#ScaleStrategy is produced by DX Journal and OneEleven. This editorial series delivers insights, advice, and practical recommendations to innovative and disruptive entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.
One of the most important — and hardest — aspects of running a scaleup is figuring out how to transition sales from being founder- to team-driven. Paul Teshima, CEO and co-founder of Nudge.ai, knows how important it is to growth.
Teshima is a Canadian-born serial entrepreneur who, as part of Eloqua’s executive team, grew that company to more than $100 million in revenue over 13 years before it was acquired by Oracle for US$957 million in 2012.
In 2014, Teshima launched Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform that helps businesses find and build the right relationships to drive revenue. He secured an office in OneEleven and along with his co-founder Steve Woods (also a co-founder at Eloqua), and they have grown the company to 22 employees, landed several major enterprise clients and more than 20,000 B2B users on the platform.
Teshima spoke with Bilal Khan, Managing Partner of M6ix Ventures and the founding CEO of OneEleven, about the hard parts of scaling a sales team. (Read our full story on Nudge.ai here)
Bilal Khan: How did you manage the transition of startup to scaleup when founders go from being the primary salespeople to building out the sales team?
Paul Teshima: One of the most important aspects of scaleups is figuring out how to transition sales from being a sales team of one as a founder to a sales team. It’s also one of the hardest. Founders often overestimate how much they actually know that no one else knows, decisions that they can make in their brains at the drop of a hat in a deal cycle. It’s really important to try and simplify and understand what could be translated salesperson that they can then repeat over and over again.
I also think that first hire is super critical to be much more of an entrepreneurial sales person. A classic best practice as you continue to scale is hiring them in groups of two so that you can start removing variables because it may not be the right time to transition it you didn’t hire someone with the right skills. That stage is really delicate and you will need to be patient.
Khan: Have you transitioned Nudge.ai into a sales team approach as opposed to the founders?
Teshima: I’d say that we’re still in founders plus a bit of hybrid sales teams. So we’ve got some salespeople working on that delicate transition period now. I can tell you that I’m already overestimating how much I think they know because I know and take it for granted. I mean, of course they don’t know, it’s in my brain still. It’s about being methodical. We just brought someone in to help us really try and simplify the sales process to determine what can be scalable.
Khan: When do you start thinking about finding a seasoned sales leader? Do you immediately find someone who can start building a sales machine or is this further down the road once you hit your stride?
Teshima: It depends on where you are on a revenue curve plus the capital you have and the talent that’s available at the time. There’s definitely an argument that you hire the Director of Sales first that can carry the bag and helps to scale that initial phase. But there’s also an argument about hiring a hands-off VP to go build up the entire team. Both require early evidence of some form of scaling. You have some sort of process that defines how the sales process works today and there’s some of the things that we know in terms of the metrics about it.
Khan: What are some of the key metrics for a sales success that you think are important?
Teshima: There’s obviously the output of generating revenue in the growth program. For us, we’re in a product-led model so it’s a little bit different and a little newer. We look at early stage interest as signing up for a user, finding a cluster of users account — is it qualified product lead? — and then we ask if we can turn that into a trial that converts to a paying customer. We look at those stages which is a little different than the classic B2B funnel.
Khan: In Canada, we talk a lot about whether we have the sales professionals with the deep skill set to be able to scale companies and do B2B sales. Has finding sales talent been a struggle for you?
Teshima: Are there less seasoned salespeople in Canada who have gone from $0 to $100M than in the Valley? Yes. Do we need to solve that problem? Absolutely.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve been part of the business that has gone from $0 to $100M in revenue (Eloqua) and we didn’t have anyone to rely on but ourselves. I think it’s just a matter of going in and doing it. You are seeing lot of seasoned people coming back to Toronto and as that continues to happen you’re going to see those people train others to get to the next scaling point.
[Sales] is really about the discipline of keeping in contact and helping others in your network, knowing that it will pay back over the long term. We did a study where we showed that the average head of sales has a strong network at work that’s three times the size of an sales development rep, which makes sense.
Khan: I wanted to talk about B2B sales cycles. Those are really challenging time frames in cycles to manage when you’re starting a company. How have you hacked in on the early stages of the sales cycle from a simple cash-flow perspective?
Teshima: The hardest part of closing an enterprise deal is first finding it and then getting involved in the sales cycle itself because they’re so inundated with a barrage of outbound outreach from all these customers. The strategy I recommend to scaleups is this: You have to show some pocketed value, lock them in and then go division-to-division quickly. And do it cheaper than a competitor. Try that approach versus just the top down approach right out of the gate.
Khan: Would you do that at the expense of generating any revenue?
Teshima: Enterprises today actually have slush funds to experiment with technology where they didn’t before. It is absolutely true that if they put some skin in the game, you’ll have a more successful pilot. This opportunity allows you to qualify those deals earlier. I think you need to be pretty disciplined about qualifying and if you invest in the cycles and then put a price on it.
Khan: So you’ve landed the customer and they are paying for the product offering. You’re coming to a renewal cycle and they scale back their offer. How do you address a situation like that?
Teshima: We haven’t had that happen at Nudge.ai. If I think back to me earlier days at Eloqua, there were times when customers pulled back. It’s only a death cycle if you don’t learn from it for the other customers that are existing. You should never forget that customers can always come back in and in champions can always move jobs. You always want to do right in those situations because you never know when you’re gonna meet them next in the ecosystem. Maybe they’ll evaluate it differently.
Khan: How do you think through channel partners strategically?
Teshima: In cloud software, it’s more challenging to have channel partners because of the nature of the product. On the technology side, there is probably good synergies. On the service consulting side, I think it’s harder. If you think training your first salesperson is hard, try training channel partners all your stuff, when they have 20 competing things to sell and they’re making a small margin on your product.
You first need to establish that you can direct sell your product in a repeated way before you think about channel partners. You can get lucky and find one strategic one and go big, but more often than not you’re going to find that they’ll get all excited, get trained and they’re not going to sell anything. Even if they do close something, maybe it’s not exactly the right fit. I’d say be careful with channel partners in early stages.
Khan: Are there any books that helped you in your scale journey?
Teshima: I am probably less of a book guy than I should be as a CEO. There are two books, however, that I found helpful:
- Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great”. I especially liked chapter five about managers and this idea that the best managers, CEOs and executives don’t even want the spotlight. They’re much better being extremely streamlined and determinedly humble, inwardly focused on driving change.
- “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. One thing that came out of that was this idea of focusing on the bright spot in your startup. As a founder, you’re geared towards focusing on what needs fixing. It’s actually better and more uplifting for the business to focus on the bright spots.
