Early stage startups & outsourced sales

Early stage start-ups often enquire with us for B2B lead generation. So far, we’ve shied away from very early stage startups and instead preferred working with mid stage startups looking to scale sales.

We believe sales in early stages of a startup is a process of establishing product market fit. The product offering is being continuously refined based on customer feedback as you go to market. This requires close coordination with internal teams. We’ve always maintained that this early phase should be driven by the founding team.

At this stage, there aren’t established benchmarks for lead qualification, quality, conversion etc. This makes it difficult for either the client or us to predict the outcome or evaluate the engagement objectively. Unfortunately a few founders do not appreciate this uncertainty. They think of B2B demand generation engagements as silver bullets which will magically increase sales in the short term. These are doomed to fail.

However, in recent months, we’ve had an increasing number of early stage startups provide us with a counterview on this.  Here’s gist of what they say:

We very well understand the stage and nature of our business. We are aware that ours is a consultative selling process, sales cycles are long and we have to engage multiple times with a prospect before we sign a deal. We understand conversion might not be predictable. We simply want to fast track this process so that we can course correct quickly wherever required.

We don’t have sales expertise in-house. Our’s is a product company. And we don’t believe in reinventing the wheel. We’d like to partner with someone who has experience in business development so that we avoid common mistakes people commit.

We don’t have bandwidth to build capabilities inside. We’ve seen the effort & management involvement required to build our product & engineering teams. Sales won’t be any different. It is not merely about hiring individual frontline salespeople. To build a sales system will take time & investment. And we simply do not have the luxury of time that this process will take. We’d rather utilize outside experts to help us scale this faster before we move it internally in the future.

Such discussions have made us reconsider our own long held view. Years in sales after all teaches on to be humble and listen to customers.

We’ve onboarded a couple of such clients on a trial basis. Whether such engagements are beneficial for clients as well as for us will take time to arrive at. But we’ve already started seeing the benefits that these client’s referred to in their conversations. The scope and nature of such engagements will evolve over time. But there is definitely some merit in getting outside sales expertise at every stage of growth.