Sales - The biggest challenge for B2B startups

In B2B startups, Sales and customer traction is the strongest driver of valuation and the main indicator of success and progress. However, at the same time, it is the biggest operational problem in most of them and the number 1 issue. According to one of our surveys, it is the most discussed topic in board meetings.

Why? 

Sales in a startup requires a lot of experience and skills in the following key areas:

• product market fit
• methodologies and frameworks
• psychology
• negotiations and contract law

Those things are usually not part of the curriculum of an engineering or even business major at a university. Sales strategies are also often counter-intuitive and their implementation requires a specific mindset.

However, most founders of high-tech startups have a technical background and no Sales experience. But still, Sales is heavily underestimated by many founders, they often try to do it themselves or with junior sales people for way too long.

Even when founders realise, they need to hire experienced Sales people who fit into a startup environment, it is extremely hard to recruit ones that both understand how to build up Sales in an early stage, but also know how to scale it.

Touro Solutions

Scope

We help startups to build up their Sales organisations. We have worked for many startups and also Fortune 500 companies. Our work is very hands-on and operational and includes:

• developing go-to-market strategies
• supporting recruiting with leading-edge processes (including interview guides) as well as sales enabling
• building up sales processes and analytics incl. forecasting and board reporting
• establishing sales methodolgies that fit to the respective growth stage

Operational Model

We provide mentoring suited to your requirements, ranging from bi-weekly calls, advisory board seats to more operational fractional work.

Costs

Our remuneration model is highly flexible and adapted to startup budgets. Therefore, you as a startup can afford such a strong experience and your sales costs highly correlate with your revenue and sales success.

References

We work with the best B2B software startups in Germany that are backed by the most renowned investores like UVC Partners, Cherry Ventures, Earlybird, Target Partners, eCAPITAL, etc.

Our clients include e.g. Build38, Loyalty Prime, Synera (formerly ELISE), OpenCampus, Netviewer (now Citrix Systems, NASDAQ: CTXS), nfon (Prime Standard: NFN), Cuculus, and Market Logic.