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Episode 6 1

This Week in Venture Capital #61 with Vince Thompson of MiddleShift & Mo Ali of ThisWeekIn

Wednesdays at 2pm (PST)

This week Mark delves into the world of sales in the current state of startups and business tech. He welcomes accomplished sales manager Vince Thompson, formerly of AOL and Facebook, to talk about his new venture with MiddleShift. Also welcomed to the studio is This Week In’s own Mo Alo, who has been the sole reason why This Week In still runs to this day.

We’d like to thank our sponsors Fenwick & West and Assistly. Go to Assistly.com/VC for an exclusive This Week in Venture Capital special offer.

Timecodes:

00:02 Mark introduces our Sales episode with guests Vince Thompson and Mo Ali0

4:45 Mark asks why Mo is wearing a Eagles jersey on the show. Mo lost a bet

05:15 Mo works on telesales at ThisWeekIn. For how long?

07:00 What is Thompson’s Middleshift?

10:00 Selling eyeballs & selling audience

12:30 Making the money that you sell

14:18 Your first hire should be someone who’s hungry and willing towork. No VP’s

15:00 Don’t punch above your weight class

16:00 Determining a sales guy from a bad one

19:00 Never wanting to join a club that doesn’t want them as a member

20:15 Mark’s secret sales interview trick

23:00 Make sure to listen more than you talk

24:00 Selling a startup today.

27:30 Identifying your strengths and finding the path to ROI

29:30 What is a CPM buy?

30:00 Assistly Sponsor Ad

36:00 Sales people only care about money

38:00 Cashflow isn’t high…what’s the answer?

41:00 Suster: Paying a little upfront and then withholding until they get paid

42:00 The simpler the comp plan, the easier it is to see the shenanigans

44:00 The problem with the “waterfall method”

45:00 Sales people don’t want to be locked in an office

47:00 Group pipeline calls and how effective they are

51:00 One more tip from Suster on the sales world

53:00 Moneytip: Call early or call late to skip the secretary

58:00 Vince Thompson’s book, “Ignited”

64:04 Using LinkedIn to get ahead

66:00 Suster tells Jason Calacanis that Mo should get a lunch expense account

73:00 Staying on top of who is in the sales pipeline

76:00 Mark: “Don’t hire sales people too quickly, don’t hire bigpeople. Be smart, think quickly.”

  • http://twitter.com/servicecentralz Service Central

    Hi Mark, I love that you brought up the concept of applying the Agile process to sales. After seeing the success of Agile for our development team, we actually went and introduced a home-baked version of Agile into our sales team at the start of the year and have found it to be amazing!

    Beforehand, we were finding it really hard to determine how often to have a sales meeting, weekly meetings were just overwhelming our teams schedules, monthly meetings were just too far apart, and frankly fortnightly meetings made it hard to develop a good team bond and culture too. So, we introduced a fortnightly “sprints” for our sales reps. We have the sprint target meeting on the first Monday where everyone talks about what they are going to do and sets their goals in front of the whole team, then we have really quick 15 minute “stand-ups” twice during the sprint which are done as a teleconference only (Thursday morning in the first week, and Tuesday morning in the second). We then meet on the Friday afternoon at the end of the sprint to discuss how everyone went, which works out to be a great group mentoring session.

    This simple application of the broad “agile” structure has really helped us develop a strong culture of trust and teamwork in our sales team. Its a great way for everyone to learn from each other, and build up their knowledge.

    I would fully recommend implementing a similar approach to any start-ups out there with a sales team.

    Regards,

    Danial Ahchow
    Service Central
    http://www.servicecentral.com.au

  • http://www.RenegadeToolCo.com Timothy Lemnah

    I didn’t catch what school Vince went to. I felt to many questions were dodged and to much greed was expressed. One of the best shows to date though and many great angles on all 3 sides of what it takes to run an effective sales team!

  • http://twitter.com/chasedave Dave Chase

    This was a great episode on an important topic that most product-focused startups are weak at – Sales. There was a question about when telesales is appropriate. The rough cut off points are driven by revenue/customer/year. Less than $5000 and one should have a self-provisioned product. At most, you can have an inbound order taker. When revenue is $5k to $100k, Telesales is what pencils out (I’ve seen $200+k deals done via the phone) and when revenue is greater than $100k/customer, traditional field sales can pencil out. This is based on work with 35 startups mainly in the Seattle area. 

    Prior to founding my startup, I was part of a firm similar to Vince’s but focused on enterprise/SaaS software (as opposed to his media focus). It’s important to point out that the high function telesales orgs aren’t trained monkeys reading scripts, nor a boiler-room mentality (though productivity is critical to track/mesuare/expect). They can be highly professional and are appealing to sales pros who aren’t interested in traveling all the time yet they can make good coin.