This 90-minute interactive workshop, conducted online in English, offers advanced education for board members.
The sales aspect of a startup is often tied to the founders of the company, who are frequently seen as the only relevant advocates for the products or services the startup provides. Boards are often uninformed on the best sales practices, when they don’t consider them downright useless. This approach often leads to a lack of sales experience on the board and a heavy reliance on the luck factor in growing the business.
This workshop is designed to expand on the core curriculum of the Startup Board Academy and advise board members on the best practices around implementing and managing efficient sales processes through considering a number of relevant aspects.
Sales organization
- Symptoms of a poor sales organization and related risks
- Sales strategy vs sales organization
- Staying up to date with current sales trends
- Hiring the right people and allowing them room to develop the right approach
- Sales team pedigree
- Risks of hiring sales people for their existing networks
- Sales reporting, measuring and performance assessment (pipeline stages advancement and lead conversion rate)
- Avoiding confusion between strategy and tactic
- Setting realistic sales goals with the resources available
- Assessing the growth and expansion strategy (competitive risk, knowledge of the market, available resources, flexibility and availability)
- Ensuring realistic revenue forecasting: top-down vs bottom-up approaches for setting budgets
The role and contribution of the board in sales
- Ensuring sufficient focus on the sales approach
- Aligning the company strategy, the go-to-market strategy, and the sales organization
- Guaranteeing sufficient measurability of the results early in the sales process through relevant and smart KPIs
- Revenue upstream (lead generation, prospecting, sales pipeline, channels)
- Revenue downstream (forecasted, signed, invoiced, renewed)
- Sales resources (headcount, recruiting, and partner enrolling)
- Setting up efficient sales management
- Selecting experienced sales managers
- Setting smart sales objectives that allow for real-time progress tracking, and monitoring them regularly
- Implementing and iteratively improving collaborative sales tools
- Establishing an efficient onboarding process for the sales team
Compensation of the sales team
- Assessing the commissions compensation model efficiency
- Considering alternative compensation models
- Maintaining motivation and focus within the sales team
Special moments requiring board attention in sales
- Assessing the impact of one-time events (new product launch or opening of a new market)
- Expanding the sales organization
- Resolving sales issues and remedying sales objectives being missed repeatedly
- Supporting management in difficult decisions
Ensuring commercial skills are present on the board
- Tracking the sales topics discussed and decided-upon actions
- Assessing the current sales dashboards
- Selecting board members with sales management experience
- Articulating the importance of a robust sales process to other board members
The workshop allows for an excellent opportunity for current board members to discuss specific challenges and benefit from each other’s experience and insights into how to drive the company’s sales and optimize its sales practices.
Workshop duration
1.5 hours.
Workshop format
Video conference.
Pricing
- External participant: CHF 150
- Board Academy Alumni: CHF 130
Trainers: Benedict Stalder and Jean de Wolff.
