Edition 6: Capital meets awesome community; Your guide to crushing B2B Sales; Community-led growth;
Edition 6: Capital meets awesome community; Your guide to crushing B2B Sales; Community-led growth;
We invest in the Future of Businesses: Web2 / Web3 Infrastructure your company should care about.
Edition 6: Capital meets awesome community; Your guide to crushing B2B Sales; Community-led growth;
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COMMUNITY
Do you also feel like just going for networking drinks is not enough? Yes, we agree. That’s why we are building a new type of community. Curated, fun, engaging events.
Sounds good? Then join us on Locals 😉, the discovery app for activities and communities full of inspiring and entrepreneurial people.
And we are hosting our first event in the well-being series for founders and investors. join us for yoga in Central London on 1st June, 5:00 PM BST 🧘
READS
Community-led Growth (by Sarah Nöckel)
In B2B, software buyers have endless choices in today's market, so companies can't only rely on features and pricing to win. Founders are more focused on building products that optimize for value and retention.
But building community is more than just launching a Discord or Slack channel. There are many building blocks and questions you should ask yourself before going all-in: Who is the community for and who not, how the community's vision aligns with organizational goals, what value will you create for members, what members can do once they've joined, how to deliver insights from community conversations to the rest of the organization, and how to incentivize and reward participation?
How to Master Outbound Sales without a BDR (yet) (by Work-Bench)
One of the biggest mistakes we see Seed-stage founders make is hiring BDRs too early in hopes the addition of a dedicated outbound sales team will help produce and close more leads. What founders don’t realize is that hiring, training, and managing a BDR team is a heavy and time-consuming lift.
This Enterprise Playbook outlines how founders can conquer founder-led sales by experimenting with the sales process until they have defined a successful and scalable playbook, all before hiring a fleet of BDRs.
Public SaaS Comparable Table (by Meritech)
If you are curious to check how public companies are performing Year-over-Year, think LTM, ARR, market cap, rule of 40.
10 Insane AI Chrome Extensions to Save Hours of Work (by Angry Tom)
OPINION
How to smash Enterprise sales?
Hiring
When your company is in its early stages, we discourage the hiring of a traditional Head of Sales. At a very early stage customer feedback is king - you must enhance your product, pricing and differentiation.
Don’t hire senior, instead, your sweet spot is a sales lead who not only has the necessary skills for the role but also aspires to progress to the next level. At an early stage someone with a very senior background in let’s say an enterprise giant is accustomed to getting high commissions and may leave if getting that product market fit takes longer than expected.
Hire a person who can convert the same passion and love that you have for the product. Ask them to pitch anything, absolutely anything (cooking, hiking?). You will hear how they pitch something dear to their heart.
Leads
The B2B sales process is not an easy one. Your first ten customers are arguably the most important and difficult to sign.
📢 Press coverage - pitch your unique story, storytelling is key!
🤝 Tapping your personal network (family friends, ex-colleagues, investors, fund LPs, incubator peers)
🧗♀️ Consistently engaging with your prospective customers on relevant platforms (e.g. Twitter, conferences). Think about where your target customers spend time online and offline.
Process
The goal of a sales team is to create new value for customers. Especially for a startup that’s addressing a new market or trying to solve a complex problem. That’s why Enterprise requires a well-developed process. Ultimately you have to answer: Why buy, Why you, Why now?
Why buy?
Identify a unique objective the company is struggling with ➡️ grow revenue by 20% ➡️ acquire a company ➡️ data centre consolidation and migration ➡️ integrated change management solution. Make sure you address the issues with the right audience, CFO will hardly care about a marketing automation tool you are trying to sell.
Why you?
No one knows your product better than you do, so you will need to help the decision-maker to define what success looks like. Your biggest enemy here is not other startups, it is the company’s status quo and a desire “to keep things the old way”.
Why now?
Turn the value proposition into a quantifiable business case. Prioritise based on the problem at hand, for some it is costs, for others it may be efficiency or accuracy.
ATTEND
💻 May 22 (virtual)
When banks fail: Navigating the Aftermath from SVB to First Republic (Cohen Circle)
💻 May 24 (virtual)
The state of pre-seed funding (Sifted Talks)
The pre-seed landscape in 2023
Identifying the right time to start raising money
What fundraising options are open to you
How to ensure you’re finding the best investors
🇩🇪 June 5-7 (Berlin)
👋 Say hello if you are around, we will be in Berlin.
WORK
Tempo is a platform to find a B2B Sales role in London;
Klarna, the buy now, pay later giant, is looking for a new business development manager in Manchester;
Deel, an HR and payroll system, wants a new lead product designer in London;
LEARN
📖 This month we are reading Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff & Carlye Adler
Customers are partners: You finished the sale properly when your customer is successful. Treat customers as partners, and they will pay you back a great return through product feedback, market insights and referrals.
Sales is a numbers game: Funnel volume. Conversion. Retention. Increasing any ratio will make you more successful, but if any of these is low, you might need to close your business.
Land & Expand: Never be a jerk to small businesses. They might grow and become your biggest customers.
🎧 And listening to Use This A.I. Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Business In 2023 by HubSpot
Uncover AI strategies you can start today to transform marketing completely. Learn how to take a known strategy and integrate AI into it, the top-down model vs. bottoms-up model approach to AI and how to create opportunities for your team.
Please note that any charts, data, or projections discussed are subject to change without notice, may differ from opinions expressed by others, and are for informational purposes only. They should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. The content speaks only as of the date indicated; Pretiosum Ventures has not independently verified third-party links or sources, nor makes representations about the enduring accuracy of such information.