Sales FAQs
All the Q&As that we've collected for Sales
How do I ask for a business introduction?
We are on our scaling journey and wondering what is the best fit for our needs mid term: Hubspot or SFDC. Does anyone have experience with both and can share the pros & cons?
An enterprise have sent us a contract which requires us to get insurances like commercial general liability, professional liability insurance, etc. How do we go to get about it and what is rough pricing for it etc.?
Do you have any tips on kick-starting a sales funnel? E.g. automation, workflows, etc.
Has anyone worked out how to do a SaaS reseller agreement?
We need a tool for marketing, sales pipeline, and also customer onboarding at a good price. Any suggestions?
What are your thoughts on affiliate payouts?
How did your compensation plan for your first sales look like? What was the ratio between the base and the incentive, and what was the incentives based on?
Does anyone recommend any vendors who can get prospects' mobile phone numbers?
Any suggestions on email lists vendors?
What is the feeling of "finished product" that they should have on the last months of the pilot? We need to decide of a timeline of features and performance to reach during the pilot. Do you have any experience to share on this matter?
What deadlines should we set for the Fastrack investors for the signing/wiring?
What's the best service / API to turn an email into a user's role, e.g. marketing / engineering / leadership / product etc?
Does anyone have a Sales Contract template for per-user/month deals we can use as reference?
A friend started a company and wants to give up some % of sales if I help him find new customers in the US who'd sign a contract which results in revenue for him. What % of revenue from order could I ask for?
Any thoughts on using Salesforce for tracking customer success & adoption? Or is there a better thing out there?
What is your experience in selling common stock (for a bit of founder liquidity) during an investment round?
Aside from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, what other tools do you use to reach out to leads?
Can anyone share an example template of a sales commission agreement?
What are your thoughts on Chargify, Recurly and Chargebee? Any experiences with other subscription management platform?
Has anyone tried Cleverly or something similar?
What's the spare budget of a PM at Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Baidu for which no approval needs to be done?
Any good examples of an uncapped plan suited for a monthly SaaS revenue business?
Does anyone know of an email campaign tool that can send emails until a task is completed?
Does anyone have a mobile CRM suggestion?
Any recommendation for software to send email campaigns that looks natural and not automated?
What are your thoughts on booth sponsorships at industry specific conferences that you're already speaking at? Was the ROI higher than spending on AdWords?
We're proofreading the contract template for our first customer.
Question: XYZ shall pay our company an amount of: a) just $Z, b) $Z + tax?
Any opinions on outsourcing sales development/sales reps? We’re talking to a company called Hypofusion that provides outsourced SDR and sales functions.
Any tips/advice in selling into local government?
Any advice on a sample email sequence after users subscribe to a newsletter?
We sent our advisor a document giving 100 shares as a "thank you" for agreeing to help us for free. Should we stop including stock in all our advisor agreements?
What is the best way to get contact leads and accounts from Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Any suggestions on how to increase % of people showing up for our calls?
How do you inexpensively scale beyond an outbound strategy (1 salesperson) + customer referrals?
What should I include in my Executive Summary or 1 pager?
What should I expect at the Customer Summit?
How do I create a Business Impact Assessment Template?
How do I craft my 60 sec Elevator Pitch?
How should I approach lead generation?
How should I approach sales?
What do you do to prevent your outreach email getting suspended by Google?
We sent a lot of emails and it says that our DMARC isn't set even though it is and we might be blacklisted. How to get around this?
We have a customer ready to get on a contract. We would like to walk away with monthly advance payments for the entire contract period. Is there any template (payment terms/contract) we can use for a start?
What are your thoughts on having a self serve demo vs no demo (i.e. contact us to set one up) for highly technical products and how it impacted conv. rates?
Does anyone have some good cold email for sales templates?
Are there Terms and Conditions or User Agreements for (web)app usage templates you like/use?
What are some role titles for individuals that are "buyers" for consumer products? Head of ________, etc.
I know we're supposed to personally write every single sales email when we're just starting out, but does anybody have a sample email that has worked well for cold-emailing potential customers? Just trying to get new ideas for crafting our own.
Hi all, what crm+integrations do you use for email/LinkedIn mailings for potential customers?
What service are people using to find someone's email address?
How do you typically handle sales meetings at CES? Not sure if I should meet them on the expo floor, hotel, setup a meeting room etc.
Is LinkedIn premium worth paying $80 per month?
How do you take an LOI to a POC?
I'm putting together the "blurb" that I'm asked all the time. What do you put on it?
A simple script to crawl linkedin connections to make them into a more indexable and searchable list: https://github.com/angl/linkedin_crawl/ sharing in case it’s useful for others. use it as your own risk as I didn’t read the linkedin ToS very carefully
Does someone have a good LOI/MOU template for a customer?
How do you properly issue invoices to customers in India for a US entity (taking proper care of taxation etc). Any softwares we can use for this?
have you used legal counsel to review customer contracts? What could be the cost of it? Does $3,000 sound too much? (this is enterprise sale contract for >$100,000)
When doing a PoC with a large company, who owns IP related the PoC created by large company?
Anyone have a template or an RFP you may have completed as an example?
Any advice on finding contacts at companies whose employees aren't on LinkedIn? Mattermark hasn't been helpful. It's possible the companies are actually wholly-owned brands, in which case advice on how to find parent companies would also be very helpful.
Anyone knows a sales tool which interacts with LinkedIn? We drove some campaign through LinkedIn and now have to deal with all the answers and follow-ups
A potential customer scheduled a call w/ our existing customer for a reference. Is there anything we should be doing with the existing customer to prep them / make sure they are good advocates or, is that likely to come off as shady?
Can anyone share a template of a customer consulting agreement?
We have a CTO wanting a reference from a customer. I have a CIO who has worked w/ us closely & can provide the CTO a decent reference. Advice on best practices? Should I tell CIO not to share pricing information? Should I provide him with a template?
Anyone recently run a sales advisory program? Essentially, incentivizing sales executives for introductions to prospects. Looking for inputs on what kind of compensation structure has worked and what did not work.
Two fortune 500 companies want to pilot with us. Not sure if I should ask them to review the legal contract first, or arrange security check first then discuss the contract. Which should go first to make the sales successful/quick?
Anyone worked with innovation department of F2000 companies before? Trying to find the department in big corps that deal with startups/scout new technology but don't know which keywords to start with, like how these departments are usually named?
What tool would you recommend for outbound sales emails?
I’m looking for a CRM that’s lighter than Salesforce and optimized for outside sales, but able to use offline.
Anything to consider when evaluating CRMs?
What's the best way to collect inbound leads on your website? Specifically, what tool/product are you using?
Does anyone recommend a good Sales Bootcamp for CEOs? I'm a technical founder and I'd like to up my sales game by learning some sales techniques and strategies. Any suggestions?
I am looking for recommendations on any mobile based Sales app for tracking team sales
Does anyone have data on typical sales cycle duration for enterprise sales?
Anyone had a broker agreement for SaaS solution? What is the best business model with a broker who is providing a strong customer connection? Does a broker receive % of recurring revenue?
We have a large customer who wants to start a trial ASAP& I want to position so that we don't get slammed by them but also doesn't make it look like we're too small to eventually handle their volume (we just need time). Any advice on the verbiage to use?
Does anyone have an old PoC or Pilot contract you could share?
Trying to come up with a list of all the extra stuff for an enterprise/on prem deployment of a cloud based product- trying to make a list to show there is a LOT of work to take a cloud product on prem and help justify a higher price
Has anyone invoiced a European client for your SaaS subscription? I want to make sure that I handle VAT correctly. I want the customer to be responsible for all taxes and duties.
I'm starting to build an SDR team for executing on cold emails/calls & generating leads. Have you found an SDR in your domain or you found a generalist and trained that person? What specific things did you look for in an SDR?
Have you guys had a customer that asked for a W9? They’re not supposed to issue a 1099 for software service so curious to see if there was any other reason they may have asked.
We have a 6 figure sales contract with consulting in phase 1 (pilot) and licensing in phase 2. There will be a monthly fixed payment throughout, & value added bonus starting in phase 2. Does any of you have a contract template we could start with?
Anyone have good tips or hacks for attending industry specific tradeshows your target customers are attending? Want a way to find new leads beyond just networking at the conference. We weren't able to get a booth, but are brainstorming other hacks.
Any suggestion on a mentor/coach/help to negotiate a larger enterprise deal with a customer? around $5M ARR - customer is sending his senior director sourcing & some finance director & I am quite alone.
Which is the best sales automation tool that allows you mail sequencing and send it to a list of leads? Also if that can be connected to a CRM tool.
We’re looking for a good contract lawyer (for Enterprise SaaS contracts) as well as a negotiation lawyer (to help for redlines and follow up calls)
Some customers we talked to at the customer summit asked us for our sales deck. What would be your opinion on that and what should we be careful for?
How have others dealt with security concerns from the IT team? we have sufficient options and suggestions (3rd party audits, on premise installation, etc) but the guy from IT said we aren't big enough of a company to trust their data to us
Im struggling a bit w/ pricing our SaaS product, especially for large customers who ideally want many things. What would be a good starting point & once they go into a PoC, how do you go in & ask them to convert to a full customer and start paying money?
If you know a company has a pain & your product can solve, what’s the best way to find a strong connection? What tools can help us scrape linkedins? Are organization tools useful?
Trying to close a large customer and they are asking to see a copy of the Security Awareness Training we have administered to our employees. Anyone else have to do this? Did you actually do an online training, or send a document out to your employees?
Have a contract w/ a customer saying they're open to piloting as long as we pass their IT bar. Anyone asked them to sign a paper at this point in case they flake? Anyone have good sales contract to use that talks about going from pilot to full roll out?
What is the typical protocol with collecting $ from a customer for a POC? We definitely want to maintain a good relationship but don’t want to have to follow up several times for every payment.
Any suggestions on how to deal with an answer of a prospect like this? ” Have you currently performed any work with a top performing US electric utility?” - which we haven’t (being a startup…)
We contract w/ health plans, offer service to patients & get paid when prescriptions filled. Deal size varies based on #patients enrolled &time they are on meds. How could I structure sales comp given varying deal/product performance?
Anyone had a customer cancel a contract mid-term saying (CEO told me) it was signed by someone un-authorized to sign (VP Sales, in this case). anything to be done here? they still have 6 months of payments remaining on the contract
Does anyone have a builtwith or datanyze account? Can you share accounts?
Looking to use an inside sales person to work w/ MQLs or other leads & get them further qualified. Looking for input from those who built an inside sales team or outsourced it. If hired, what profiles worked? If outsourced, which companies did you use?
Would you pay 3500 in registration fees + 1500 for flights + accommodation for a relevant conference in Florida which can generate leads? Given that you have one $80K contract + POCs+ about $100K in the bank?
We are looking for ways to get a list of companies which use Microsoft Dynamics as CRM. Datanyze is one option but it’s going to cost us around $3-5K (pretty steep!!). Any other options / techniques / hacks ?
What’s an appropriate commission % for a first sales rep if they’re getting a cash and/or equity base?
We are reviewing out market analysis (asking how many eCommerce websites are there). I usually use 'mattermark.com' but I’d love to double check the result. What do you use?
When offering annual contracts w/ billing upfront, is it good to have a 3 or 6-month opt-out clause w/ a refund? or is it better to charge twice? at the beginning of each 6-month cycle & not touch refunds? or better to eliminate any opt-out options?
How do we plan out getting paid for roll out delays? Draft a structured plan in the proposal? Y$ (>X$) for the first 200 users in the first month paid upfront? And scale down Y to X as we scale up the number of users?
What is the general advice in situations where a company asks for ownership of a percent of IP since they’re paying the “NRE” cost of the pilot?
I would love to talk to someone who has closed a deal with an enterprise. We are in negotiation rounds now where we could potentially have 20K users from one enterprise. But the roll out will take time. So pricing has to be done right
Anyone used an account based sales tool that they like? Overall, want a solution that keeps track of the tactics, has the ability to match it with our key buyer profiles, and then sequence the plays.
For those in enterprise sales, have you found that publicity helps accelerate deals that are already in your pipeline?
how much are you paying for outreach.io?
Any recommendations to get Visiting cards printed in SF (or online vendors who’ll deliver in SF)?
One of our big clients is asking for an extended timeline. Instead of Fall 2017 deployment, they want to push it for April 2018. Any advice on that?
I would also be interested in seeing similar templates for sales pilots if someone has!
I have a client who well into a pilot and near final on decision ... Some lower level folks have asked for my top 5 competitors...how does one deal with this question?
Has anyone built a customized solution of your primary product for a large corporate entity before? I’m trying to figure out what I need to bring to the table at our first meeting.
Does anyone have a standard NDA agreement we can send to a customer? A sample in the vault?
For a SDR, what is a good number of quality prospects that he/she should out-reach per day?
To receive payment from a new customer, they want us to "participate in an electronic transaction program using either Ariba Interactive Email or the Ariba Supplier Network (“ASN”)”. Does anyone have experience with this / know what’s involved?
Recommendations for Outsourcing SDRs
Anyone using something like BuiltWith.com for tech based leadlists? We're looking for B2B companies that have a complicated web app, and a customer support team using Intercom full time.
I'm currently working on pricing. Do you have any recommendations or suggested reading on how to create cost breakdown and do pricing for HaaS products? I am not sure where to put previous cost of work done to create the product.
Got a rejection reply from a lead worth min $100k in annual revenue. What would you guys do? How would you turn this into a sale? We had been talking to them for a couple months
Recommendations for vendor for outbound lead-gen / meeting set-up? Ideally with cost per meeting comp component
What's the protocol for SaaS renewals? We have our first renewal coming up soon! Do we just have them sign the same contract with new dates? Are there specialized renewal contracts typically used?
I’m trying to do my first pricing negotiation and need some tips on pricing. In particular, I’ve set my pricing model very high and now need a few ways to discount the price to bring it back down just in case they try to haggle.
Does anyone know a good outreach/dripcampaign tool that works with outlook365 or outlook mac?
How do you reach out to these innovation departments in big companies?
We have a customer who is piloting our product. Should we charge them?
How do innovation teams make decisions?
What is negotiation?
When you’re trying to negotiate on pricing, how do you look at your data to adjust your pricing based on the value of your product/value to customer?
How do I calculate probability of certain price point when my customers differ in how much they are willing to pay?
What is bargaining?
What are best practices when you're on a sales call?
What is the purpose of a sales script?
What is the general structure of a sales call?
What are the fundamental sales elements
How does one go about building a script?
We want to contact 1000s of people (via cold email) but I am apprehensive of using mailing lists since that might reduce our chances of them reading the email. I am curious if any such tools to send mass emails exist?
Pre-order Sales Strategy
Alchemist Mentors for Business Development / Growth past Series A
Help with Lead Gen and Warm Intros
Lead Gen with Workshops
Building Communities for Lead Generation
Lead Gen Outsourcing?
Getting Paid for Webinars?
Automating Cold Outreach
How to get from LOI to Contract?
Transitioning from LOI to Contract
Obtaining Trade Show Contact Information
Corporate Sales Compliance
Securing Paid Pilots
Customers asking about SOC2 Compliance
Understanding the Differences Between B2G and B2B Sales
Crowdsourced SDR Advice
We started to build our CAB and some of the people we reach out to ask if there is equity involved. What are the best practices around it? If the advisor worth it, what are the normal equity if any?
CAB Resources
What is the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and how did you reach out to the people on your list?
I have CAB leads asking “what is the overall time commitment?” Still thinking about our format, but leaning towards a 12 month period w/ individual bi-weekly calls, an “online forum” with some “hangout” discussions based on certain milestones.
Is there documentation of the CAB process after securing their interest?
Getting pricing push back from a CAB prospect that our price is too high.
I feel he is just haggling&it's possible to end up ~$5 PEPM. Worried low PEPM when projecting it for the fully featured GA product to be $10 will look bad to investors.
I had a potential CAB member ask for what % he’d be getting instead of just amount of shares. did people actually share this knowing it was pretty low?
We're about to start recruiting for our CAB. Alchemist materials say offering a small amount of stock, like 200 shares is optional. If we don't offer that inducement in our opening letter, what do we expect is "in it for them" to join our advisory board?
In terms of CAB, would it be weird to approach more than one executive of a big corp?
How do you “officially” get someone on the CAB? Any agreements to sign or is it just verbal good faith thing?
We sent out 200 invitations for the CAB; have 54 responses. Should we start multiple CABs so people don’t feel like we let EVERYONE in, or should we push people out?
Regarding sending email sequences for CAB invites. Did I hear a coach say Don't send HTML emails?
What is the best way to keep potential customers interested in our product/service if we're unable to convert our CAB to sales?
What do you offer to the high-level decision makers in your CAB? What are their feedback on number of shares?
We have a CAB member that wasn't involved in a pilot with his company but with another one. He's doing referrals for me and I'm not sure if I do the contract and how is he involved in the process. Should he be in the sales process at all?
We have a CAB underway (using the Advisor Template) and they're asking if we have documentation that this falls under an 83(b) election w/ respect to IRS requirements so that their accountant can submit that. Any suggestions?
Concerning CAB, what do you usually do if a person replies that it would be a potential conflict of interest with them advising us on a product/service that could create a benefit to competitors?
Any experience with a non-performing CAB advisor? We had one who did not perform according to the contract so we won't be proceeding in giving them any equity. Is there a standard "format" to be used?
Do you know how a VC would react to a company that has dozens of CAB members on the cap table? Could this create logistics/regulatory nightmare later?
Customer Advisory Board Frequently Asked Questions