Selling to small and medium businesses (SMBs) is about proving that your solution will solve a challenge they are having. Providing you’re talking to a company with a challenge you can solve, they need this solution and have a budget, then you are talking to a potential client.
Qualification is one of the most important part of the sales process. Sales professionals who fail to qualify a lead can spend weeks or months chasing something that isn’t going to happen.
Show don’t tell is a powerful option to have when talking to sales prospect. Sure, you can tell them all about your product, its wonderful features and benefits: or you can show them.
Selling a complex product can make it a challenge for a sales team to hit targets. Top line numbers can stretch into the distance and sales cycles can get longer as salespeople struggle to sell the value of the product to potential clients.
“Referral leads convert 30% better than leads generated from other marketing channels”, with B2B referrals closing at rates above 70%, according to the latest research.
Entering a new market can be a longer and more challenging journey than many founders imagine. In our always-on, hyper-connected world, we imagine that engaging with people in other countries gives us an insight into new markets.
Keeping sales prospects engaged is not easy. Cold calling is increasingly inefficient and ineffective. It can take as many as 18 calls to get a potential buyer on the phone.
As soon as a startup closes a funding round the clock starts ticking. As a founding team, you have targets to hit. It is almost impossible to do that without dedicated full-time salespeople.
Cold calling is not an easy game. Getting who you want on the phone is a time-consuming task. Despite increasing reluctance and a mistaken belief that “cold calling is dead”, speaking to a potential sales lead is still more effective than sending an email or making contact using social media.
Customers love getting something for free. Since the early days of software startups, SaaS companies in particular encourage new clients to sign-up with Freemium pricing models.
Generating sales leads from cold calls isn’t easy. And in many ways, inside sales is getting tougher.
Sending a text. It’s quick, convenient and unobtrusive. You don’t need to worry about interrupting someone’s work or meeting when you send a text.
Summer, especially during August when buyers and decision makers go on holiday can be a slow month for sales teams. Decisions get delayed. Momentum is lost. Deals can even evaporate in the heat.
Customers are constantly on the hunt for bargains. Whether it’s scouring the web for coupon codes or cashing in on last minute deals to save some money, retail shoppers love to save.
This brief guide shows how to integrate events from Instant Demos into Google Analytics. A similar approach can be used for other analytics systems.
For sales leaders, there is nothing worse than knowing your team is off-target. In high-growth companies, failing to hit a monthly or quarterly goal can have a huge impact. You could even risk missing an annual target that could make the difference between breaking even or going under.
Sales is evolving. Not only are we operating in a low-growth economy in most developed regions of the world, but how buyers behave is changing. Sales managers and account managers need to evolve and adapt to survive and thrive.
Sales is a numbers game, as any seasoned professional knows. Hitting your number, and making sure your team hits target, is the name of the game. In software companies, maintaining that consistent growth momentum is an even bigger challenge.
Several years ago then I worked as a Sales Manager at Omada I learned the value of using online meetings to qualify my opportunities and I experienced how it helped me to increase my sales productivity with 5x.
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the words “business networking”? If it’s of awkward small talk, nervous laughter and sweaty palms then you’re certainly not alone.
If you’re a small business trying to make a name for yourself online, inbound marketing is seen as the go-to tactic.
We recently hosted a well-received webinar covering lessons we’ve learned from using product demos in our own sales pipeline, as well as lessons learned from seeing how CrankWheel customers use Instant Demos in different sales models.
When it comes to B2B sales, everything is focused on the ideal customer. Company ethos, mission statements, marketing campaigns and sales materials are all crafted to appeal to the target audience. And rightly so.
Most side projects and companies start with a couple of founders: hard working, committed, believing in a grand vision… Then comes the time to hire your first employees, which can be a daunting process. Who should you hire first? When is the right time? How exactly can you convince great people to join a company they’ve never heard of?
GDPR. Four letters that have struck fear into marketing teams across Europe. What’s been an elephant in the room for so long finally comes into force on May 25, 2018. But what exactly is the General Data Protection Regulation and how is it going to affect you?
79 percent of all marketing leads never convert into sales. For all of the good work marketing does in producing content and engaging website and social visitors, only 21 percent of leads are any good.
When Amazon launched in 1995, it flipped the B2C market on its head. Consumers had a new way to shop, and other companies were forced to react. Over two decades on, many brick-and-mortar stores that failed to adapt to digital technologies are no longer around, while others struggle to compete.
According to Transparency Market Research (TMP), the SaaS market will reach $164.29 billion by 2022. The IDC says that SaaS delivery is growing five times faster than the traditional software market, with cloud software accounting for $1 of every $4.59 spent on software.
Watch a recording of our webinar to get an inside look at our deep integration with Talkdesk.
Customers don’t appear out of thin air. In fact, the process of turning a stranger into your customer includes a great number of actions, where lead generation is a core element. There are some proven lead gen methods like newsletters, PPC advertising, or webinars. That said, you shouldn’t be limited to these tactics.
When Google unveiled its Chromebook in 2011, it was met with skepticism. Would an operating system that is primarily web-based be any good? Relying on internet access to run the majority of applications hardly seemed practical, especially when dependable WiFi was hard to find.
A long time ago in a land far away, I was a Sales Rep for a company that was transitioning from offering traditional break/fix computer services to offering 24×7 monitoring and support (aka managed services) for a flat monthly fee.
How well do you know your customer? Well enough to know what they’re willing to spend money on, what they like and dislike about your products?
In the early stages of growth, pricing is one of the defining features of any software startup. Going to market with a product that isn’t priced to offer value is a fast track to failure.
We partnered with Talkdesk, a leading intelligent contact center cloud platform, to become a featured screen sharing solution in their AppConnect marketplace. From now on you can use both apps together as one seamless sales platform that offers telephony and screen sharing with integrated lead capture.
In an ever-increasingly technologized world, artificial intelligence is already in use in several ways. And whether you like it or not, A.I. will be a part of everyday life, sooner or later. Business will be revolutionized (this is already taking place as we speak) and it’s time for us to prepare.
Sales training is built on a billable hour business model. The sector alone, composed of freelance consultants and multinational firms, is a multi-billion dollar industry.
I saw this on LinkedIn the other day. Is it relevant for sales professionals in startups?
Sales professionals in any sector don’t have it easy. But when you’re up against established legacy competitors or trying to gain traction in a new market or vertical, you’ve usually got a tough journey ahead.
Sales managers in software startups face multiple challenges every day. Maintain growth. Hit target. Manage people. Source leads. Close deals. Look after key accounts and partners. It never ends.
Sales teams need to keep pipelines busy and active. A quiet pipeline, one without enough prospects, or enough likely prospects, should be seen as a red flag to managers and co-founders. Boards and investors often need to be kept informed about the state of the pipeline.
Scaling means committing to growth. Growing means staffing up in sales and marketing departments. You do need a sales team. The clock has started ticking. From the moment investor funds hit your account, you are in a race against time.
Software is created to solve problems. Salespeople work to make sure that as many potential clients see how your software solves their problem. Saves time. Saves money. Makes a process more efficient.
When it comes to scaling a Venture-backed startup, figuring out staffing numbers isn’t an exact science. Founders are keen to increase marketing and sales team numbers since these directly contribute to revenue. Or at least, that is the idea.
Potential clients want to see how your software can do what you claim. Demos are an effective and popular way to give prospects a tour, wherever they are in the world.
When you work with and around enough software startups, you often hear similar phrases, from staff and founders confident that a free trial is a final stage in the sales funnel.
For a long time there’s been an intense debate between onsite and online sales presentations. Is it better for your team to be in the field, meeting customers face-to-face? Or putting them on the phones, calling and presenting demos online?
No, not the type you’re thinking of! We were hosting UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School students for International MBA Consultancy Week (from the 5th to 8th of June).
Digital marketing, thankfully, is playing a role in ensuring you can reach a much wider audience of potential buyers. Websites and digital sales funnels make it easier to reach a wider group of buyers. With social media, content, email marketing, landing pages, and digital advertising, your product can reach hundreds or thousands of potential buyers every day. Reaching them is only the first step.
David Skok, a serial entrepreneur turned VC, with Matrix Partners, coined the phrase, “touchless conversion sales model” around seven years ago, with an article that neatly summed up the low-touch sales model. Something software founders and entrepreneurs should aim towards, since the lower their customer acquisition costs, the more they will make over the lifetime of each customer.
Software companies don’t always adopt the same pricing models, even when they are selling a similar service to competitors in the same market or sector. There is a psychology behind why different pricing models are adopted, which is what we will explore in this article.
Software is big business. Gartner estimates that IT spending will exceed $3.5 trillion in 2017, with $357 billion of that spent on software services, a 7.2% increase in 2016 global software revenues, which were around $333 billion.
Calling a potential lead within 5 minutes of an inquiry (or them handing over an email or phone number through a landing page) increases the chance of successful contact 100 times. This lead is 22 times more likely to enter the sales pipeline, according to the Lead Response Management Study.
CrankWheel just surpassed 10.000 weekly installed users on the Chrome Web Store, and with great scale comes great responsibility. The last few weeks were a lesson in humility in regards to customer success management at scale.
Responding to a customer request within 1 minute increases conversion effectiveness 22x. It’s so intuitive yet at the same time we, the software industry, make customers jump through hoops to get our attention. Here’s one way to make that problem go away.
Come and witness live how fresh and exciting sales can get when you put your heart into developing innovation that works every time!
You all know that at CrankWheel, we are absolutely insane when it comes to collecting sales data and sharing the our experience.
CrankWheel is growing based on user feedback. We seize every opportunity to talk with our buyers. We meet them everywhere! From attendees of events like Slush to other participants of startup competitions like Vodafone Stökkpallur, Deloitte Fast Rising 50 (both of which we won, by the way!). We talk in order to do proper research about screen sharing usability.
In every sales follow-up call hides the dreaded „how does it work?” question. How does one cope in these „I want it now!” times?
Hey there! We are CrankWheel, an international startup from Iceland. We are going to Slush 2016 and we want to meet you there!
This interview was originally published in Icelandic at Vodafone.is under the name “CrankWheel - From Google and a Sales Career to an International Startup in Iceland”.
Deloitte’s jury has finished debating and announced, among others, that CrankWheel was chosen to present on the Fast 50 - Rising Star event on 16th November, on the 20th floor of the Deloitte Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland.
A picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand words when spoken at an average speed require 7 minutes and 42 seconds. You can save your customers that much time by simply adding screen sharing to your telesales campaigns!
Surely your company has great sales professionals with all of the tools it needs to get people interested in the product itself. After all, sales professionals have a wide variety of tools, but according to a recent study (and just plain intuition!) delivering sales presentations is the primary deal closer for most.
It is our great pleasure to announce today the launch of an innovative project one of our customers started several months ago, where CrankWheel plays a key role.
If you’ve ever been involved in sales, you’re sure to have noticed one thing that is critical: sharing. Whether you’re the buyer or the seller, sharing forms the bedrock of your conversation. Prospects share their business challenges and their ideas of how they want to address those challenges. They share how they create value for their customers and how they’re constantly seeking to improve. Flip it around, and the sales team shares their value proposition, and they share proof of how their solution can help solve the prospect’s challenges.
One of Google’s early mottos, part of their “10 things” mantra, was that “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” Our founder drank a lot of Kool-Aid in his ten years at Google, plus it’s just one of the most sensible mantras we’ve heard. That’s why we designed CrankWheel to be a simple tool that does one thing really, really well, namely screen sharing.
Imagine this phone call between Bob, a very well off older gentleman, and Maude, a salesperson at a high-end travel agency:
The last few weeks have been quite hectic here at CrankWheel HQ. Two things kept us busy: Making our product generally available on our website on Friday, November 6th, and preparing for the Slush conference in Helsinki, which happened last week, November 11th and 12th. Our plan was to launch just before Slush, and then publicize our launch at the conference, as well as meet with prospective customers in Finland during our trip.
You may have read about CrankWheel before, on our founder’s blog or the Startup Iceland blog. Today, CrankWheel is coming further out of hiding, launching a new website and this new blog.
