Fractional Sales & Strategy
There are pros and cons to both full-time and fractional B2B sales help. If you as a founder have the time, money, and experience it definitely is better to hire full-time. You would get more economies of scale with your own employee. If you don’t you should examine fractional sales.
The part-time sales rep is tasked with executing the sales plan. This would include researching targets and undertaking cold outreach consisting of emails and calls, attending meetings, assisting with proposals and working leads to a close. A part-time VP of sales would typically help develop a sales plan, formalize the sales cadence and messaging, undertake sales management and manage the funnel.
Typically the enterprise B2B sales process takes 6 to 18 months from start to close. This process includes outbound calls, emails, booking meetings, site visits if needed, proposals and then follow ups to a close.
Services, Onboarding & Execution
We learn your business through our onboarding process called a Sales Fast Start Plan, gaining enough initial knowledge to run discovery calls while leveraging your team’s technical expertise.
We start with a questionnaire that you complete with details ranging from your ideal customer profile, product or solution, messaging, sales and marketing material, key objections, and pricing. After reviewing these answers and your sales material with you, we build a customized sales plan and messaging.
We aim to know enough to be dangerous and then leverage your (or a member of your team’s) technical knowledge on the calls. From here, as more calls with prospects take place, our technical understanding continues to increase. Initially, the goal is to simply book discovery calls for you, where deep initial technical knowledge is not required.
We go through an onboarding process called a Sales Fast Start Plan. This starts as a questionnaire that the client completes with questions ranging from your ideal customer profile, product or solution, messaging, sales and marketing material, key objections, pricing amongst other things. From here and after reviewing these answers with you and any additional sales material you have sent, we build a sales plan. This plan and the messaging created allows us to be in a position to understand your company and product, at a level to answer basic questions and ask the client probing questions. This process from start to finish takes approx 16 to 24 hours of time.
We completely whitelabel ourselves and when calling, we call using your organization’s name. We also strongly recommend having an email address with your email domain. Our goal is to be a seamless extension of your team.
A BDR, in most cases, would be doing research, outbound cold outreach via emails and calls, follow ups, meetings, proposals and quarterbacking a lead to close. To manage this activity, a sales CRM like Hubspot would be used. In some instances, depending on the client’s needs, we will hand over the lead at the discovery call, leaving the rest of the sales process for the client to complete.
Absolutely we can attend events on your behalf. We are proactive from an event perspective and will manage the booth and walk the floor all in a proactive manner. Our goal is to speak to and engage potential prospects and collect leads.
Pricing, Hours & Tracking
No, we do not work on 100% commission. There are a few reasons for this including:
- We are not in the business of financing other businesses during this period and taking on all the risk. Our fixed fee is much less than hiring an experienced, full-time sales person.
- We do not control the product or service delivery, execution of the team on implementation, the pricing, follow up service and so forth. The lack of control makes the risk threshold too high.
To a certain degree. We set a minimum number of hours at 32 per month. We find any less than this makes it difficult to get traction. If there are events as an example that you would like us to attend, then this can be an additional number of hours for that particular month and then revert back to normal. Or, if you are doing say 48 hours a month and need to decrease to 32, you could with a month’s notice.
We use a time tracking system and track the hours (down to the quarter hour) and will include a summarized list of tasks completed during that time. At the end of the month you will receive this time summary as part of the invoice. We also track all our activities and your growing sales funnel in a sales CRM like Hubspot. This will also include a dashboard summarizing work completed.
Target Markets & Client Fit
VA Partners has a few ideal B2B customer types. These can range from startups that are under 1 million in sales to larger companies that simply need help in growing. We are able to assist firms with sales efforts ranging from simply booking meetings for a senior executive to managing the entire sales process from research to close and then post sales support. From a sector perspective, organizations that have a product or software are typically our best fit.
Over the last 20 years we have supported international companies looking to expand to Canada from Northern Ireland, Germany, France, Estonia, Finland, and the Republic of Ireland in direct engagements. We are currently working with a US based firm and assisting them in sales in Europe, Asia and Canada. We also are working with an Irish based organization and assisting them with sales in Canada and the US.
Yes, we can. We are working with a number of Canadian companies now that sell into the US.
As an example, one of our Canadian clients now is the exclusive distributor in North America for a construction product and we are assisting them in targeting multi-location restaurant, grocery and retail chains.
About VA Partners
We have been in business for 20 years and have worked with over 200 organizations.
VA Partners was founded by Mark and Steve back in 2006 with the goal of helping early stage Canadian technology companies grow. Mark and Steve believed that small companies need a fractional, scalable sales resource that brings the methodology, process and executional capabilities to drive sales faster. Since that time, VA Partners broadened its capabilities and now works with both smaller, start up size firms as well as larger, growing companies that need help with sales.
We are all located in Ontario, Canada with team members in Toronto, Sault Ste. Marie, Kitchener, and Niagara.