IN THIS ISSUE
This week's Driven brings another solid lineup of practical advice and helpful resources:
- What to do when you need the help of senior executives but aren't ready to hire them
- How to reach your target audiences where they hang out online
- How to make better hiring decisions in sales
- Why some savvy B2B SaaS companies are bypassing the C-suite
- Don't expect a fast return to face-to-face selling when we have a vaccine for Covid-19
GO-TO-MARKET | STRATEGY | STARTUPS
Think in fractions: What to do when you need executive-level talent but aren't ready to hire full-time
A friend faces a hiring dilemma. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of a startup that plans to seek funding later this year. But his company isn't ready to hire a chief financial officer (CFO).
The cofounders are highly experienced in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). But they're less confident in finance, sales, and marketing.
They need advice on how to shift from product-development to customer-acquisition mode. They want to start a marketing function from scratch. And they want to know when and how to start building a sales team.
Fortunately, they can get the level of talent and experience they need for each role, without spending big bucks. They can do so by hiring part-time executives for as little as an hour a month or full time for several months.
Several other friends of Driven are highly experienced senior executives who are open to providing part-time of "fractional" services.
Among them are a fractional executives in these roles:
- Chief financial officer (CFO)
- Chief marketing officer (CMO) or senior marketing leader
- Chief revenue office (CRO)
- Leader of sales execution.
I've known them all for many years and would highly recommend any of them.
If you're interested in connecting with such people, please tell me.
Or if you need a first-rate fractional CFO, download a backgrounder on Steven Westberg.
Backgrounder on Steven Westberg, fractional CFO. [One-page PDF.]
Dave Vranicar at Driven
MARKETING | COMMUNICATIONS | DIGITAL
How to reach your target audiences when you don't know where they hang out online
"SparkToro crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to find what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online."
Some enterprise SaaS companies face a big challenge in selling niche products.
How can you find your target audiences online, if your market is small and your buyers work in highly specialized roles?
You could interview them to learn more about them. (You should do this regardless.)
But interviews take time. If you hire someone to do them for you, the process takes weeks and is likely to cost thousands of dollars.
Now you have another resource that may help you for a small fraction of the time and cost.
SparkToro works great if you're selling to consumers and your target audience is big enough. It also works for B2B companies with big markets. But some B2B target audiences are just too small to provide useful insights.
For example, I experimented for a SaaS company whose target audience consists of merchants and category managers in big grocery retailers.
Rather than searching on job titles (as you would with LinkedIn Sales Navigator), I entered words merchants are likely to use in their online communications or their job profiles.
When I entered "merchant category promotions planning." SparkToro said it had insufficient data.
Then I searched on "category management grocery promotions profit forecasting."
SparkToro found only about two dozen people who fit the profile, but it provided useful insights in seconds and at zero cost.
SparkToro also found more than 200 profiles of people who use the words "category manager" in their online profile.
Further, it estimated how many of these people engage with a social media account called The Grocer in the UK and the trade magazine Supermarket News in the US. It also noted how many listen to a podcast called The Art of Procurement.
These insights can be helpful for planning non-obvious marketing communications. The next step would be research those channels for opportunities to promote related content.
I know of another software company that's looking for efficient ways to reach IT professionals who want to improve the performance of java code in big companies. My search on "enterprise java performance" returned insights on about 1,900 profiles.
That gives a marketer plenty to work with.
If these capabilities sound useful, give SparkToro a free trial.
sparktoro.com
SALES & SELLING | STAFFING & HIRING
How to overcome unconscious bias for better hiring decisions in sales
"Sales leaders develop bias for certain candidates, and this bias is what leads to so many sales hiring mistakes. Sales managers get it wrong at least half of the time."
Sales leaders should be aware of 4 kinds of potential bias when they hire sales reps:
- Their own biases in favor of certain candidates
- Their own biases against certain candidates
- Your sellers biases toward some prospects and customers
- The biases of prospects and customers toward some sellers.
All biases tend to cloud judgment, and clouded judgment leads to mistakes in hiring.
Moreover, biases are unfair to some candidates for sales roles – especially women and members of minorities.
Bias can also harm your company, because mistakes in hiring sales people cost a lot of money.
The best way to overcome all 4 sources of bias is to use an objective assessment you can tailor to different selling roles and situations.
"There is More Than One Type of Bias in Hiring Salespeople." Dave Kurlan. December 4, 2020. Objective Management Group (OMG) blog.
omghub.com
SAAS | INDUSTRY TRENDS
B2B SaaS companies flourish by offering products that appeal to end users over C-suite buyers
In past decades, software companies sold to what they called economic buyers. Such buyers were usually C-level executives who made the decision and signed the check for software other people would use.
But successful software startups today appeal directly to end users of their products. They can do so because end users increasingly have the power to buy and use the products they prefer.
As a result, software companies build multibillion-dollar businesses in general categories that have no obvious executive-level buyer. Such categories include software for collaboration, communication, and productivity,
These newer companies often have a direct sales force, but they spend from 20% to 50% less on sales and marketing than their older counterparts.
And the newer SaaS companies are less likely to license their software by the seat. They're exploring other forms of revenue tied to usage, scale, and consumption.
They may generate additional revenue from sources other than software, such as payments and data.
"The Next 20-Year Cycle in Business Software." Ajay. November 19, 2020. Ideas from Bain Capital Ventures on Medium.
medium.com
COVID-19
Even with effective vaccines at hand, experts see a slow return to safe face-to-face interactions
"It will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”
How soon can you expect a return of face-to-face selling?
Your answer to that question will have a big effect on the way you plan your go-to-market strategy and budgets for 2021.
If you think everything will be much better shortly after an effective vaccine becomes available, you may be overly optimistic.
At least that's what I think after reading about a survey of more than 700 experts in infectious disease, recently run by The New York Times.
Epidemiologists are an exceptionally cautious group.
But despite early errors, they've been right about many things – including their prediction of the current surge in cases.
Don't be too quick to discount their current warning that even vaccinated people may transmit the disease. Or that some people who have had the disease can be re-infected.
The experts may be overly pessimistic. But they are not naively optimistic. And despite what some politicians have said, most of these scientists are not politically motivated.
So as you plan for 2021, it pays to consider the possibility that the scientists are right.
Even when we reach herd immunity in the US – maybe as early as summer 2021 – experts warn against throwing caution to the wind.
How soon will companies return to work in the office? And when will they welcome sellers into corporate workplaces? It may be months after we've reached herd immunity.
"How 700 Epidemiologists Are Living Now, and What They Think Is Next." Margot Sanger-Katz. Claire Cain Miller. Quoctrung Bui. December 4, 2020. The New York Times.
nytimes.com
ABOUT DRIVEN
Driven is a fortnightly digest for busy revenue leaders in business-to-business SaaS. It's most useful if your company sells higher-ticket products that require moderate to heavy involvement of professional sales people.
Driven is here to help you achieve your goals, overcome your challenges, solve problems, and become a better version of yourself.
You'll find an online archive of back issues 12 through 43 at this link.
A word about links, commissions, and endorsements
When I provide links to articles from vendors, does it imply an endorsement?
Only of their content. Not of their products or services.
If I recommend a service or a book, it’s because I think it’s likely to help you. Period.
I get nothing from providing links to any commercial service, including the books for which I provide a link to Amazon.
That may change. I’ll tell you when it does.
Dave Vranicar at Driven