Is Your Company on the Ramp to Repeatability?

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Is Your Company on the Ramp to Repeatability?

You’ve got a couple of customers. Some of them are even paying you for your product but every day and every week, you’re running like mad just to keep up. Every time you fill one hole, it’s from digging another.

Weeks go by and you add a few more prospects to your pipeline, but then five or six or ten others went completely dark.  You did a few demos, you sent a few proposals, but seems like you can’t get any real momentum going month after month.

Or worse, you decide to slow down on the selling thing altogether because you want to fix those bugs or add that feature or work on the platform.

You think – “Maybe if you could just hire someone to do the selling for you, it would be so much better…”

See that’s what Morgan thought too. Morgan is the founder of MilkCrate and thought it was all about the product and a very long six months ahead to rebuild her platform. Could the product be better? Of course it could.

Sales Purgatory

It’s called “Sales Purgatory.” But it doesn’t have to be that way, IF…. if you make what I call “The Big Push,” The Big Push up your 10x Ramp to Repeatability.”

But Morgan made a decision to sell the product she had, and in less than six weeks working together, MilkCrate closed a deal with the University of Philadelphia that got her a round of funding. Even better? Two months later, they got a deal with Comcast. Comcast!

Here’s the thing… I don’t know you, your company or your product, but really I do…

It’s not about adding another feature. It’s not about rewriting the code. It’s not about another investor meeting in which the investor tells you – “Love what you’re doing, you just gotta ramp up sales….”

CBIsights published a report that analyzed the top 20 reasons why enterprise startups fail. The first five reasons were:

  1. Lack of demand for the product
  2. Ran out of cash
  3. Not the right team
  4. Competition
  5. Pricing

So in other words… Four of the top five reasons – lack of demand, lack of cash, competition and pricing – are sales problems. Heck even the wrong team often comes from hiring the wrong salespeople or hiring too soon.

It’s not until #6 that “product” was a reason for failure…

Making “The Big Push”

Right now, here, today, it’s about sales.If you’re in Sales Purgatory, the only way out is to sell your way out. It’s about starting The Big Push – Your 10x Ramp to Repeatability.

Maybe you need to get from Customer #1 to Customer #10. If you’re at a $100k, it’s about getting to your first $1 million in ARR. Are you at $1 million only to realize that it’s still not enough for the next investment round so you have your sights set on $10mln.

That’s why I do what I do. In fact, this is all that I do. I’m not a sales guy that happens to work with a few startups. I only work with enterprise startups that need to start their The Big Push – their Ramp to Repeatability to get out of Sales Purgatory and on the path to the Promised Land.

This is all that I do. I’ve spent 15 years in Silicon Valley, growing three enterprise startups to their first millions in revenue. Check me out on Quora. Find my books on Amazon. Look at my workshops on YouTube. I only work with startups just like you.

It’s the reason that the founders at Blend Labs asked me to join their team in 2013, a founding team that grew Palantir’s banking vertical from zero to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, paying them $10s and even $100s of millions. They had seed funding from Peter Theil and Mark Andreessen. Yet they still asked me join the Blend and lead sales because of the same expertise I share with my clients today. We didn’t even have a product when I started selling there, and still closed two customers in less than three months, including a $400k deal with Freddie Mac. What I do works.

The Law of Diminishing Intent: “We should…”

I met with a HeathTech CEO a few weeks ago about how he needed to grow MRR, how he needed to get away from relying on his one big customer, how his market is growing and he needs to take advantage but just can’t make it happen.

The funny thing is… we had the EXACT SAME CONVERSATION 14 months earlier, and he knew it. He even said as he was describing his sales problems – “This probably sounds a lot like what I told you last year….” Yup, exactly.

I hear it over and over… We should do this with sales. We should implement that idea. We should… we should… we should… The thing is, we should ourselves all the way to never-ending startup mode.

I know there are lots of places you get sales ideas and information – blogs, books, conferences, mentors, advisors, board members, investors, friends. Ideas are cheap. Information is easy.

It’s the IMPLEMENTATION that’s hard. Sure you’ll get all the information and ideas from me that you could ever possibly need. The hard part is putting these ideas to work for your startup – working together every day to TAKE ACTION on The Big Push.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Law of Diminishing Marginal Intent. It says the longer you wait to action, the less likely you’ll be to take that action. Don’t be that HealthTech CEO.

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Prospecting, Pipeline & Paying Customers

Making the Big Push, climbing your 10x Ramp to Repeatability comes down to three things:

  1. Prospecting
  2. Pipeline
  3. Paying Customers.

First, we’ll build a Prospecting Plan of Action for YOUR company. Most startups are do a little here and there in a lot of place, and none of it is really working. It’s definitely getting them on the Ramp to Repeatability. Whether it’s LinkedIn, conferences, email campaigns, white papers, webinars, introductions, or some combination of these, we’ll build YOUR Prospecting Plan of Action so that you and your team knows EXACTLY what to do every day – how to find the RIGHT companies, the RIGHT BUYERS, ready to take action – to build a strong Sales Pipeline.

So let’s talk about the Pipeline – your sales opportunities; your future customers. This is where many startups hit a choke point with lots of deals in the pipeline, but nothing closing. I’ve learned that there’s no shortage of “interesting conversations.” What we need are companies interested in BUYING.

Next, we’ll execute on a Pipeline Pull-Through Strategy that focuses on the key objections your future customer have – product reliability, pricing, implementation and more. We’ll show you how to run your product demos so that you can take control of every sale, create customer urgency, and shorten sales cycles. Then it’s about converting your Prospects to Paying Customers.

And that’s what we want, right? Revenue in the door and adding customers to your ledger. Logos on your website. Case studies. References. Product-market fit.

When we do these three things right – build your Prospecting Plan of Action, execute on our Pipeline Pull-Through Strategy and Convert your Prospects into Paying Customers – a Repeatable Sales Process emerges. It’s by doing. It’s by selling that we make The Big Push your 10x Ramp to Repeatability.

The best part? Customer money is the best way to finance your startup. When you have customers, revenue and repeatability, you’ve slowed your burn rate and now have what you need for the next round of capital, so that you can get out of startup mode, scale, and build the company you imagine.

Take Action. Now.

Commitment is just two things – decision and action. You’ve already decided to watch this video. Now take action. Let’s find out the biggest risks and gaps in your sales process get you out of Sales Purgatory.

Sales cycles aren’t getting any shorter, and the longer you take to start selling your way out of Sales Purgatory, the longer it’s going to take to build the company you imagine. Or worse, you’ll never get the opportunity.

Your target market DESERVES to buy your product. Don’t let them go another day with bad solutions or manual processes or inferior technology. The NEED to hear from you, and the way we do that is to commit to The Big Push because every day is a lost opportunity. If we do this right, the your biggest problem is figuring out how to manage you new sales and customer success teams because you’re on the path to scale.

That Fortune 500 company that you want to take down is selling right now. Your competitors are out there selling right now. They’re getting funded because they’ve made their Big Push.

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Let’s start YOUR Big Push on your Ramp to Repeatability right now…