Kloia is a small DevOps company that believes in fluid teams. Everyone is an engineer, so everyone does development, DevOps, QA, project management etc. This approach worked well for IT projects, but it was a disaster for sales. When we tried to do sales by ourselves, it didn't work. Then we outsourced part of it, didn't work. We hired an in-house salesperson, it still didn't work. We took a break and thought: what if we don't follow the book and distill our own approach to sales? In this report, I will share how we used shorter feedback loops, experiments, and fluid organizational roles to find a more effective sales approach for our small IT consulting company. We obviously wanted to increase sales by doing this, but we also wanted to do it in a way that will not hurt our peculiar company culture. We feel we did it: ~90% increase in revenue and no major org crises!
I will share 5 major take-aways from our two-year journey, talk about our current challenges, and hopefully inspire you to courageously apply similar tweaks to your sales approach.
- There are right times for sales to be involved: We observed that customers feel better when salespeople join kick-offs at the beginning of the project and major closing meetings at the end of the project phases. Their involvement at the beginning tell the customers that they were not there only to sell something and leave - that they will be involved in the project throughout.
- There are wrong times for sales to be involved: While their involvement is valuable, there are certain points where their presence can be questioned. We found out that technical deep-dive sessions and conversations with senior sponsors/stakeholders are best done without the sales people in the room. Because salespeople lack the technical and organizational skills to contribute to those conversations, their presence has been perceived as looking for an opportunity to do an upsell, as opposed to trying to solve the problem.
- Things work well when salespeople care about customer success too: The hit-and-run type of sales can bring good revenues, but it does not necessarily mean happy customers. We found out that many of our clients choose us over other competitors because we do not focus on just getting a Yes to a contract. We offer flexibility in scope of work, staffing, payment terms and contract terms so that we have a good relationship with our customers, and salespeople are responsible and empowered to strike this balance.
- One person leads the project, and that is not the salesperson: It may sound like the salesperson is in a lead role, but that is not the case. Sales takes an active role, but they are not the leads for the project. We make it clear that the Delivery Manager, not the salesperson, is responsible for the ultimate success of the project. The DM manages the scope, quality and the timing of project, sales may support them in relaying customer expectations they hear along the way.
- Incentives should be towards long term customer satisfaction: Incentives and commissions are a big part of salespeoples' compensation. Salespeople know that one way to maximize their profits is to do a large number of burst sales for small projects, leaving a big bucket of work for the engineering team to sort out. We have modeled our commissions to incentivize longer term customer value as opposed to shorter burst sales. This ensured that the engineering team would not get overwhelmed with concurrent requests, and steered the sales team towards stronger client relationships.