1712 – How to Bridge the Gap for Startup Success with Kristie Jones

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's the founder and principal of sales acceleration group christy jones christy your website is salesaccelerationgroup.com christy it's great to have you josh thanks so much for having me on yeah share with us a quick overview of what you do the impact you have in the world and who you work with sure um i exclusively my swim lane as i call it is uh startup founders normally zero to 5 million in revenue. Majority of those are probably VC backed, although I do some bootstrapping as well. So the majority of those that have just gotten some series A funding are in desperate need of formalization, documentation and training around all sales processes, as well as probably starting to add their first sales reps and create a sales team.

1:45So I spend a lot of time with my founders doing those two things. Yeah. Yeah. So this is what you're talking about here can be quite challenging for someone like, let's say that they're just, you know, they have a background in tech. And so they came up with a great idea for a SaaS platform. They're, you know, they've built it out. They've worked with developers and they're thinking about, okay, what's our go-to-market? Well, I'm more of a tech person. I'm not a professional salesperson. That's, and if you don't get that right, Right. You could lose. I mean, they won't just won't go to market.

2:17You won't get what you truly want. And that's the impact in the world that you're going to have to have a really defined sales strategy in order to make that happen. Correct. Yeah. And you're spot on. Right. So, you know, I caught my favorite founder story is, you know, they were working for the man and they needed something that they couldn't find out in the market or what they found out in the market. they didn't like, I thought it was an inferior product. And so they thought to themselves, well, if I have this problem, other people have this problem. And because I have a tech background or I'm a developer myself, surely I can fix this.

2:50And so they go off into the world and yes, they do. They, they, you know, build a better mousetrap or they build the first mousetrap. But to your point, there's a lot of the sales and marketing side that they just haven't had experience with. And so, you know, one of the things I love most about my job, Josh, is that people are so grateful for my help, right? Because they don't know sometimes what they don't know. And there is a formula for this. And because I spend most of my time in the SaaS world, we have defined processes and things that we know are best practices that can help take that product to market and find the right customers for them.

3:28You know, and I think as well, my hope is that, you know, SMB founders, or, again, someone that's looking at launching something, we can acknowledge that we need sales help as much as we might need, well, we have to write something in Python. Well, I don't know Python. Well, should you learn it and try to do all of that coding yourself or would it make more sense to hire somebody to do that work? Well, clearly, I think most of us, unless we're competent programmers, would say, that's going to take me six months or a year. and that's not going to help me get to market. Same thing in sales. Sales is a skill and it's, it might be one of those things that from the outside in, we might think, oh, well, anyone can sell, but, and that's true.

4:17I believe that that's true to an extent, but there are also, there's levels of proficiency that then translate to success. I'm sure you have some elements of agreement with that statement? Yes. I think that's why I said, like, I think the majority of my founders, because a lot of my founders are VC backed, they know, they do know what they don't know and, or starting to figure out what they don't know. And the VC is encouraging, right? So I have a lot of great relationships with VCs across the country who put me in touch with founders that they've just invested in because they need it done. Like you said, like they're used, these, these founders, right.

4:54And sometimes even serial founders, right. This is not their first rodeo as a startup founder in general, but they know a lot of these things, but they also know that there's a speed, right? So as you said, like I can take a year and learn Python. I can take a year and learn sales, but VCs don't have that kind of patience. And so I affectionately say I'm an extra set of expertise hands because maybe, you know, these guys are all, the women, men, men and women that I work with are the smartest, right? They're, they're the smartest in their area. I love, this is one of the things I love about the job and the working with these types of people, they're super smart, but it's just going to, I mean, so they'll figure it out, but do they have time to figure it out or do they want to spend 12 months figuring it out?

5:34And they really probably shouldn't. Yeah. So in terms of like how you work with your clients, you know, obviously it looks like you do some training, coaching, but you also can help with attracting or hiring help. Can we talk about kind of the current environment. Like, let's say that I know that I need to attract in some sales talent. We're recording this, you know, we're in September, we're recording this September, 2023. What is this supply and demand or what is the environment like for attracting sales talent right now? It's great. I, because I do spend a considerable amount of time, about 40 % of my time, what I do called hiring help.

6:20So I'm not a recruiter. I don't source. I don't charge a percentage-based salary. They do charge. We are a for-profit business. But what I'm finding is I'll drop a job description, you know, and do a paid LinkedIn posting. Let's say for an account executive, mid-level or enterprise account executive, I'll get anywhere between 250 and 350 resumes in the first 36 hours. Wow. I normally, I normally have, I warned them that we're going to shut it down real fast because, and in fairness to that, I don't even normally get through 350, right? I normally get through 150 of the 300 or 350 I get until I found a nice pool of people that qualify.

6:56Yeah. And then Christy, obviously, you know, going through, like, let's say that somebody is like, they're already doing this themselves. They haven't been working with you. It's fine. What would be some best practices that you would recommend? Let's say that they are staring at a stack of 200 resumes. What, what do they do? Well, Josh, it's not going to be a surprised you to hear that I have a formal process for hiring as well. So they need a process, right? I mean, first off, legally, you need a process. You need a consistent process that you're doing every time just to cover yourself legally.

7:27And I think, again, a lot of early stage startups don't always think about the legal side of hiring, but that's important for me and for my clients. So, you know, do you ask the same question? You know, what are we looking for in the resume? You know, have we put the right job description together first and foremost? And then I, you know, I ask three questions during my phone screen. So I do a 30-minute phone screen with all candidates that I deem on paper to be worthy. But I ask the same three questions every time. Sure, there may be some different follow-up questions to that. Then what happens?

7:54And I take them and put them into a first behavioral-based face-to-face, as I call it, or virtual face-to-face interview. So you have to have a formal process. So I do that interview with someone from the company. I do the phone screen with my team. We do that. But then someone with the company needs to join me for the face-to-face behavioral-based interview. From that, if we like them, depending on how many levels we want to go through, we may run them through an assessment. So I always say, you know, I've been hired, I've hired hundreds of sales reps over 20 plus years, but I still like an objective measurement, right?

8:27Again, that I can compare people to. I'm looking for certain things. These are not failure assessments, but these are, I use these assessments to help bridge the relationship between the hiring manager, who they're going to be reporting to, and the person. So, you know, if there are nine on independence and a two on manageability, we need to know that now. And we need to talk about that now, right? There's no reason I start, I believe in a culture of accountability and that starts during the interview process. And so we start setting expectations and start figuring those things out in the interview process.

8:57And if during the interview process, we find out it's not going to work out, which is totally fine, right? Not a fit for one party or the other. We're not going to spend time, energy, and money. Although we have maybe gotten some VC funding, we don't get millions and millions of dollars right off the bat. right? So we have limited financial resources, limited human resources. And so, you know, have a formal process, have, you know, set interview questions that you're going to ask. I actually hand a list of 20 competencies to my clients and say, pick eight. You can assume I'm going to pick sales as a competency, but pick eight other competencies that you think are important to your culture or the business.

9:32And we're going to ask behavioral-based interview questions around those competencies. So you got to really get nitty gritty. I call it when I'm teaching sales training, I call it question on a question, right? We ask a question, they give an answer. We ask a follow-up question to the answer we just heard. We're going to do the same thing in the interview process. We're going to use it as a discovery call. Yeah. And Christy, you know, when you're working with organizations and they may have, not necessarily to say sales professionals should be pretty proficient in best practices today, but do you see any misconceptions maybe about organizations where they don't have, like they're doing sales out of, because, well, they just have to, but maybe that's not their professional background.

10:14Do you see any either misconceptions or, ooh, yeah, guys, that doesn't really work really well. Instead, why don't you start doing a little bit more of this? Any maybe broad observations that you see when you're working with clients? Yeah, a couple of things come to mind right away. One, as kind of playing off the hiring situation is I call it sales reps or professional interviewees. So buyer beware. A lot of my founders, I started the hiring help division of my company because I got tired of walking into organizations where they've mishired. Right. So not understanding the difference between a hunter, a farmer and a gatherer.

10:54So making sure that first off, you understand what you want and what you need. And then there are definitely specific interview questions that you can ask around that. So mishires are a big challenge, I think, in this world, specifically in the startup world. The second thing I see is what I call pimp the demo, where they're doing that outbound prospecting call, but they're not looking to go through discovery. They just want to show and tell, as I call it. So, you know, having an SDR or even yourself going out and trying to pimp the 30 minute demo and you're like, let me just show you what I got.

11:27The Christieism for that is it has to be all about them before it can be all about you before it can be all about us. And I find there's a lot of us going and not us going on, but me, me, me, me. Let me show you my product. Let me tell you how great we are. Let me tell you why my founder built this because the products on the current, you know, in the current market suck. So really understanding that we have to look for fit. And it should be, honestly, the product. I say, I think you've really come to the top of the pyramid as a sales rep if you can sell it without showing it. There are lots of ways you can prove that your product does what it says it does without the show and tell.

12:04Yeah. And I would suspect some of that gets to this relationship between sales and marketing and advertising, right? And any trends that you see there, both in, oh, yeah, do more of this, or maybe trends that you've seen in terms of how people are making mistakes in and around that? Yeah, I still think that the sales and marketing relationship is not as tight as it needs to be, right? I mean, I say this needs to be interwoven. And I really want marketing from a sales perspective, from building new top of the funnel. I want marketing to be the opening act, right? The warmup crew, the person that comes out and makes sure that the headliner is, the audience is ready for the headliner.

12:46And so I really want marketing to do that warmup. I want them to do the content campaigns. I want them to do some digital. I want them to do some events. You know, I want them to be, their call to action, marketing's call to action and sales is call to action are very different. So marketing should be about brand, about the industry, about positioning ourselves as thought leaders, whereas sales really is more about fit, figuring out if what you, you know, what the problems you have, we can be solving and you want to spend money to solve them. So I do think the relationship is just still not as tight enough as it needs to be.

13:18And working really like, you know, setting the calendar, right? So what's marketing going to go after today, which means sales is going to go after it in four or five weeks after marketing has warmed it up. I just don't think there's enough, you know, formalization of that relationship. them. Yeah. And Christy, in terms of, I don't know, maybe, and again, marketing might be a little bit, I don't know how much work you do on that side of it, but any observations about creating new top of the funnel opportunities? Are you seeing maybe some platforms kind of decreasing in value and seeing opportunities?

13:57You know, if there's a business leader that says, listen, I feel like we've got good talent, but right now we just don't have enough of the right kind of opportunities. Anything that you've seen? Events are coming back in a really, in-person events are really coming back in a very strong way. Trade shows, conferences, whether those be local, regional, or national. And they're very expensive, Josh, as you know. So, I mean, it's not just the cost of the 10 by 10 or the 10 by 20 booth. It's the travel, it's the marketing materials, it's all of that. So, you know, I really encourage my clients to take a percentage of that marketing budget and put it towards events.

14:30You know, in webinars, I love webinars. So webinars can be done very, very cheaply. But getting in front of people right now seems to be a big connection. People are going back to in-person events. They want to network with others like them. They want to hear from experts. So they are attending events throughout the country. And so I think that a certain percentage of the marketing budget, you can get, those are your people, right? So I always say, you know, when, as you're a sales rep, if you get an inbound lead, you didn't choose them, right? You didn't get to choose the people that come to your website and sign up for things.

14:59But at an event, you can get so specific about your target audience and your ICP that you know that when you, you know, if they walk into the, you know, the conference center, they walk into the expo hall, you know, or you're just there to set up meetings and meet people, you know, these are your people. Yeah. And I guess finally, Christy, in our ongoing culture, you talked about this just a little bit earlier. But if we as leaders, let's say we're talking to a lot of founders and executives that are listening right now, and we want to create a great culture and environment where our sales professionals can thrive and they can achieve their goals, right?

15:39And we can kind of co-create great success together. Any tips for founders and higher level executives? Yeah, I think some of the mistakes that I see made are, again, not only that buyer beware situation where maybe you're doing some mishiring, but also assuming that you can hire an experienced sales rep and they can come in and just hit it out of the park. Without those formal processes in place, without the sales stages being correct, without truly understanding who your ICP is or what the persona is. The other thing I think is trying to boil the ocean. So I say to them, hey, listen, there are a lot of people in your ICP.

16:15like hundreds of thousands of companies that fit and could benefit from your product, but you have two sales reps. So we can't, we can't do that. We can't boil the ocean. So what do we want to do, right? Do we want to own our backyard? Do we want to own the SMB market? Do we only want to go after, you know, VPs of HR? So I say get very, we need to get very specific. I kind of stole some, some of my strategies from the dev team. So I call them sprints. So I like to really get founders and companies and sales reps focused in on six to eight week sprints in just one particular area. Let's go after healthcare VPs of HR, right?

16:54Not all VPs of HR. Let's go after healthcare because that messaging can be more tailored, more customized. You'll get to know the lingo, what is the language that they use? So I think that that's one of the things, particularly as you're starting out a business or even as a business that's going into a new area, you probably don't have the manpower unless you're a fortune 500 or 1000 company. to go boil the ocean. So where's the low hanging fruit for you? Where can you get quick wins, as I call them? What particular area, whether that's your region, whether that's a particular person, whether that's a particular industry, let's go ahead and get a little siloed.

17:30And let's become an expert in that little sprint area that we do before we expand into other areas. Plus, going back to the marketing sales relationship, that helps marketing too, right? I mean, you're actually marketing to boil the ocean as well, but there's no reason for that. we only have so much manpower. Yes, we need top of the funnel, but we couldn't handle 2 ,000 leads if they came to tomorrow. Right. Yeah. I love it, Christy. Your website is salesaccelerationgroup.com. Someone that's been listening to our conversation right now, what would you recommend that they do if they really have already gotten value from our conversation right now and they're looking forward to maybe having a conversation, maybe kind of exploring a potential relationship?

18:11What would you recommend their next steps be? Sure. A couple of things, Josh. One, please connect with me on LinkedIn. Let me know that you listened to the podcast and heard me here. I love hearing from people who have listened to the podcast and get, what was your one takeaway, if you will. And then Josh, I've set up a special page for your listeners on my website. So salesaccelerationgroup.com front slash thoughtful. And on there, I'm going to give you my top interview questions by competency for your listeners. So if you're not sure about the behavioral-based interview questions you should be asking based on a particular competency.

18:44Fear no more. I have provided that for you and your listeners. Free resource. Again, that URL, correct me if I'm wrong. It was salesaccelerationgroup.com forward slash thoughtful. Yes, sir. Awesome. Christy Jones, again, you're the principal. Sales Acceleration Group, in addition to training and coaching and hiring help, you also do fractional sales leadership. And again, that's all available to look at, again, at salesaccelerationgroup.com. Christy Jones, startup expert, founder, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh, for having me. Great conversation.

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