked against those. For example, Outreach values work ethic, ability to transfer passion, and coachability. Instead of simply asking “are you coachable?” (anyone can BS this), Mark believes in taking real world, physical cues. He likes to give a candidate a role-playing experience, give them live coaching/feedback, then ask to do the role play again. Excellent candidates should be leaning in, taking notes, and then display the feedback in the second role play.
Lastly, Enterprise Weekly is off next week. We’re so thankful for our enterprise community and hope everyone is able to take some time to unplug 🦃
📚 Read more news:
Crunchbase: Tech Industry Layoffs Are Accelerating. What Does That Mean?
Fortune: 2022 40 Under 40
Morning Brew: What Today’s Tech Decision-Makers Are Stressing & Addressing
TechCrunch: Palo Alto Networks Is Buying Cider Security For $300M
TechCrunch: Bending Spoons Acquires Evernote
WSJ: Activist Investor TCI Calls on Google Parent Alphabet to Slash Costs
📚 More to follow:
- on questions for a potential co-founder
- on the seed fundraising market
@SarahHinkfuss on questions to ask a startup before being hired
- on 3 stages of a PM career
Company: FireHydrant
Role: Director of Product Marketing
Technology: Site Reliability & Incident Management Platform
Funding: $32.5M from Work-Bench, Menlo Ventures, Harmony Partners, Salesforce Ventures
🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
OneSchema raises $6.3M led by General Catalyst
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Co-founders: Christina Gilbert (CEO), Andrew Luo (CTO)
OpsHelm raises $1.3M led by Fika Ventures and Garuda Ventures
Risk / Security • Seed • Seattle, WA
CloudTruth raises $2.4M led by UBMB
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Boston, MA
Sematic raises $3M led by Race Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Zest raises $4.2M led by GV
Future of Work • Seed • New York, NY
Supernova raises $4.8M led by Wing Venture Capital
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • Prague, Czech Republic
Zenlytic raises $5.4M led by Bain Capital Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • New York, NY
Sensible raises $6.5M led by Craft Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Keyo raises $7M led by Marc Randolph and Others
Risk / Security • Venture • San Francisco, CA
Omneky raises $7.5M led by Orbit Ventures, Ethos and Others
Sales / Marketing • Seed II • San Francisco, CA
Narwhal raises $8.6M led by Nexus Venture Partners and a16z
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Gilbert, AZ
Freshpaint raises $9.5M led by Intel Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Adway raises $10.4M led by Octopus Ventures
HR Tech • Series A • Gothenburg, Sweden
Primer raises $12M led by Craft Ventures
Sales / Marketing • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Quix raises $12.9M led by MMC Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • London, UK
ArmorCode raises $14M led by Ballistic Ventures
Risk / Security • Series A • Palo Alto, CA
BoomPop raises $14M led by ACME Capital and Atomic
Future of Work • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Loops.ai raises $14M led by Scale Venture Partners
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Tel Aviv, Israel
Terzo raises $16M led by Align Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • Los Angeles, LA
EngFlow raises $18M led by Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital and a16z
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Austin, TX
MadKudu raises $18M led by Felicis
Sales / Marketing • Series A • Mountain View, CA
Buildkite raises $21M led by OneVentures and AirTree
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series B • Remote
Rewst raises $21.5M led by OpenView Venture Partners
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Tampa, FL
Owl Labs raises $25M led by HP Tech Ventures
Future of Work • Series C • Boston, MA
Brightside raises $33M led by Obvious Ventures
HR Tech • Series B • San Francisco, CA
MotherDuck raises $35M led by a16z
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Seattle, WA
Spot AI raises $40M led by Scale Venture Partners
Future of Work • Series B • Burlingame, CA
Descript raises $50M led by OpenAI Startup Fund
Collaboration / Productivity • Series C • San Francisco, CA
Akeyless raises $65M led by NGP Capital
Risk / Security • Series B • New York, NY
Contentstack raises $80M led by Georgian and Insight Partners
Collaboration / Productivity • Series C • Austin, TX
Weka raises $135M led by Norwest Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series D • Campbell, CA
Astera Labs raises $150M led by Fidelity Management and Research
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series D • Santa Clara, CA