This past week I had the good fortune to attend the PwC Vision to Reality Conference.
This conference is geared towards leaders of growing Canadian startups and technology companies, and regularly has a great slate of speakers. Eugene Bomba and the rest of the PwC team do a great job of organizing this event. This year, PwC unveiled the results of a survey of Canadian startups that touched upon their greatest challenges. No surprise, the most common challenge for Canadian startups is generating revenue.
With the biggest challenge for Canadian startups being revenue generation, what can growing businesses do to overcome this fundamental issue? The key is to create a great plan, execute on that plan, use the experiences to tweak the plan, and repeat. This post will focus on some of the key elements of an effective sales strategy for Canadian startups.
1. Create a Great Value Proposition
Understand the benefits you can provide and create a concise statement that describes those benefits, your company, and your products or services. Quantifiable benefits are best.
2. Target the Right Customers and Contacts
Picking a specific vertical and a finding the right contact within that organization to target will help close business faster and eventually help Canadian startups reach other organizations within that vertical.
3. Understand the Steps in Your Sales Process
Create a list of the key steps that are used to close a sale and make sure everyone in your organization can recite them sideways. If your startup operates in the B2B space, be prepared for longer buyer cycles that require increased time and effort.
4. Use a CRM
A CRM is a great way to keep information on accounts, contacts, and all past activities. The key for me here is using it to plan for future activities as you move a sales opportunity through the funnel.
5. Execute On The Plan
After you create the plan, you will need to go to networking events, make the calls, leverage those Linkedin connections, and follow-up promptly on the few inbound leads you would get at the start of the sales effort.
It’s hard to know where you are going without a plan. Canadian startups need to create a detailed plan and execute on it to get some traction with customers. If you need help creating and executing a startup sales plan, our VP of Sales offering may be just what you need. Contact me and we can discuss how VA Partners can help your startup grow revenue.
