Watch as our CEO Rick Pizzoli talks to this global group of budding entrepreneurs at Slush, the world's leading startup event, about the "dirty word" that's essential to your tech org — SALES. Because how much time have you documented and measured your sales strategy? You can't just rely on how disruptive your tech is anymore. You need to have a strong international B2B strategy if you want to sell SaaS to enterprises and make that mark.
Rick Pizzoli
My name is Rick Rizzoli. I'm the CEO and founder of Sales Force Europe. Today I'm going to talk about a dirty word. And that word is Sales. A lot of people talk about strategy. A lot of people talk about disruptive technologies. People talk about fundraising. But not many people talk about sales. And I don't know why. Because without sales, you don't have revenue. Without revenue, you won't have a very successful company.
So you spent years developing your technology and building your company. But how much time have you given to planning sales? And how did we end up thinking about sales or talking about sales or hoping for sales, but how many times have you sat down and documented your sales strategy and followed that strategy?
So a bit about us, I founded the company in 2003. Since then, we've helped about 100 technology companies expand their sales efforts in Europe, half of those companies were from Silicon Valley, winning in Europe and other half were European companies, and helping them expand their sales reach across Europe. Our team consists of 60 in-country account directors and account managers that are qualified for that sales target, the sales strategy of our clients. They're contracted either on a full-time or on a shared resource basis for our clients. So we offer full-service professional sales everywhere from localizing the sales strategy of our clients for the local market, to closing the first customers, expanding the market and growing the business.
The target verticals that we focus on are enterprise SaaS, telco, both hardware and applications, Channel Sales, and consumer electronics. These are some of our Silicon Valley and US clients, where we either manage their entire international sales team, or we work on a per country basis, growing market by market. We also have a very nice portfolio of finished clients. Many of them are here today.
Why expand beyond your home markets? Number one, if you stay too long in your home market, you might start experiencing a flattening of your growth. Now you can add new services to extend that a bit, but if you start early enough, looking at international markets, you can really assure stable revenue growth. And number two is you launch in your home market, you built your brand, you've built your identity, you've built your value proposition. And as you expand, you may be inclined to add new features new applications, but in doing so there's a risk of of losing your focus of trying to do too many things for too many people. And then when you do go international, it's that much harder to be successful.
Our recommendation is stay true to your core. Really be the absolute best company that you can be and when take that company international, you will be much more successful in your expansion.
Next question is when to go international? For one, be well established in your home markets. Have a really solid product. Have a clear value proposition, why somebody wants to buy your product, the value that you bring your customers. Understand that. Document and have an ROI [return on investment], you know the the actual numbers behind it. And number two, you need to have a happy referenceable clients in your target verticals. If you don't have them in your home market that can be really hard to expand to the next markets. Next, you need to have clear sales and marketing documentation, sales presentations, all the collateral ready. And lastly, you need to have clear operational processes. And so if you sell to a client, you need to know how to support it, how to install it, whether it's a direct sale or an indirect sale through channels, all those operational processes need to be documented. And number two, you need to have management and investor commitment and expanding international.
Moving to new markets is not a job that you can do on the weekends or something you can do after hours. It takes full commitment from everybody inside the organization. And that includes sales, marketing, technology, operations, legal, finance – everybody in our organization has a role to play in the expansion. It should really be dedicating 10 to 20% of their time to the international expansion process. So in launching in your home market, you have the luxury of being both the developer and the integrator of your technology, the developer and the local integrator. But before you expand international markets, you need to make the transition from being the integrator to a company that's offering packaged solutions. And this means clear products, clear product roadmap, technical documentation, technical training.
Similarly, when it comes to selling in your home market, it's typically the founders that are doing the selling. They know the market, they're passionate about their business, they're closing customers that they typically know. But that's typically also all in their head at some point. They need to get all that value proposition down on paper, down to some sales planning, and really evolved to being a professional sales company. And that needs to be done really before they expand to international markets.
So where to go? Well, to start, make a plan. Look at where you have current clients today. If you have clients in your home market, do they have international offices? Look at where your qualified leads are coming in today. Sit down with your marketing and look over the past year. Do a matrix. You know where your qualified leads are coming in from.
Look at the competition. How is the competition selling? If you have some stiff competition from the US and they're landing in London first, expand in Europe, go off to Germany or France or other Nordic countries.
Next, test your pitch in foreign markets and be ready to adapt, be ready to evolve or adapt the positioning for the target market. Your positioning and your sales pitch in southern Europe may be about saving money. Whereas in Germany, it may be about efficiency. So every market will have its subtleties. And next, first address accessible markets first. If you're a European technology company, expand first in Europe. It's easy to make mistakes locally, when you can hop on a plane and fix something in an hour, as opposed to making mistakes in Silicon Valley or Asia first. When you do go international, fully engage the process. And that means not just sitting on Monday morning sales calls. That means getting on the airplane, being involved with your sales team, being involved in the foreign markets, being involved with the prospects and the clients and the channels. It really takes active engagement to be to be successful.
Give it time. It does take a year before sometimes two years to really be successful in a new market. And you can break that down over quarters. And so the first quarter really focus on closing your lead customer, even if you need to give it away, get your lead customer, make them happy. Then in the second quarter, really focus on building your brand, signing trial agreements signing channel agreements. Then really look to grow the revenue over Q3 and Q4. Don't go elephant hunting, just because you've closed some large companies in your home market doesn't mean you're going to be closing the large companies to start within the foreign markets.
Really focus on addressable customers. Don't over-invest before you've made a success. Again, the classic mistake that American companies make is they come over, put a big office in London before they know if the UK is even a market for them. Maybe they've arrived too early, maybe they've arrived too late.
So test the markets, get some sales, and then build your business around the revenue. There's a number of strategic options you can use. Most companies will use a blend of these and these may evolve over time. So by starting out, you may be flying back and forth from your home market. It's a great way to test new markets and to understand the demand from new markets. But you will be limited in your ability to penetrate new markets by flying back and forth. And also if it's your management team doing that, they will lose focus potentially on building the business.
Next is signing channels. It's a great strategy. But signing channels is not a free way to expand your sales, somebody still needs to close the lead customers to make sure that the channels are even interested in working with you. Somebody needs to hand select those channels, somebody needs to do the technical training, the sales training. And that's typically that's best done by having somebody on the ground in those markets.
Next, opening up foreign offices is great way to show commitment to supporting your accounts, but do so once you have some revenue to justify it.
And lastly, the service of contracting with on-demand sales professionals is a method to grow. Now the benefits of that can be a faster time to market, lower risks, cost savings, and having people on your team that are really well qualified for your target verticals in your sales strategy. So to go a bit more depth on that. If you're employing local teams and you're opening up offices, it's expensive. There's budgeting, you rent an office, you're recruiting, you're hiring recruiters, you're flying back and forth – it can take six to 12 months to [go through] that process, before you're even engaged in the markets. Whereas, if you work with a contract team, you can, from the word Go! you can have a team up and running and selling within a month to two months. And that really gives you a six to 12 month jump on the competition. So in many cases, success is about beating your competition to market. And also on cost, by opening up offices and recruiting people, there's a lot of upfront cost flying back and forth. Whereas they're on a contract model, most contractors work on a fixed fee and a commission, so you really have a block of costs upfront that you can save, following that ROI much sooner, much more forward. And lastly, if you're working with account directors, they will be qualified per your target verticals, they will know your target space, they will be working in your target country. And if you're working with a larger sales agency, quite often there's additional support that will be available in those local markets. So it'll be management support and marketing support, sales engineering support. So that coupled with the support that you're giving from your home office – remember all the different departments really is what it takes to be successful. We say this thing: it takes a village to raise a child. We say: it takes a village to really be successful in a foreign market.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about a case study our clients Livefyre. It's a very hot, well-funded Silicon Valley company. They've closed some of the biggest publishers in San Francisco, and then the US. But they were struggling to close deals in Europe. They're flying back and forth, getting meetings, but they weren't closing the deals. And they were at a quandary because they knew the market was hot. And they knew they needed to move fast. But they didn't want to lose time by hiring people. So we met with them in April of 2013. Within four weeks, we had qualified a team, signed agreements, agreed on objectives, trained the team, and by May, they were engaged in selling in the UK. Within three months, by August, we'd close Timeout magazine for $300,000 and really started the momentum in the market. Then we closed the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, Sky News. By the end of the year, we'd closed a million dollars, [and] with the revenue expanded the European team. And now we're at about $5 million in revenue. And we've expanded the sales efforts into Asia and Latin America.
Now, really the two takehomes from this were Livefyre as a company, were laser focused on publishers. I mean, they could have gone after brands, they could have gone after gaming, but publishers was really what they did best. And so when we qualified our team, we qualified people that had years of enterprise sales experience and SaaS experience selling into the publisher market. So when they arrived in the UK, they knew the targets and had personal relationships with these people. And we were really able to gain momentum and closed majority of the business we went after. And number two is we beat the competition to market – we got there early. If we weren't starting in May, somebody else would have proposed to Timeout, somebody else would have gotten the momentum in the markets and closed the FT and other markets and other customers. So that's it for my presentation. Thank you for your time.
Audience Question
Hi! Thanks for your presentation. So sure, I really liked the things you mentioned there. I have one question regarding contracting versus going to the foreign market by yourself. Can you see that there could be a problem in the commitment if you use the contracting strategy? Like how to make them as committed as committed to your product as you are yourself? And if you go there by yourself? Sure.
Rick Pizzoli
We're not talking about outsourcing your sales, we're talking about contracting with senior specialists in your vertical, and that can be done full time. So to the visibility of the market, there's no difference. It's just the paper. So they're on a contract, and they're not on local employment. So we have full time contractors that have been with our clients for years. So the difference is, you're not stuck with European labor laws, with expensive hiring and firing. You're bringing on very senior people, people that maybe don't want to work full time. They want to work as a contractor, but they can do that for a very long time. If you don't have the money for a full-time person, you can do a shared resource. And so maybe it's halftime on your product and halftime on somebody else to test the markets. But these are professional people, they do this for a living and their commitment is to is to make it a success.
Audience Question
Thanks for your answer.
Rick Pizzoli
Sure. Thank you very much.