Our past couple of meetings have helped you get better at direct marketing, now please join us this Wednesday, Oct 7 at 7pm to learn about how to get better at direct sales.
We’ve lined up two great speakers: Bryan Starbuck from TalentSpring, and Kabir Shahani from Appature, to share their experience and advice on selling. Specifically, they will help you answer questions such as: do I need direct sales? how do I generate leads? how do I scale and measure my sales operation? what kinds of commissions should I pay? and many more.
If your product or service can benefit from direct sales (as opposed to just direct online marketing), or if you’re already working on direct sales but want to get better at it, this meeting is for you.
Most sales information available to startups is the eCommerce sales strategy. This talk will cover the metrics to show when an inside phone sales team can be more effective for a startup company. It will also show how to build out a sales team. It will then cover long-term growth model and how to manage a inside phone sales strategy. Inside phone sales have proven successful for the following startup companies that have grown into full B2B SaaS companies: Concur in Seattle ($1.8b market cap), SalesForce ($1b in revenue), SuccessFactors ($111m in revenue), NetSuite ($150m in revenue), Taleo ($168m in revenue).
Bryan Starbuck is the CEO of TalentSpring, Inc. TalentSpring is a B2B SaaS company that uses matching technology to find the best resumes for corporations staffing department’s open positions. TalentSpring offers their customers over 110 million resumes across all major sources of resumes. Data mining and semantic search algorithms are used in the resume matching technology. TalentSpring is a 11 person company funded by private investors.
Everything in life involves a sale. Whether it’s a product to a customer, an idea to a colleague, or yourself to a prospective employer – you have to be ready to make a sale. As an organizational function, Sales does have a great deal of science and some smaller elements of art. In this talk, Kabir will focus on the smaller component – the art – by offering a practical guide and a framework for ensuring you have the right foundation to start putting the scientific practices into place. He reflects on his early days of cold calling to sell computer hardware at the age of 16, to today managing complex enterprise sales as CEO of Appature, and provides 10 immutable laws that he’s found to be true through those experiences.
Kabir Shahani co-founded Appature with Chris Hahn in January 2007 with a vision of delivering bleeding edge software that provides tremendous business value while still being easy and fun to use. Their flagship product is an enterprise marketing suite that provides companies the tools to focus on their target customers, make more informed business decisions, and drive overall revenue while saving money on marketing campaign execution. Their approach has been so unique, that the company already works with top brands in the healthcare vertical, and achieved profitability its first year. In recognition of the company’s success, Kabir was named one of BusinessWeek’s “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009”. Prior to co-founding Appature, Kabir held roles in Business Development and Program Management. He holds a degree in Informatics from the University of Washington.