How To Build A Sales Engine - Armando Mann, Sales Hacker Conference

Close is at today’s Sales Hacker Conference in San Francisco and we’ll be taking notes and sharing the best talks of the conference with you. List of all talks.

ARMANDO MANN, SVP of Sales and Customer Success, RelateIQ

When you try to optimize a sales engine what are you supposed to do first? Or focus on?

Email marketing? Customer success? How do you prioritize different parts of your funnel?

The answer is EVERYTHING. You can’t just focus on one aspect. Your users are taking the entire experience with your product in consideration.

What is the Role of product: Make users happy

What is the job of sales and marketing: Make a lot of users use the platform.

How?

• To maximize happy users, you have to consider the whole user experience, outside of your product.

Components of a Sales process:

• not: ABC (always be closing)

• Leadgen

• Word of mouth / Customer referral 

• ask for referrals inside and outside the company

PR/Analyst Relations

Referral from existing users

Viral Loops (sharing, collaboration)

SEO (content, blog, whitepapers etc.)

Social media

In product promo

Email marketing

Partnerships

• Affiliates

• Co-marketing

• SMB resellers

• dont sell.

• dont try to have them build the sales process. Share yours with them

Larger resellers

Acquire (Land)

• optimize webuite for self -serve

• Webinars for lead capture

• Lead nurturing

• Emails, Chat and Phone teams

• Trials conversion team

• Large accounts teams

Grow (Expand) - growing accounts

• Onboarding of new users

• Health Monitoring

• Upsell more licenses or products

• Renewals

• Key Metrics

• Daily usage

• weekly usage

• Customer SAT or NPS

• Monthly Actives

• YoY user growth

Final thoughts

• One Team: Marketing, sales success and support are all part of the same engine

• A math problem: Engineering driven acquisition teams are fueled by metrics.

• People first: Passionate teams eat BHAGs for breakfast (Big Hairy Audacious Goals)

• Tools Matter: The right tools can give you super powers

• Revenue is a consequence of doing all those things. Focus on the things that cause a lot of happy users.

Next steps:

1. Check out notes from other talks from Sales Hacker Conference

2. Try out Close to track your sales communication automatically