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Building a Sales Process from Scratch.

June 28, 2021 10 min read

Recently, our CEO, Matt Hollis sat down over a Zoom call with Rfider’s Global Head of Sales, Silverio Governo to discuss what it takes to build a sales process and a sales department from the bare bones within a tech organisation.

As a little bit of background - over the past 18 years, in a variety of sales executive and management roles, Silverio has successfully helped tech organisations, such as Sitecore, Acquia, Objective (to name a few) who have a desire to create customers (as well as brand advocates) for life, helping them on their journey to redesign how they shape their customers’ digital experiences and demonstrating the value in cloud adoption.

As Rfider’s Global Head of Sales, Silverio helps their customers to increase visibility into and across supply chains, while at the same time providing opportunities to foster collaboration, improve customer experience and increase productivity.

They’ve seen all kinds of delays and mistakes that have hindered deals closing. In our live session they will share:

• Where to start when starting from scratch in a sales executive role at a tech company
• Where sales processes break down - what to look out for
• Real life examples to learn from

Today, we’d like to share some of the highlights from their discussion. If you’d like to watch the whole conversation press play below.

Matt: Thank you for joining us, Silverio. One of the things that interests me is that you came from an enterprise sales background, very successfully achieving your targets, and in the middle of COVID, you dive straight into startup land. How did that happen?

Silverio: The idea of and the desire to join a start-up was front of mind when I first moved to New Zealand in 2004, but the timing just was not right and I was lucky to have a number of opportunities to continue my growth path along in the enterprise world. And, so I continued to do that including travelling overseas in 2017 to the UK with my kiwi wife and kids for an extended OE. But then when we came back to New Zealand in July last year, apart from a couple of options on the table back into the enterprise world, I had someone who I knew who said, "Is it time to reconsider the idea of joining our startup?" and so it just felt like the timing was right.

Matt: While all the rest of us were sort of struggling with change, you amped it up, so I love that.

Silverio: When you lift your family to go overseas and then lift them again in the middle of COVID and come back, well change what does that mean anymore, right?

Matt: Tell us a bit about Rfider and what is keeping you busy right now?

Silverio: John Pennington, our founder and CEO, based in New Zealand was previously running Deloitte Digital New Zealand and became fed up with some of the aspects of the world of tech. He noticed a huge demand for more transparency around the products and brands they associate users with. And from there, John created Rfider, software that increases visibility into and across supply chains, while at the same time providing opportunities to foster collaboration, improve customer experience and increase productivity. A next generation platform to mobilise your business, modernize customer engagement and protect your customers from product fraud.

I have been with the team for around eight months and I’m really proud that we have grown exponentially during that time. Maybe not as fast as we would like but certainly fast given that we are still a reasonably small team. But the model that we employ seems to be working really well for us and so that is the master plan.

Matt: Let us start to dig into that as we are here today to talk about building a sales process from scratch. So how hard is it? You land in but where do you start?

Silverio: You have a lot of support in big enterprise companies and that is phenomenal. But what is interesting is you probably need to peel the layers back and understand why is all that support there. And the support is probably there because you have legacy mechanisms that you cannot change and so any little bit of flexibility that you look for needs an entire team to help you. No matter how much respect I have for all of my colleagues and sales, sales teams, sorry salespeople, sales management, I think one of the biggest unsung hero teams is the sales operations team.

The biggest difference for me when joining Rfider was that I was excited at the opportunity to be able to say, "Okay, what have I learned in the past?" Every company I have worked for has its own sales process, has its own tech tools that they work with, has its own sales methodologies that they follow. So what were the little snippets that I have learnt and can research further to see if any of it is going to be applicable to the company that I work for now?

And I think that has been the biggest highlight for me is having the freedom, the blank canvas, a bit of a cliche but it is true, and that is kind of the excitement I was looking for.

I thought to myself before I started, “there is no such thing as a deer in the headlights”, and “it is going to be phenomenal”. But actually, it was the complete opposite. I was very much a deer in the headlights when I realized just how complex it was going to be to actually figure out, "Okay of everything I have learned, of every company I have worked for, where do we get started? And how do I quickly figure out what is going to work?"

Matt: So when you starting off, where did you start? Did you start thinking about the systems? Was it just the process of boiling that down or was it about the people?

Silverio: It was actually none of the above and let me explain why. We’re very fortunate that in today's world you can go online and literally search based on four or five keywords and be presented with thousands of pieces of advice. So there is not a shortage of advice out there plus you have your own experience over your career. The difficult part is which snippets or which

advice do you take and I think that the most important part was to understand, and again another little cliché, start with the why.

Our CEO has actually had quite a lot of success already with a handful of customers. So I looked at what was it that secured those customers and what was the process that they followed? And I thought to come into a brand new organization with a preconceived mind, that this is what I want to do when I come in and I want to get this going, is naive and a little bit arrogant to some extent because your method might not actually apply for the ideal customer profile that you have in mind.

The first thing I did was absolutely look at, okay, we have these few customers and they seem to be very, very happy. What was the process that we use to get them on board? Whatever we do needs to be measurable, needs to be repeatable, and needs to be something that is going to get success. It will not work all the time. We will fail but when we fail do we have the right pieces of the puzzle in place to look at and review why it is that we failed to try and fix that?

So the first thing was looking at where have we won, where have we lost, and why. Once that was done then it was a question of which technology. One thing that I believe is non-negotiable is we live in a world of tech, there are some technologies out there that absolutely are super useful for us and everyone on the call will use their own pieces of tech, some things are non-negotiable. For me, that’s a solid CRM. My second tool of choice is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Rfider already had a CRM in place, as a start-up free version of a CRM which makes life a lot easier. Sales Navigator, of course, a key part of that process from an outbound point of view and prospecting point of view, and those were the first two milestones from a systems piece.

Matt: When you deploy your sales process and your sales systems in a startup, how do you go about it? Again in the big enterprise world you came from, typically your marketing automation pushes the leads directly to your CRM. You have all this integration and you probably have Sales Navigator integrated into CRM and then eventually document creation for proposals and order forms, click buttons, and ease aligned and the whole sort of shooting match. What happens in a startup when you need to be pragmatic and agile?

Silverio: Looking at everything we want to do. We want to increase the sales pipeline. We want to increase marketing and event activity. We want to grow our team. I mean one of the aspects of me joining a start-up was I have always worked for a sales leader. It was my turn now. I have always wanted to become a sales leader. So I want to grow a team but you need to earn your stripes.

Now when it comes to tech, you are right, tech is out there to help us but when you arrive in a large enterprise company all the tech is already there, right? You have a CRM, a marketing automation tool, and more times than not your teams are already there as well. But what is the point in having those tools in place if you do not have the right people, the right mind share, and one of the biggest barriers to sales, the right time or the sufficient amount of time to actually make those tools work for you or work properly. And that is by far the biggest lesson learned now is that we are still using our CRM and sales nav. Why because that is probably the limit of what we can afford to spend time on based on the size of the team that we have. But as we begin to bring on a marketing function, 100% we want to be doing that level of automation.

My career in particular over the last eight years has been very much in that space around creating customer experiences that will generate a significant number of leads through the digital channels and having all that experience and lead generation automated through contextualization, through systems integration, etc. We are not there yet, so very much a step-by-step approach but very much where we want to end up very, very soon.

Matt: You touched earlier on the importance of putting the data in the CRM which I am a huge believer of and I often sort of get a little bit frustrated or even roll my eyes at people who say I cannot give my salespeople to enter the sort of data in the CRM. In your experience and from your professional career, how has that been tackled? Have you seen it done well?

Silverio: If you are one person and you have got to do so many things, if you are not recording them somehow, you cannot have an organised life. It is impossible, it is absolutely impossible. So, we are really lucky that the tools are out there.

I remember when salesforce brought out this mobile phone integration on their app. The ability to make a call and not have to think, "Okay great. I know I have got a call. I know I now need to record the fact that I had a call with them." But the fact that did not have to go into my computer and record that and actually, the integration would actually just pop up after I hang up the call and say, "Hey what happened insert here." I was like, "Ah! brilliant!" You know, those things matter. Why? Because I am operating at scale.

You will have multiple touchpoints within an organisation and you will have multiple organisations and some of us even have multiple verticals to go after. Unless you are recording all the information that you need to record, the automation that you aspire to have one day is going to make no sense and it will not work because there is no contextualisation.

I’ll give you a really good example: we are reviewing our billing mechanism at the moment. When we bring customers onboard we need to capture these five-six fields. Why? So the system at the other end can just pull those automatically not only for the order creation but also for any recurring invoicing. In comparison, working for a billion-dollar company, the number of times that I was contacted by someone in the Billing department after having sent the contract. My feet were up and I’m high-fiving, having a beer and the Billing rep says, "We do not have the tax number or the ABN number as you say in Aussie or something like that."

These are fundamental things that your lack of discipline is now causing pain for somebody else at the other end of the process, so that is one negative aspect. But the other one, of course, is that there is evidence that shows that a lack of traceability in CRM can have a hugely detrimental impact on your ability to close the deal successfully. And in particular, if you are fully focused on filling your pipeline and working on multiple opportunities at the same time with the complexity of a lot of opportunities at the moment in today's day and age, you need to have all that information at hand. And anyone who is meant to be supporting you in your role needs to have easy access to that information as well. So absolutely recording info is super, SUPER important.

Matt: Let us move on to horror stories. Do you have any sales process goes wrong horror stories that come to mind?

Silverio: We talked about closing deals. In the enterprise software as a service world, one scenario that is really interesting is the customer sees your solution as an all-in-one solution. What they sometimes do not appreciate is that behind the scenes, some of the kits that form that all-in-one solution are not actually entirely all yours.

Now you are probably working with a couple of little integration partners or service providers etc and you need to get some pricing from them in every deal. And in one particular organisation that I worked for, what was incredibly painful and actually put a lot of deals in jeopardy, is when all you want to do is get a quote out the door as quickly as possible and you are having to work with someone your company has employed, whose sole purpose is to go out and get quotes from these third-party partners of yours or discount agreements or whatever it is to help you get that quote out the door. And let us face it, most of us probably work for global organizations and that person may well be situated in a 6 hour time difference than where you are.

How do you get that information and how do you do it quickly? Then consider there are 24 salespeople in one geography all trying to get hold of this one person. How do you simplify that? And I think that is as much process as it is systems of a problem to solve. The third-party partner pricing that is definitely something that has got in the way of closing deals and plenty of other horror stories around where the sales process breaks down. Whether it is a sprinkling of the methodology that you have not done properly, whether you have not qualified an opportunity properly.

How about you or what is one of the many that come across from your side?

Matt: Look, it is funny that you mentioned that relying on third parties that impacts your speed to quoting. I would say the vast majority of the horror stories that I could relate to, speed of quoting, or poor qualification.

A key story that kind of jumps into my mind was, a couple of organizations ago I am working in a business, chasing a really big cloud provider in the US to win their deal and we are in there, we have just acquired another company and we were using their network to pitch this deal. And they said, "Okay, that is good. We just need to go and check to see what the suppliers have in stock so we can give you a lead time. And we had been a really agile, really responsive, 24-48 hour quote turn around and this I quote timeout because the vendor was very slow, you know European, long way away. And it blew out to 10 days and by the time we got back the vendor very nicely told us that this was below our normal performance and as such we would not be getting the order and if we would like to get back to our previous performance they will talk to us some more. And it was a pretty brutal sort of slap across the chops, but I think fair enough as well. That have been very clear to us about saying, "Hey if we win a deal speed is of the essence and we need it fast."

So, to me a great reminder that you have got to be agile and you have got to understand your customers’ needs around timing.

I wanted to jump into prospecting because this fascinates me as well. So you come in, it as a start-up. As you said, a handful of sales have been made by the founder, and you are parachuted in to head up sales, you are the great white hope to generate revenue. Where do you start?

Silverio: Startup world it has been really interesting looking at what a startup means and what it means selling in a startup right? How much of it is actual recurring revenue, how much is optics right to the market, it has been a huge learning curve.

When you are a one-person sales team, you cannot try and prospect to multiple verticals and multiple people and multiple companies to talk about multiple different types of value and problems that your pains, that you are going to solve. So, where I started was with the number one, ideal customer profile. Who do we have today that we know we can get a significant chunk of the market in play. There is enough differentiation between us and the competition and that is going to accelerate our next stage of growth and that is kind of where we went into first. And we decided okay that is going to be our direct outbound world.

However, because what we do actually can be quite simple, can be quite easy to adopt we should not turn off these other areas. So, what model do we want to employ? Is there a non-direct model, almost like a child model? And by coincidence one of the other really successful ways that we have been growing is through a referral network and having seen any sort of channel partner on contracts, our referral network contracts are very generous and it is pretty cool.

But what we do is we then have, okay who are people in certain areas who can actually facilitate these introductions? Why? Because we are in a world of COVID, okay, things are sort of opening up slowly at least us. We are, Australian, New Zealand the fact we have this bubble is quite incredible, but actually a lot of other sales people who have to deal with international sales, they are not able to travel to go and see these new prospects and when you try to get in front of a prospect, you need to remember that you are one a hundred people perhaps that day trying to get hold of a CMO to flog them. And I am a 42 year old guy trying to compete with 21-22 year old inside sales reps, who are absolutely working super hard on the phones trying to get their attention, so things are stacked up and that is why warm intros come in really handy.

And so, where do we start? Focus on the area that you know, you are going to be able to have the biggest amount of growth in the short term and concurrently agree that is where you are going to focus on the out bounding and then we have had huge success in building and we continue to build slowly a strategic ecosystem of referral partners to help start facilitating those warm intros and try to shorten the pipeline generation cycle.

Matt: It does and you talked about obviously the direct, picking up the phone, out bounding, direct chasing prospects. Any thoughts on what channels are working best at the moment?

Silverio: I am still a firm believer that no single channel is the strongest channel. One of my sales leaders 11 or 12 years ago is now a very successful sales leader and speaker and the international circuit. He is an Aussie by the name of Tony Hughes. He authored a book 4 or 5 years ago called Combo Prospecting. And one of the biggest lessons about the combo prospecting piece is the realisation that one single channel is not going to be enough. You should absolutely be targeting a particular person, right? First of all, regardless of channel, you should know why you are targeting that person and you should make sure that your story to that person of why you have contacted them is as contextual as possible so that you stand out over and above anybody else. And then you go and do that across multiple channels - email, LinkedIn, phone, social.

My last role at Acquia I was fortunate enough to be designated an inside sales rep to help me out in my first year and I bought him a copy of Tony’s book, Combo Prospecting. He employed that particular model and next thing you know in January at the Sales Kick Off event, he wins the global award for the Best Inside Sales of the Year. And it just proved that you have to do things differently, you have to understand what others are doing and failing at that I can do better and smarter.

We have all this tech available to us so let’s pick the right tech to help us be successful because again a lot of seasoned enterprise sales people arrive at the job not ready to pick up the phone. I see it all the time and I am sure a lot of people on the call see it too. They rely on the fact that they have inside sales people and marketing teams to generate leads for them. By far the biggest thing, which I knew I came into this with my eyes open, I am not going to have that when I come into my startup world. So, how can I quickly start to get some traction, and by far the tech is definitely there.

Matt: Lastly I want to have a chat about qualification. I am a bit obsessed with qualification, obviously, you have got to be able to generate leads and you have got to be a good BDMs to got to go out and find customers. But then, the difference to me between sort of the good of the great is that ability to qualify. Any sort of thoughts around that?

Silverio: I have been selling for a number of years but there were two lessons that I wish I had learned earlier.

One was that you cannot keep everyone happy all of the time and that was a lesson that I learned in enterprise account management and that plays really well into the qualification.

Second, qualify, qualify, qualify and it is hard. When you are working for some of these enterprise organisations and you have this huge number hanging over your head, you worry about keeping your pipeline full and how you’re being measured weekly, what does the activity and Salesforce look like and everything else.

The point is, there is enough evidence out there that shows you may have less activity than others, you may have less opportunities in the pipeline, but actually if you have qualified early, the last two or three stages of the pipeline process of your CRM pipe is going to be much more accurate and tidier and your management team will recognise you for that.

Matt: That is great. I think we will wrap the chat up there because I think qualification is so critical. I think you summed it up really brilliantly.
Nicole Stirling
Marketing Coordinator at Opvia