saasesforthemaases

Account Manager, West

Emerging Tech Sales Strategies

I recently joined a company when they were at Series A. Company is founded by legit leadership that came from C level positions at Fortune 100 companies. We got our Series B recently, but are in a space where the need is still emerging and predicted to increase in need by Gartner/Forrester over the next 4-5 years. The prediction is that our category will be fully mature in 5 years. Here's the rub.... I'm in early. 12-18 months early. My question is two fold:

1) What are some of the sales strategies you executed if you've done emerging tech sales where there aren't really "paved roads" and you had to build everything from scratch / spend a ton of customer interaction on education and validating the space?

2) What did you do during that time to generate extra cash flow to pay your bills/mortgage and not dip into your savings so much that the opportunity cost felt exhausting?

Thanks for any advice you emerging tech savages!

👑 Sales Strategy

✌️ Growing Pains

💴 Money Management

6

12 comments

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Sunbunny31

Politicker

1

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Sounds exciting. I was through this so long ago, what I remember is we worked really hard to prove value, working from customer one and branching out. It means that customer references are obviously lacking, so you're going to have to be able to find a way to speak to your value prop in an extremely convincing way and probably be very flexible in your contracting so they are comfortable taking a risk with your company.
Re your second point: I'm not sure how, but things always seemed to work out. I didn't overextend myself and worked hard, so didn't have to pick up a side gig. If you do, there are many you could entertain, but I'd put my focus into this as much as you can.
Best of luck!

saasesforthemaases

Tycoon

0

Account Manager, West

Thank you for the advice! Very helpful

1nbatopshotfan

Politicker

1

Sales

Congrats and good luck!

Point 1. Try new strategies and fail fast. You’re going to need to cycle through different approaches to build interest and build brand recognition. You’re probably doing it with less marketing support and/money that you’d hope. What type of small events can you build momentum with? Getting clients or prospects to breakfast sometimes works. Can you host an informal get together? Are your prospects located in the same cities/areas to do that? Can you join local organizations? I think you need to be as creative as possible here.

2. I recommend setting up a CD ladder that has your monthly mortgage in it, so that you’re covered for a year to ramp. Buy a 3/6/9/12 month CD for the value of your mortgage and use the money at maturation to pay the corresponding months mortgage. A strategy like that has helped me in the past when shifting jobs. It’s also helped psychologically because I didn’t think of it as coming out of savings etc.

Good Luck!

saasesforthemaases

Tycoon

1

Account Manager, West

Thanks! That CD ladder idea is really smart. I need to go look into that this week and set time with my financial advisor

Justatitle

Big Shot

1

Account Executive

1.) being in early is great and if you believe in it I hope you have some equity so that when it pops it’s really worth something to you.

2.) having a side hustle is critical. Whether it is Uber, bartending on the weekend etc… find a way to make 400-600 extra on the weekends or at night so you don’t have to touch the savings.

saasesforthemaases

Tycoon

1

Account Manager, West

Thanks, yeah made sure I got a sizable equity position. We've since moved to Series B, so the company seems like it's on the right track and the equity could someday payoff! I was able to find a side hustle with a friend helping him expand his business. It costs me about 2.5 hours a week and brings in an extra 1k but I'm going to look at my other spare time and see what else I can be doing to bridge the gap. So far this year I've had to dig in about $20k, so would like to not do that again next year :)

Justatitle

Big Shot

1

Account Executive

I had a friend that would own vending machines and I think he had 15-20 and made like 5-6k a month. There’s tons of other side hustles, the only other thing I’d bring up is asking the leadership team for a raise. The worst answer your get is a no.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

1

Rolling 20's all day

My recommendation is that you need to leverage relationships and case studies to dig your roots into a specific niche/market.
So if you get one solid customer in a space, leverage the hell out of it to keep digging into the space.
You can also utilize strategic partnerships who have existing relationships with your ICP to get in the door.

saasesforthemaases

Tycoon

1

Account Manager, West

Great advice. I'm working on our case studies deck now, and we've invested heavily in the GSI/partner space vs. hiring a dedicated SDR team. I think that's a good call for now because it's a cheap way to get trusted introductions and facilitate lasting relationships.

Njanack

Good Citizen

0

SDR

Just do it!

saasesforthemaases

Tycoon

1

Account Manager, West

Needed this this morning. Thanks!

Diablo

Politicker

0

Sr. AE

When I worked with a non-Saas start up, we used to do a lot of experimentation and failed many but at one point after many month we realized what's working the best and what's did. That was our step 1 then.

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