Working in my capacity at as an EIR at Balderton Capital, I have recently written a new publication, The Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales, with the able support of Balderton Principal Michael Lavner and the entire Balderton Capital team. This guide is effectively a new edition, and a new take, on the prior, excellent B2B Sales Playbook.
The guide, which is published as a microsite, is also available in PDF format for downloading.
I’ll put the opening quote here that the editors omitted because it’s nearly unparseable:
“I have learned everything I need to know about sales. Sales is saying ‘yes’ in response to every question. So, now, when a customer asks if the product has a capability that it currently lacks, I say, ‘yes, the product can’t do that.'”
— Anonymous CS PhD founder who didn’t quite learn everything they needed to know about sales.
In short, this guide’s written for you, i.e., the product-oriented founder who thought they founded a technology business only to discover that SaaS companies, on average, spend twice as much on S&M as they do on R&D, and ergo are actually running a distribution business.
The guide has seven parts:
- Selling: what founders need to know about sales
- Building: how to build a sales organization
- Managing: how to manage a sales organization
- Renewing/expanding: teaming sales and customer success
- Marketing: using marketing to build sales pipeline
- Partnering: how to use partners to improve reach and win rate
- Planning: planning and the role of key metrics and benchmarks
While there are numerous good SaaS benchmarking resources out there, the guide includes some benchmark figures from the Balderton universe (i.e., European, top-tier startups) and — hint, hint — we expect to release those benchmarks more fully and in a more interactive tool in the not-too-distant future.
The guide is also chock full of links which I will attempt to maintain as sources change over time. But I’ve written it with both in-line links (often to Kellblog) and end-of-section links that generally point to third-party resources.
I’ve packed 30 years of enterprise software experience into this. I come at sales from an analytical viewpoint which I think should be relatable for most product-oriented founders who, like me, get turned off by claims that sales has to be artisanal magic instead of industrial process.
I hope you enjoy the guide. Feel free to leave comments here, DM me on Twitter, or reach me at the contact information in my FAQ.