Developing a Sales Strategy - Part One by Intercom

Crafting a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. You can delay it until you’ve acquired your first 100 or 1,000 customers, but at some point you’ll need to find sustainable traction in the market.
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sale sale STRATEGY Part customer develops business SaaS
About Techcelerate Ventures

Tech Investment and Growth Advisory for Series A in the UK, operating in £150k to £5m investment market, working with #SaaS #FinTech #HealthTech #MarketPlaces and #PropTech companies.
sale sale STRATEGY Part customer develops business SaaS
DEVELOPING A
SALES STRATEGY
Brought to you by Intercom
Crafting a sales strategy is one of the core activities every 
business will have to undertake. You can delay it until you've 
acquired your first 100 or 1,000 customers, but at some 
point you'll need to find sustainable traction in the market. 
A well defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful 
growth. It's how you'll know who your target customers 
are and how you'll sell to them.  Get it right and watch your 
company's growth trajectory go up and to the right. 
Go without one and risk seeing your business flame out. 
The challenge for you is deciding which sales motions will 
actually drive your strategy forward and leaning into just 
those few. It's far too easy to say your initial sales team 
will be both SMB and enterprise, inbound and outbound, 
hunters and farmers. The reality is that without focus, doing 
any of those effectively is nearly impossible. The key is to 
experiment and iterate with discipline, so you can zero in 
on the sales strategy that's right for your business.
Here, you'll learn from top practitioners in the field about 
their winning sales strategies and the lessons they've 
learned scaling sales. Taken together, their advice is a 
roadmap to identifying and navigating the crucial inputs 
to long term sales success. 
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
3
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
What it takes to attract 
your target customer
Des Traynor, 
Co-Founder, Intercom
  Regardless of whether you're selling a SaaS 
service or a physical good, you need to understand 
what it takes to attract your target customers and decide 
how much revenue you want to earn from them. That 
gives you the ability to plot how you'll reach those 
customers, which gives you three options:
These axes were created by Joel York to define the three 
key sales models for SaaS businesses and are a great way 
to help you understand how to move forward. (The 
bottom-right quadrant, a complex sales process with 
low value customers, isn't a viable business, so it's not 
even worth considering.)
High value
per account
Self-serve
Complex
sales
process
Low value
per account
Enterprise
Transactional
Self-service
Many startups, when using this model 
to define themselves, end up in the 
bottom-left quadrant because it's the 
easiest one to scale in. The problem is 
that being in the lower left means you 
usually end up with a high amount of 
low value customers. This limits how 
you can acquire customers. Spending 
$300 to acquire customers for a $99 
product isn't economical.
So depending on what industry you're 
in, picking the wrong quadrant could 
4
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
leave you dead before you even start building anything at all. 
Here are some examples:
 Some industries are notoriously hard to reach, e.g. 
content marketing isn't as effective for dentists as it is 
for developers. This means you might need to pay to 
acquire customers.
 Some industries deal in annual contracts, NDAs and SLAs. 
This means you need to invest in a sales process.
 Some industries are used to PowerPoint sales presentations, 
handheld onboarding and onsite training. This means 
you need a high contract value to profit on a customer.
Evaluating if you're able to offer a self-serve experience or a 
complex sales process and then determining if there's a high 
or low value for each user helps you decide how you should 
approach the customer.
Self-serve
Complex
sales
process
Low value
per account
High value
per account
Excerpt from Intercom on Starting Up. 
5
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
When you need sales 
in a self-serve world
John Barrows, 
Sales Trainer
   If you're selling something that has 
a super low Average Contract Value (ACV), 
say, $1,000 for the year, it's hard to justify 
having sales in that equation whatsoever. 
But, if you're in somewhat of a complex sale 
that involves a sales cycle longer than 20-
30 days, and at least two or three calls with 
multiple people, sales is a critical part of that 
to make sure it goes right.
John Barrows, as heard on the Inside Intercom podcast. 
You can only automate and educate people so 
much before they want to talk to somebody. 
Maybe $5,000-$10,000 is when people get 
more uncomfortable putting their credit 
card online and buying without talking to 
people. But that threshold exists.
6
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Focus breeds 
excellence in sales
LB Harvey, 
VP of Sales, Intercom
    One of my guiding principles as a sales 
leader is "focus breeds excellence." Sales reps, 
especially new ones, struggle to be fabulous at 
multiple sales motions. That means when you're 
formulating your sales strategy, you need to be 
explicit about creating the right, differentiated roles 
on your sales team and ensuring you're incentivizing 
and prioritizing the right motions within those roles.
Let's take inbound sales and outbound sales, for 
example. Inbound and outbound require vastly 
different skills and workflows. The managers on an 
inbound team need to be obsessed with analyzing 
top-of-the-funnel trends  the marketing channels 
bringing in high quality leads  and increasing the 
conversion rate from lead to opportunity with 
tactics like live chat. Managers on an outbound 
team, on the other hand, need to be able to get 
sales reps gunning to go out and evangelize the 
product's amazing benefits for customers. The 
point is they're different teams, different reps, 
different motions.
7
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Do you know  
who your ideal 
customer is?
Tomasz Tunguz, 
Partner, Redpoint Ventures
 The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The 
perfect customer. Can you describe it for your 
startup? The more precisely you can describe it, 
the better. That will simplify disqualification. But 
articulating the ICP well isn't enough.
Vague ICPs are problematic. The company will 
focus on too broad a customer base, waste 
time and effort with unqualified prospects and 
blunt their sales pitch with irrelevant value 
propositions.
Clear ICPs can also be problematic. A clear but 
useless ICP might be: a disenchanted thirty-
something mechanic who likes to play German 
board games, read Nietzsche and watch MMA. I 
can clearly articulate my ICP to myself and others. 
The target market is clear (and niche!)
But how would I identify this person if I'm 
looking to sell to him? Where would I begin 
8
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
generating leads? Mechanics meetups? Board 
game conventions? Nihilist forums?
A good ICP must serve three purposes. First, 
the ICP should enable me to identify a good 
prospect quickly. Second, I should be able to 
simply convey the ICP to someone else in such 
a way that they can find other ICPs. Third, the 
ICP should be defined so systems can be built to 
identify them.
A better ICP is: VPs of marketing in GDPR-
affected regions; or heads of sales with teams 
larger than 50 people in technology; CEOs of 
profitable pool supply companies.
These ICPs are much easier to identify using lead 
generation tools. They can be communicated to 
teammates simply and computer systems can 
be tooled or trained to identify them at scale. 
To grow, startups must scale and distribute ICP 
identification from one to ten to hundreds of 
people. A narrow, clear and identifiable ICP is a 
crucial ingredient in that growth.
Excerpt from "An Often Forgotten Characteristic About Your Startup's Ideal Customer Profile."
9
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Why salespeople 
need to think like 
consultants
Mark Roberge, 
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business 
School, and former CRO, Hubspot
   When folks ask, "What's changing in sales; 
how is it different?" the common theme is that it's 
going more and more inside. Twenty years ago, 
you had to actually talk to a salesperson just to do 
your buying process. They had information that 
you needed, and the best reps were very skilled 
at withholding that information in exchange for 
the information they wanted from you  who's 
the decision maker? How much budget do you 
have? What are your needs?
But today, I can be in my slippers on Saturday 
night, after I put the kids to bed, and I can find 
the top five vendors in a space. I can find out what 
they do, how they are different from one an-
other, and how much they cost. I can try many of 
the products for free, and I can buy many of them 
right on the site. Why we need sales becomes a 
huge question, right?
Excerpt from "Hubspot's Mark Roberge Talks Inbound vs. Outbound Sales, Transparency and Big Data."
We  need  to  do  a  
better  job,  when  we  
engage  with  someone, 
to  engage  with  them  
in  their  context.
Those of us in sales have to step up our game in 
order to add value to that whole ecosystem. We 
need to be there as consultants and advisers to 
our buyers. We need to do a better job, when 
we engage with someone, to engage with 
them in their context. We need to do a better 
job understanding their specific goals and the 
specific challenges they're trying to solve, and 
translating the generic marketing on our website 
to their business. We need to tell the story from 
their perspective. That's the skill the best reps 
now possess.
10
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
It's never too  
early to invest  
in sales ops
LB Harvey, 
VP of Sales, Intercom
 Setting up a sales operations team is 
absolutely paramount to your success as a sales 
leader. They're a strategic arm that puts your sales 
strategy into high gear. For all the talk about sales 
hacks and magic, sales operations is really what 
helps you nail the right motions for your team.  
Let me put it this way: if your sales reps are race 
car drivers, your sales ops team is the pit crew. 
They're the ones ensuring your frontline sales 
team gets deals to the finish line with precision 
and consistency. And just like in auto racing, 
you can't have one without the other if you 
want to put your business into hyperdrive. 
That's because sales ops is the collision point for 
so many crucial sales initiatives. If you want your 
sales reps to spend more time selling and less time 
doing administrative work, then you need sales 
systems to optimize away the inefficiencies. If you 
want your sales reps to be on the cutting edge of 
the market, then you need sales enablement to 
train them on competitive positioning and to 
curate external sales trainers. If you want to own 
your pipeline and your forecast, then you need 
sales analytics to identify high potential prospects, 
flag accounts at risk for churn and set the right 
incentives to execute against those goals.
Sales ops is incredibly powerful for your business, 
and you can never invest in it early enough.
For all the talk about 
sales hacks and magic, 
sales operations is 
really what helps you 
nail the right motions 
for your team.
11
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
From SaaS 
startup to mature 
SaaS business
Joel York,   
CMO, Accellion
  As a SaaS startup evolves into a mature 
SaaS business, growth aspirations naturally 
lead to the desire to expand market reach to 
new prospects and to expand product footprint 
with current customers. The SaaS startup that 
enters the market with a customer self-service 
SaaS sales model represents the origin of a 
natural evolutionary path. 
The theory is straightforward. The nimble 
SaaS startup that has built a large self-service 
customer franchise for a super simple product 
starts pumping in new features, develops 
modular pricing schemes, adds a few sales 
reps and sets off on a quest to increase its 
average selling price from $10 of monthly 
recurring revenue to $100 MRR to $1,000 MRR 
to $10,000 MRR and beyond!
However, the straightforward tactics belie 
the tectonic strategic, operational and cultural 
shifts required for success. Underlying the 
simplicity of the customer self-service model 
is a mass market, low cost competitive 
strategy. Meanwhile, the enterprise sales 
model assumes a highly differentiated product, 
usually characterized by cutting edge internet-
enabled innovation. 
Maintaining the simplicity of the customer 
self-service model as a successful SaaS start-
up introduces more complex products and 
Selling up the value chain
Complexity
(CAC & TCS)
PriceHigh
Low
High
Transactional
Enterprise
Startup
Graveyard
Self-service
int
ern
et 
ec
on
om
ics
co
mp
eti
tiv
e s
tra
teg
ies
typical star
tup
 ev
olu
tion
 path
unique
dierentiation
low cost
large scale
12
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Excerpt from "SaaS startup strategy | Three SaaS sales models."
purchase processes in close proximity to the 
originally simple, self-service product and 
purchase process requires careful planning 
and execution. Should the products be sepa-
rate offerings or modules of a single offering? 
Should transactional sales arise by skimming 
the cream of customer self-service prospects, 
or should entirely new lead generation vehicles 
be put in place? Are enterprise customers just 
transactional customers who are all grown up, 
or an entirely different species? 
It is often said that moving upmarket is easier 
than moving downmarket. This is probably 
true, but it is NOT easy to move up without 
inadvertently abandoning the down.
13
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Experiment with 
your sales strategy 
 before you pivot
Elizabeth Cain, 
Partner, OpenView Venture Partners
  Sometimes a sales leader or founder or 
even CEO gets too excited by too many new 
ideas. Every new idea is a GREAT idea that 
he or she wants the entire company to chase. 
Moving too quickly, all in different directions, 
and pivoting regularly creates confusion  you 
hamper your own progress. The most common 
risk I see? Moving to enterprise. Companies 
close one or two enterprise customers and get 
big deal fever. They pivot their entire business 
strategy and point the outbound team at ONLY 
enterprise meetings.
A culture of experimentation needs to be 
established at the top and pushed down into 
an organization. It takes guts to test things, 
fail and go again. Leadership teams need to 
create room for this and encourage creativity 
without repercussions.
So how do you actually run a disciplined 
experiment? It starts with a hypothesis  what 
are you here to test? Then you need to identify 
the different factors, design a process, agree to 
a timeline and be crystal clear on the metrics 
you will track to determine if it worked. 
After you run the experiment, you need to be 
rigorous in your review. If it worked, the next 
step is to figure out how to cap out this option 
 how far can it scale?
How to run 
a disciplined 
experiment.
Experimenting can 
be made simple 
using these four steps.
1. Generate hypothesis
2. Design experiment
3. Run experiment
4. Analyze result
Excerpt from "The 3 mistakes every company makes building the outbound sales model."
14
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Be wary of  
"happy ears"  
with upmarket  
customers
David Katz,   
Director of North America Sales, 
Intercom
  There's a classic response people have 
when talking to larger companies  I call it 
"happy ears." It's incredibly easy to be overly 
optimistic when you see a sexy new logo walk 
in the door. The thing you forget is that at 
large organizations, there are lots of people 
there who are constantly evaluating tech-
nology and looking for ways to use those new 
tools to help them stand out or leverage a 
proposal to negotiate better terms with their 
current vendor. But out of all these evaluations, 
very few purchases are actually made.
As a sales leader, you have to be very dubious 
of this situation. The reality is that you 
should walk away from 99% of these early 
conversations with larger customers. If you 
can't get the stakeholders on the other end 
to give you straightforward answers, agree 
15
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
to a mutual evaluation plan or meet shared 
deadlines, then it's time to walk away. The 
absolute worst thing you can do is waste your 
time or theirs.
Even if these early conversations do go well, 
inevitably there will be things larger customers 
ask for that you simply don't have yet. There 
are four critical questions you can ask to get 
ahead of their needs from the get-go:
 What are their must-haves from a current 
functionality perspective? And why? Often-
times, this will be things like administrative 
capabilities, reporting functionality, security 
protocols and integrations or APIs.
 What are their must-haves from a future 
functionality perspective? And why?
 What are the nice-to-haves they hope will 
come in the not too distant future? And why?
 Lastly, what are your current differentiators 
that get them really excited about taking a 
bet on you and bringing your tool into their 
stack? And why?
If you don't have it, you're not good at it and 
the plan isn't for you ever to work on it, be 
honest with your stakeholders. The right 
early upmarket customer will ultimately be 
sold on the vision you paint for them, not 
on a checklist. People evaluating software 
vendors, especially people evaluating lots 
of them, appreciate transparency. It means 
you'll hear "no" more often than not, but 
getting to "no" faster is preferable. And when 
the time is right down the road, those same 
people will also remember you for it. 
The right early 
upmarket 
customer will 
ultimately be sold 
on the vision you 
paint for them,  
not on a checklist.
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
Sales channel 
partners  
accelerate growth, 
not create it
Steli Efti, 
CEO, Close.io
   First, let's get the basics out of the 
way: If you're trying to get your first 10 or 
100 customers, resellers and sales channel 
partnerships aren't the right channels for you.
If you've only just built a minimum viable 
product that you're trying to sell so you can 
learn from real customers, these aren't the right 
channels for you.
If you don't have a steady and stable stream of 
customers and monthly income coming in, these 
aren't the right channels for you.
Here's why:
1. Resellers and sales channel partners are 
strategies to accelerate and speed up existing 
growth, not to create it from scratch.
Excerpt from "When (and how) to scale your business with resellers and channel sales partners."
2. They are only good at selling something that 
already works. Their incentive is to keep 
their clients happy and make money. And if 
your product doesn't help them do that  if 
you can't prove that your product brings 
tremendous value to its users  then they're 
not going to put in the effort.
However, if you're six months to a year in; 
have a product that already has traction and 
growth; have experimented with and found 
success with content marketing, paid ads, and 
inbound and outbound sales; and are bringing 
in hundreds of thousands or millions in reve-
nue, then it's a different story.
You want to only engage with them when the 
time is right and you're ready for that type of 
scale. Never before.
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
You can't afford 
to treat SaaS  
customers like 
they're disposable
Stan Massueras, 
Director of EMEA Sales, Intercom
  Unless your business is transactional, 
nurturing your existing customers should be 
just as important as acquiring new logos. The 
way I see it, closing a deal is just the first step. It's 
what comes after  onboarding, upselling and 
cross-selling, renewal  that determines your 
customers' ability to grow with your product 
and, consequently, the fate of your own growth. 
The cost of selling SaaS can be pretty high. The 
median SaaS startup takes 11 months to make 
back the money spent acquiring a customer. 
In other words, you need your customers to 
be satisfied and willing to pay you for nearly a 
year. Otherwise, you're losing money on every 
customer you acquire, which will cause your 
company to flame out. 
That's why I think it's so important to have 
account or relationship managers on your sales 
team dedicated to building relationships with 
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Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
customers. It's a difficult job, but an important 
one. By being a trusted partner to your customers, 
a good relationship manager supports your 
business in three ways:
1. Expansion: Growing accounts that are spend-
ing a low amount but have high potential.
2. Retention: Maintaining accounts that are 
spending a lot and are at the top for growth.
3. Contraction, i.e. monthly spend stability: 
Fighting to keep customer spend at the same 
level. 
If you want to achieve sustainable growth, you 
have to keep your customers around for as long 
as possible. The plain truth of the matter is that 
companies built on recurring revenue can't afford 
to treat customers like they're disposable.
 
The plain truth of 
the matter is that 
companies built on 
recurring revenue 
can't afford to treat 
customers like 
they're disposable.
intercom.com/sales
Intercom  The world's first customer platform helping 
internet businesses accelerate growth