ICYMI: A recap of Q1 The Revenue Architect

Sales coaching highlights

I’ve coached fantastic 20 startup founders and teams in the last six months. Here are some of the highlights from our work together.

Helped the founders of a seed-stage legal AI startup grow from $0-$2M ARR in under a year. The key to our success was to build a repeatable sales process to qualify and close inbound leads and to help the founders improve their selling skills and maximize win rates.
Helped the founders of an early-stage Apple device management startup acquire 3 large enterprise customers. The key to our success was to maximize warm intros from the founders’ networks, create a structure for POVs and improve multi-threading skills to get alignment across stakeholders.
Helped the founders of a pre-seed stage ad tech startup win their first customers and get acquired. The key our success was to create a target list of early-adopter publishers and advertisers and prepare for sales calls in order to get the tech deployed quickly and show value.
Helped the founder of a growth stage SaaS startup build an account management team and reduce churn. The key to our success was to define customer segments based on revenue and usage, build a set of simple plays for each segment and review customer calls to improve discovery, upselling and objection handling skills.
Helped the CS team at a growth stage publisher tech startup improve their account planning and discovery skills. I designed and ran bespoke training sessions for the team where we built account plans for actual customers and practiced discovery and objection handling skills using real scenarios.

If you’re looking for coaching to improve your sales skills, learn more about my sales coaching services here.

How to build an account plan. Shows you how to build an actionable account plan in under 10 minutes and use it on an ongoing basis to drive renewal and upsell.
How to make your first sales hire. Explains why first your sales hire often fails to deliver and lays out how to prevent it happening to you.
How to build a territory plan and hit your quota. Covers how to build a territory plan that stacks the odds in your favor and includes a template to build out your own.
How to handle a buyer who won’t make a decision. Shows you how to spot an indecisive buyer and the specific steps to take to avoid finding yourself in a “timing not right” situation.
How to quickly spot problems in your executive team. Explains how to use your board meeting prep and output to spot problems with strategy, prioritization, planning and execution.
How to use AI to find and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses. Lays out how to use AI to summarize your competitors’ online reviews into strengths and weaknesses and incorporate them into your sales conversations.
How to run a GTM retro to find and fix your biggest problems. Retros are

Answering your questions about doing demos. When to start demoing, how long should your demo be, how to demo to a group vs an individual, how to wrap up a demo and how to stop getting ghosted after a great demo.
Answering your questions about early-stage customer success. When to hire your first CS rep, what to have them focus on, what to measure, how to engage customers who are at risk of churning and should you track NPS (spoiler: no).
Answering your questions about refining your ideal customer profile. What to do with leads outside your ICP, how to figure out your ICP when you are pre-revenue, how often to review your ICP and what to do if you think you have multiple ICPs.

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