Categories: Scaling Sales
With each stage of growth, investors have the unique opportunity to help their portfolio company leaders navigate complex challenges to decrease their time to realization. We’ve outlined examples of what successful companies address, in each phase of growth, to scale revenue.
Consider how you can help your portfolio company partners assess these areas and provide support as they look to address what's critically needed to scale the business.
Startup Phase: (Seed A, B, C)
The common challenges emerging portfolio companies face often relate back to having the right message. In this phase, it’s critical that sales leaders focus on giving their salespeople the what and the why so they can execute in front of the buyer. Help your portfolio company leaders translate the founder’s vision into a consistent, buyer-focused message that sales teams can use to differentiate their offerings and sell at a premium.
There are four questions that every salesperson (and everyone in the portfolio company) should be able to answer, consistently. Consistency around the answers to these four essential questions will help drive leadership alignment. If there’s misalignment in executive answers, then there’s likely confusion on the front lines. Once your portfolio company’s leaders have cross-functional agreement on answers to the four essential questions, they can operationalize them in a way that’s consumable to front-line salespeople.
Investing early in a buyer-focused sales messaging framework can equip entire sales teams to increase average deal size and quota attainment, while cutting ramp-time in half. That’s exactly what NS1 did. See how NS1’s sales team drove a 60% increase in company growth by investing early in a custom sales messaging methodology.
Mid-level Expansion Phase: (Seed B, C, D & Public)
In this phase, portfolio companies often shift the sales focus upmarket, to increase average deal size and take a more proactive approach to targeting opportunities, qualifying deals, and driving value-based conversations. As leaders navigate these complex shifts, they are often challenged with defining what’s needed to equip sales to drive accurate forecasts and predictable revenue.
These shifts often demand that sales leaders implement a consistent sales process and voracious qualification approach that are both aligned to their buying audience. In addition, sales leaders need to define the opportunities and investments that will drive their desired outcomes.
Help your portfolio company’s leaders navigate their options. Ensure they have effective sales qualification processes and methodologies in place to build and foster a foundation for ongoing success. They may find value in understanding how Intercom navigated similar challenges and increased average deal size by 261%. Intercom’s leaders share their story and what they implemented to improve pipeline qualification, accuracy and growth.
Large-scale Expansion Phase: (Public & Private Ownership, Has Subsidiaries)
Enterprise portfolio companies face the complexities of aligning entire, global sales organizations around common company goals. The challenge often becomes, how does sales leadership adjust for company shifts (mergers, acquisitions, new product rollouts, etc.) in a way that’s both scalable, yet customized to the specific needs of each territory? With differing markets, competitors, and internal execution challenges across territories, it’s difficult for global sales leaders to launch strategic initiatives that are both relevant and consumable for their entire organization.
These challenges are often a key reason why one-off sales trainings, events and kick offs only produce short-lived results. Leverage your experience to help your portfolio company leaders adjust their approach. Focus your portfolio company partners on establishing custom and proven frameworks that can be implemented across their global sales organization to improve team performance in every territory.
Help your portfolio company partners and their sales leader understand what’s needed to enable their sales organization to operate in a repeatable way. It’s critical that in this phase of growth your portfolio company has a sales leader who can strategically define the right opportunities to drive aggressive, expansion-stage success. Help them move in the right direction. This rapid sales assessment tool may help them prioritize and define what their sales organization needs to drive consistency and growth.
Prioritize What Sales Needs to Scale the Business
Your portfolio company’s leaders are likely working on the strategy to align sales to hit critical company goals and accelerate time to realization. Provide them insights on the realignment initiatives that successful sales leaders use to equip their teams to execute in front of the buyer and achieve critical sales outcomes. Share this webinar with them to help them prioritize sales initiatives that will have the greatest impact on revenue and growth.
