The answer is both and depends on where you are in your company growth - your sales model will evolve multiple times during the three typical growth stages. The goals for each stage are different, as is the team that will drive you to success. Finally, the most effective sales model and sales team for…
Early-stage Start-up CEO: Can a Strategic Partner give you an “unfair advantage” vs. relying on pure organic growth?
Many young technology companies dream about establishing partnerships with larger companies as a way to help them increase their market coverage, increase sales volume and lower sales costs. For example, most early stage companies want strategic partnerships with the large cloud players: how do I get Amazon, Microsoft or Google to partner with me and promote…
Avoid these Early Stage Mistakes in your Channel Strategy
All start-up CEOs want a Partner network to help the Company establish market traction. The hope is your Company can leverage Partners to bring them into real sales opportunities. The reality is while in this early Customer Proof Stage, Partners will be less inclined and equipped to work with a new company until they see real…
How to Successfully Scale Sales Past $20M
Congratulations are in order when you reach this stage. As a CEO, you have closed your initial set of paying customers, you have identified and successfully sold the repeatable sale and you are probably somewhere around $20M in ARR. Now you are ready to raise the “market scale” round of financing and grow out your sales,…
CEO: How to Scale Over $10M ARR: Sales Repeatability
Congratulations! You’re now approaching $10m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). You most likely have at least 25 customers and are expecting some add-on sales or renewals this quarter. As mentioned in the last post, a critical indication of the future success of a Stage 1 company is the ability to move beyond beta customers to…
7 Tactics to Hiring Your First Sales Team
Who Should I Hire First? Many technical founders struggle to build out their initial sales team. Some of the questions they wrestle with during this initial growth stage were introduced in our last post, Why Don't I Have 100 Customers Already. They include: When should I start hiring salespeople? What does a "good" salesperson look like? How…
Why Don’t I Have 100 Customers Already?
As a CEO, how do you expand from 1-20 customers into the next stage of growth?
