Entrepreneur Meetup: SaaS Sales University with Tonni Bennett

On Thursday, July 25th from 12-2pm we hosted the next class in our University series: SaaS Sales with Tonni Bennett, Sales Consultant at Skaled.

Tonni has spent the past 5 years scaling high growth companies and dove into nitty gritty sales process details to help Atlanta SaaS leaders scale and grow their revenue.

The Rise of the Buyer

Tonni started her presentation by talking about the power the buyer now has in the sales process. Because buyers are more educated than ever before, the role of sales is not to tell/show a buyer what a product or offering does. It is to help a buyer understand how a product or offering can work in their environment to solve their needs and challenges, and how it can do this better than the other options available to them.

Sell the Vision

She then went on to discuss the importance of selling your vision. Your story and your ‘why’ are key to sales. You need to find something that resonates with people beyond your value prop. As a startup you may not have your product fully fleshed out yet. You need to be able to sell your vision to early customers in order to get it to where you want it to be. Try to connect with people and really show them why you do what you do and how what you are doing will help them.

Do not underestimate the power of your story.

ICP, TAM, and Personas

Tonni gave us a quick lesson on how to define your sales process with ICP, TAM, and Personas.

• ICP: A description of the company — not the individual buyer or end user — that’s a perfect fit for your solution, focused on the relevant characteristics of your target accounts, such as industry.
• TAM: Estimate the number of companies in your ICP and what the market size is for your offering.
• Personas: Who are you selling to (CMO? VP of Marketing? Demand Manager?) and what keeps them up at night? How can you sell your product in a way that meets their needs?

The Sales Process

Define your sales process in a scientific way. Key elements include: sharing your story/value prop, demonstrating the product or offering, setting proper expectations, discovery/qualification, and working out the commercial terms.

This is something that should be treated as an art and a science. It should be documented, and tried, and followed, so that you can optimize. You can’t optimize or iterate anything that you don’t have clearly defined.

Managing the Deal to Close

This is the fun part of sales! Once your potential buyer agrees that your product has value to them, you move from opposite sides of the table to the same side of the table. Tonni shared some important questions to ask at this stage in order to close your deal.