Our Approach to Sales: Bottom Up vs. Top Down?

frologic’s sales team was a very small team. Just before the exit, when we closed annual revenues of several million euros, and employed more than 40 people, effectively only 4-5 worked in sales. But how did we manage to make this work?

While certainly there was room for improvement, we had a somewhat different approach to sales than most traditional software sales organizations.

Nobody in our sales team had a real background in software sales. Initially this was no conscious decision. In the first years, we didn’t really think of sales as a dedicated role. Instead we just answered requests, helped prospects who evaluated Squish, sent quotes for licenses and, without much pressure from our side, closed some deals.

After a few years, we recognized that sales isn’t just a side job but instead a dedicated role. With some focus, dedication and good processes, it should be possible to increase revenues.

Initially, Reggie took on that role. But let’s clarify what sales meant in our context.

For us, sales started when a lead reached us. We never spent time on cold calling or proactive customer acquisition. While there may be organizations which can make this work, in our opinion the return of investment of such sales activities is insignificant at best and a big waste of time.

Our approach was different. Our vision of a well tuned sales process was to start working with minimally qualified leads. But how did we get them?

Without really intentionally doing it, from the start we spent the very limited marketing time on rather effective content marketing. We will talk more about that in a different article.

In short, the goal of the limited marketing we did was to drive prospects to our website and make them fill out a request to download a trial version of one of our products.

Each request for a product evaluation was considered a qualified lead. This is where our reactive sales process started.

The typical process then included a basic qualification of the lead (based on 2-3 questions, company, country, etc.), handing out the evaluation download and providing first class technical support during the evaluation (more about our approach to customer support and its significant role for the success of froglogic, in a different article).

During the evaluation, we allowed our prospects to 100% focus on the technical evaluation and not interfere with typical sales related questions. The role of the sales person was mostly to watch from the side lines if the evaluation is progressing and in case this wasn’t the case, to follow-up with the prospect and/or technical support to make progress.

Only after a successful technical evaluation, the sales person started a discussion about licensing and purchasing. In the vast majority of cases, this was a very smooth ride and a purchase order followed rather quickly.

Due to that process, very little convincing from a sales person was needed throughout the process. Instead, the product and customer support spoke for itself to make a convincing case.

What is also notable is that nearly all of that communication was email-only, which allowed us to be very efficient. Only on very rare occasions we had phone calls or online meetings. Even less so we visited customers on-site. This happened a handful of times per year at most. While face to face meetings are nice from a social point of view, unless you sell products or services for millions per deal, such meetings are a waste of time and resources if you are trying to scale sales.

The realization was that our initial contacts were typically technical people (developers or QA engineers) who were looking for a solution. Only later in the process, we started talking to people in those organizations which had budget power. The beauty of that was that the technical people were fully convinced and it was them who made their managers sign off the purchase. 

This way, initial deals were often small deals. But as with the initial product evaluations, we always wanted to let our products and services speak for themselves. This meant that many of our customers who started with only a few licenses expanded the use of our tools over time and grew into very significant, large customers over time.

So we did not only close small deals, but the approach to large deals was different. We didn’t cold call decision makers and spend (or waste) a lot of time convincing them that they needed our products and hope for the one big deal to get closed.

Instead we worked with many “small” leads and helped them to become ambassadors for our products in their organizations. Many of the initially small customers grew significantly over time.

In the end this also ensured that we were never dependent on one large customer, the largest customer we ever had generated less than 1% of our annual revenue. This way, even when a large customer didn’t renew a contract, the impact of our bottom line was minimal.