Sales is hard. B2B sales is harder. Startups trying to launch enterprise sales have the hardest job of all. SalesDev.Global provides live sales coaching to help your portfolio meet customers and grow sales. If your portfolio companies are not working with enough customers, SalesDev.Global can walk them step-by-step through sales development. It’s like having a VP of Sales on-call.

SalesDev.Global can help your portfolio companies immediately to:

  • Meet customers!
  • Validate their ideas with users, so they build the product customers want
  • Test their prototype or MVP, to avoid nasty surprises at launch
  • Start selling!

Hear what startup founders say about SalesDev.Global coaching:

The Sales Coaching Plugin for Your Accelerator

Now your accelerator can provide your portfolio with live sales coaching, a complete sales and marketing curriculum plus community. Developed for Silicon Valley tech accelerators, this program lets you immediately offer: 

  • Private 6-week intensive coaching programs intensives for individual companies or the whole portfolio
  • Extended quarterly and annual programs
  • Invite your current mentors to participate

Do your startups meet enough customers?

Many B2B startups don’t talk with customers early enough. Founders want to have their product and story perfect before showing them to potential buyers. They postpone customer feedback, which is so crucial for early-stage startups.

The most successful B2B startups engage with customers as early as possible, so they can:

  • Test their product concepts
  • Start to build sales relationships
  • Solve specific customer requirements
  • Begin the sales process as soon as possible

SalesDev.Global will help your startups find and meet these critical early customers.

Five stages to B2B startup sales growth

Find & meet customers

B2B startups may postpone meeting customers because it is so difficult just to find them. Working with customers requires different skills than software, hardware or other technical product development. Founding teams may not have anyone with sales experience.

SalesDev.Global will walk your startups through:

  • Identifying the “watering holes” where customers gather
  • Building outbound contact lists of qualified customers
  • Making personal contact and building customer relationships
  • Identifying the Pain they feel, and the Hot Buttons that will motivate them to buy your product quickly
  • Proposing, negotiating and closing sales
Finding your beachhead market

(excerpt from Stage 1 coaching module)

Is your portfolio testing MVPs?

Many startups don’t know how to design an MVP (minimum viable product) or how to test it with customers. SalesDev.Global will lead your companies through a proven process to identify what aspects of their technology need to be tested, design an MVP and recruit customers to provide feedback.

MVPs do not need to be expensive. We’ve helped startups hack hardware testable prototypes out of lawn mowers, videos and wearables they purchased on Amazon. Software startups can use wireframes and other prototyping tools to engage with customers and start the sales process.

Build & test your MVP

(excerpt from Stage 3 coaching module)

Meet Our Founding High-Tech Sales Coach

Since his first job as a hardware engineer in Silicon Valley over 30 years ago, Dave Millman has held sales and technical roles in startups across a wide variety of industries: 

  • Cloud computing, networking and wireless communications
  • Semiconductors and semi manufacturing equipment
  • CAD/CAM/CAE/EDA
  • Enterprise, desktop and mobile software

Dave has helped hundreds of startups to understand their customers’ problems, identify the cost of that problem, and discover the Hot Buttons that motivate them to buy a solution. He can coach your startups from the start of their customer journey all the way to revenue.

Your B2B sales coach Dave Millman

Testimonials

“Most founders are product focused. They don't understand and often have no experience with customers. While there's nothing as hard as actually getting an order from a customer, it's usually easy to get their early opinion. Everybody loves to give advice.

“SalesDev.Global has the right approach. They teach founders how to get in front of customers to get that early opinion. When the product finally comes it will be the product that the customer wanted. It then becomes a lot easier to close the deal.
But it will still be hard!!”
John East
Former CEO, Actel
“SalesDev.Global delivered two half-day workshops for our portfolio company CEOs. Both workshops were extremely well received. Semiconductor startup founders are typically strong on technology but weak on sales and marketing. Dave’s workshops showed them how to get in front of customers early and often. The whole experience was extremely relevant for the high-tech markets our companies serve. The sessions were highly interactive and the consensus from the CEOs and Silicon Catalyst team in attendance is that it was a valuable training experience.”
Pete Rodriguez
CEO, Silicon Catalyst
“My company was getting ready to pivot. We needed help to focus the whole team on new priorities and new customers. I hired Dave to run a SalesDev workshop for us in Boston. Dave brought audio customer interviews to the session, and helped our team analyze what the customers said, which was really valuable. We were able to create a viable strategy in just two days. It can be really hard to get a team of over-achievers pointed in the same direction, but Dave did it with the SalesDev workshop and particularly the customer feedback. He's been a great advisor ever since.”
Ramses Alcaide, PhD
CEO, Neurable
“We manufacture semiconductor metrology tools. Selling them is difficult because the target market requires us to reach to a small number of technical people within very large companies.

SalesDev.Global has helped us with every aspect of reaching that market, from messaging to outbound campaigns that have opened the doors at major accounts. They even created a product video to use during the campaign. I’m happy to recommend them to any deep-technology company.”
Bulent Basol, PhD
CEO, Active Layer Parametrics

Accelerator FAQ

Most SalesDev.Global clients use their coaching time to plan and implement sales programs including: 

  • Identifying their target market
  • Creating and running outbound campaigns
  • Planning, creating and delivering demos, presentations, videos and webinars
  • Planning and building their MVP and recruiting test customers
  • Building relationships with early sales prospects
  • Planning and running evaluations
  • Proposing and closing sales 

Your coach will work with you to identify your most important sales activities, plan them out and manage the project.

Many established accelerators have a network of mentors. These mentors may not have the time for weekly live coaching, or have access to a full B2B sales curriculum. SalesDev.Global can incorporate your experts into the program so they can teach their areas of expertise. This provides your portfolio with the best of both worlds: your local experts plus our proven coaching and curriculum.

Sales training is great, until it’s over. SalesDev.Global provides ongoing coaching to help your portfolio through every step of sales development.

If you have incorporated a specific sales methodology like Solution Selling or Challenger Selling into your program, you will find that SalesDev.Global integrates well and gives powerful insight into customer pain and requirements.

The founders and coaches at SalesDev.Global are engineers who have spent their careers selling tech in Silicon Valley. We’ve sold cloud infrastructure, SaaS, software, hardware, semiconductors, CAD/CAM/CAE, semi equipment, IoT and more. 

B2B technology buyers look for these attributes from their solution providers:

  1. Clear understanding of the problem
  2. Credible and robust solution
  3. A complete solution, or a roadmap to get there
  4. Measurable ROI

SalesDev.Global will teach your portfolio how to demonstrate to customers that they have all four.

SalesDev.Global has taught startups in Asia, Europe and throughout North America. 

Sure! Click here to take a look around! 

SalesDev.Global offers accelerators a variety of programs that start at six weeks of coaching for each startup in your portfolio. Please contact us for details.

SalesDev.Global works with B2B tech startups starting from when they first conceptualize their idea, all the way through launching sales of their production product. If a startup would benefit from a part-time VP Sales with industry experience, they will benefit from SalesDev.Global.

Sales is hard. B2B sales is harder.

Contact SalesDev.Global to get live sales coaching, on-demand training and a support community for your portfolio.

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