Summary
Two sales strategies for startups are discussed in the video: Bottoms Up and Top Down.
Top Down sales targets decision makers high up in an organization, appealing to executives and helping them achieve strategic goals. It involves identifying leads, validating their problem, and convincing them that your product can solve it. However, it may require building one-off features for large customers and creating an expensive enterprise sales team.
Bottoms Up sales focuses on building a self-serve product to attract a large user base. The goal is to then approach these users and convince them to sign contracts for additional features or bulk pricing. This strategy works best for startups that solve pain points for individuals or small teams.
The choice of sales strategy depends on the target audience, with the Bottoms Up approach recommended for individual contributors or small teams, and the Top Down approach necessary for executives. There is no clear superiority between the two strategies.
Sell your product: Bottoms up and Top down
- Two sales strategies for startups: Bottoms Up and Top Down
- Bottoms Up: selling through word of mouth and viral spread
- Top Down: selling to corporate executives
Top down sales
Top-down sales is a strategy that targets decision makers high up in an organization, appealing to executives and helping them achieve strategic goals. It involves identifying leads, validating their problem, and convincing them that your product can solve it. While it can be challenging to get an executive's attention, there is a playbook that usually works. However, it may require building one-off features for large customers and creating an expensive enterprise sales team. To implement top-down sales, define your target customer, find leads that fit your profile, and try to get their attention through warm introductions or cold emailing.
- Top-down sales targets decision makers high up in an organization
- It appeals to executives and helps them achieve strategic goals
- It involves identifying leads, validating their problem, and convincing them of your product's solution
- Getting an executive's attention can be challenging
- There is a playbook that usually works for top-down sales
- It may require building one-off features for large customers
- Creating an expensive enterprise sales team is often necessary
- Implementing top-down sales requires defining the target customer and finding leads that fit the profile
- Getting their attention can be done through warm introductions or cold emailing.
Bottoms up sales
Bottoms up sales is a sales strategy for startups that focuses on building a self-serve product to attract a large number of users. The goal is to then approach these users and convince them to sign contracts for additional features or bulk pricing. This strategy works best for startups that solve pain points for individuals or small teams and have products that are easy to adopt and spread virally within organizations. To succeed with this strategy, startups should focus on talking to customers, reducing friction in the product experience, testing and optimizing the sales funnel, and leveraging freemium pricing.
Key points:
- Startups use bottoms up sales to build a self-serve product and attract a large user base
- The sales team then approaches these users to sign contracts for additional features or bulk pricing
- This strategy works best for startups that solve pain points for individuals or small teams
- Startups should focus on talking to customers, reducing friction in the product experience, testing and optimizing the sales funnel, and leveraging freemium pricing to succeed with bottoms up sales.
Wrap-up
- Sales strategy for a startup depends on the target audience
- Bottoms-up approach recommended for individual contributors or small teams
- Top-down approach necessary for executives
- No clear superiority between the two strategies
Outro
- The video discusses sales strategies for startups
- It helps determine the most suitable approach for each startup