How entrepreneurs find a scalable, repeatable sales model

David Skok, one of the founding partners of Jingwei, is a veteran of several entrepreneurial experiences who will explain his entrepreneurial experience. In today's article Skok future talk about the second stage of entrepreneurship, how to develop a repeatable sales model, he will be detailed analysis of the importance of sales funnel.

In different stages of the entrepreneurial cycle, it is necessary to respond in different ways. In the last article, I talked about the first stage of what to do: Find the right product and the corresponding market. I told entrepreneurs how to focus on finding them, and I explained why we should be betting on the money in this segment. In this article, I will talk about finding a scalable, repeatable sales model.

Identify an extensible, repeatable sales Model

This means that you have found an extensible, repeatable sales Model:

The process of attracting paid customers is a repeatable pattern

If the process involves sales people, you can recruit employees who need to achieve the same level of sales as the original sales team.

If the process is a virtual network sales model, the access traffic on the Web page can also get an expected result.

Process is extensible

In the absence of short-term restrictions, the user lead source and site traffic has increased.

In the absence of short-term restrictions, resources in the conversion funnel, such as salespeople, are easily expandable.

Customer acquisition costs are significantly lower than you gain throughout the customer lifecycle

In SaaS projects, customer lifetime value should be three times times higher than customer acquisition cost.

For a start-up with capital efficiency, users should be able to recover their costs within 12 months.

Customer lifetime value to the goods, services and the cost of induction training is roughly counted.

Test/maintain slow pace for sales model

Just as looking for the right product and the corresponding market, the search for a sales model should also be done with some experimentation. Don't blindly believe in business plan forecasts, because the proposal is just an unproven assumption. Only a small number of startups can reach or exceed their overall sales plans after they find scalable, repeatable sales patterns.

You can't predict how long it will take to find a scalable, repeatable sales model. In the meantime, the product and the market will often change, so your funds should be able to support a large number of experiments in order to find a workable model.

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Don't rely on money to solve problems. The power to rely on money is a mistake, especially for inexperienced investors and board members who want to see the results as soon as possible under pressure. If you do this, even if you use a lot of money to solve the problem, still have little effect.

The original design of the sales funnel takes time to confirm. For this I set up a website called "Sales and Marketing". Design experiments can be carried out very quickly, and do not require too much cost. When you design a test, think carefully about what data you need to collect to determine whether the test was successful.

Top salespeople are the shining points of the team

If the salesperson is part of the conversion funnel (the intended conversion path defined by marketers or site owners), you must understand that salespeople who can achieve unconfirmed sales processes are quite different from the average salesperson. In the absence of any hint, they need enough intelligence to develop a repeatable process. Usually, when you recruit salespeople, you want them to follow your standard implementation steps to do things, instead of contacting customers and selling them from the talk. First-class salespeople know how to determine the secondary market and how to filter out the most useful information.

Initially, only one or two salespeople were required to secure their place of work. Make sure that the one or two salespeople are more capable of selling than anyone else. In a distributed organization, it is very difficult to change the content and directionality of information. But if there are only one or two people, the sales team can get together and talk face-to-face about the problems they see and the results.

The importance of the funnel criterion

To achieve a scalable, repeatable sales model, a good funnel criterion is indispensable. You need to be clear about the conversion rate at each stage of the sales funnel, and understand how different sales leads can change. Typically, the customer resources that each leads to are limited, and the only way to expand the company is to keep looking for new sales leads. The economic outlook for new sales leads may be different from previous sales leads, and only such a yardstick will let you know if your sales model is economically viable.

To have a truly scalable sales model, you need different sources of sales leads, which are also hard to replace.