When seasoned leaders like Kaulana Shum, a sales manager at Redgate Software in Pasadena, share tips, companies that ignore his advice do so at their own peril. That said, good sales advice doesn’t always come from sales gurus. Sales teams can learn a lot from other organizations with overlapping goals, like customer success teams. Specialists who focus on specific aspects of the customer experience, like onboarding, can also provide valuable insight.
With that in mind, we’ve gone through our archive of interviews to create a quick sales tip list. In addition to the aforementioned Shum, this list features insight from 3PL Central’s Mike Sanders, director of customer success, Mike Schafer, customer onboarding lead at SimplePractice, and the Virgin Hyperloop team. They explain how to construct the perfect sales playbook and the key to converting free trial users into paying clients.
Three years ago, SimplePractice CEO Howard Spector made a decision that would place his company in a prime position during the pandemic. He decided to add a telehealth component to the company’s medical practice management platform. According to a survey done by the company, 56 percent of users plan to continue using the telehealth feature even after resuming in-person appointments.
SimplePractice was able to stay ahead of the curve by thinking about what technology problems private medical practitioners still need solved. It’s this intense customer focus that has enabled Spector and his team to find success—the company hasn’t taken outside funding since launching in 2012—without staffing a sales team. Yes, instead of a sales team, the focus is placed on providing a seamless onboarding experience for users on free trials.
Free trials help software (almost) sell itself
The SimplePractice approach is certainly not for every company, but even the most sales-focused organizations can benefit from it. Just because the company doesn’t staff a sales team doesn’t mean that there’s no in-person support provided for trial users. Mike Schafer, customer onboarding lead, told Built In that SimplePractice sets up onboarding video calls with all trial users and operates daily “in-person” classes and Q&A sessions.
Free trials are only as valuable as the time users actually get to spend with the product or service. With this in mind, Schafer and his team created tools to ensure new users spend less time reading FAQ articles and chatting with the support team and more time using the features of the platform.
“One of the major improvements was launching detailed in-product tours once trials have started,” Schafer said. “These product tours provide walkthroughs of key features without directing our customers to read a help center article or watch a video. We’re always iterating on these walkthroughs by monitoring how engaged our customers are. We’ve seen an immediate reduction in incoming support requests from brand-new customers.”
One of the major improvements was launching detailed in-product tours once trials have started.”
SimplePractice lets its product do the talking, and while this may be too radical an idea for many companies, it does show that fine-tuned free trial programs can be a major source of new business. One thing to remember, though, is that the goal is not to remove the human element from the onboarding process altogether. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“For us, the most critical part of onboarding is creating a sense of partnership and community between the customer and our team,” Schafer said.
Virgin Hyperloop doesn’t sell hardware or software but rather an idea of what the future of transportation could be. The company has been making its pitch since 2014 to both investors and governments around the world and is currently developing hyperloops in the United States, India and Saudi Arabia and has raised $368.4 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
Virgin Hyperloop doesn’t operate a sales team, but the company has been selling its hyperloop project to government regulators for years now and is a case study for companies with longer sales cycles in how important it is to both educate “prospects” and create internal champions.
Invest in (prospect) education
The Virgin hyperloop promises the comfort of a train at the speed of an airplane, all without the limited reach (at least in the U.S.) of the former and the claustrophobia of the latter. This is an idea consumers and venture capitalists can easily get behind, but government regulators and lawmakers aren’t exactly known for being on the cutting edge of technology and need a bit more education.
While tech is an industry known for flouting or attempting to evade regulation, the Virgin Hyperloop team has taken the opposite tack. The company has determined that the only way to get the hyperloop project off the ground is by working with the government, not around them.
“We spend a ton of time just educating people on what a hyperloop is,” Kristen Hammer, business development manager, told Built In during a September 2019 interview. “[Officials] can’t give us intelligent regulation if they don’t know how the system works and what the moving parts are.”
“We spend a ton of time just educating people on what a hyperloop is.”
The Virgin Hyperloop team has made interacting with and educating lawmakers a focus of its go-to-market strategy, and it appears to be bearing fruit. In early 2019 the U.S. Department of Transportation launched the Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology Council to “identify and resolve jurisdictional and regulatory gaps that may impede the deployment of new technology,” such as the hyperloop. Along with direct lobbying, the company has also experimented with influencer marketing through its “Partner Program” to reach government officials.
While few if any tech companies have a product like Virgin Hyperloop, the company does share similarities with SaaS and hardware companies that operate on longer sales cycles and have to educate buyers about their product. In addition to helping government regulators understand how a hyperloop works and the promise it holds, these outreach efforts create natural touchpoints that help the company stand out in its increasingly crowded field.
The pandemic accelerated the shift to online shopping, which has created incredible opportunities for shipping and logistics companies like 3PL Central. The business has seen a surge in demand for its warehouse management platform, which is used by third-party logistics providers to manage their inventory, automate routine tasks and billing, and provide increased transparency to customers. 3PL Central recently closed a $45 million funding round, pushing its total funding to $62.5 million.
Although California is aiming to fully reopen by June 15, it’s difficult to imagine that the return of brick-and-mortar retail will pull shoppers away from their computers. That said, the third-party logistics segment is growing increasingly competitive, and 3PL Central is far from the only organization offering warehouse management software. To help its sales team stay ahead of the pack, 3PL Central has invested heavily in capturing the voice of the customer.
How to derive ROI from VoC
In a broad sense, voice of customer, or VoC, is about capturing and analyzing customer feedback. Common tools for collecting VoC data include customer surveys, Net Promoter Score and anecdotal feedback. 3PL Central takes things a step further, though. Mike Sanders, director of customer success, said customer feedback is used to both refine product updates and in the development of new solutions.
“When releasing product updates, we implement our customer discovery programs with five to seven key customers and user data points from all perspectives to triangulate on key functionality and data that meets the core needs,” Sanders said. “Our product ideas program incorporates submissions from anyone in our customer base and uses a community voting process to validate and elevate ideas.”
Sanders and his team provide indirect support to 3PL Central’s sales team by incorporating customers into the product development process, thereby enabling account executives to be more confident in the solutions they’re selling. In turn, the sales team supports the customer success team’s efforts to capture the VoC by providing feedback from their prospect interaction.
“It is just as important to learn from mistakes as it is to understand how to repeat successes.”
Sanders says his team’s efforts are continually evolving, and that an equal emphasis is placed on studying what went right and what went wrong, which creates a feedback loop that constantly arms the sales team with up-to-date information for their customer profiles.
Redgate Software knows a thing or two about how to succeed in tech sales. Redgate was founded in 1999 in Cambridge, England, and unlike many of its contemporaries, the company not only survived the dot-com bubble burst but thrived in its aftermath, especially in the United States. In a 2019 interview with Built In, Greg Tillman, president of Redgate’s U.S. division, said the company sold to 91 percent of the Fortune 500 and 35,000 other American companies.
Redgate’s first product was a bug tracking tool delightfully named “Aardvark.” Today, the company is known for its database management and DevOps tools. While technology has been key to Redgate’s success, their sales team has been key to its stateside expansion.
Never stop writing your playbook
One of the secrets to Redgate’s sales success is its playbook. Kaulana Shum, a sales manager at Redgate’s Pasadena office, previously told Built In that when it comes to writing playbooks, leaders need to resist the urge to ever literally and figuratively close the book.
“At some point, you’ll feel like the playbook is complete, so you push it aside and let it sit,” Shum said. “I recommend fighting against this tendency because the playbook should be a living document. If a sales team doesn’t adapt and optimize, then they’re getting outclassed by their competition.”
If a sales team doesn’t adapt and optimize, then they’re getting outclassed by their competition.”
When it comes to writing the plays, Shum acknowledges that he doesn’t have all the answers and actively sources contributions from his team. According to Shum, this collaborative approach both boosts the confidence of his team and sharpens their skills by having them break down their methods in minute detail.
“The message they get is that they are a great LinkedIn sales prospector, or they run great demos,” Shum said. “When writing about the topic, they tend to deconstruct every step in their process, making them even more deliberate in this skill. Adoption soars when everybody participates. It becomes ‘their’ playbook, not ‘their boss’’ playbook.”
