Startup and Small Business Sales

A Small to Medium-Size Business is smaller, savvier, and has less time to waste than larger companies. Here's how to navigate the SMB sales process.

Sales forecasting is all about having the right information and foresight to drive continuous growth. Learn about 7 sales forecasting strategies for startups.

Looking for a startup marketing plan to drive traction? Don't leave success to chance! Our guide offers 9 steps to build your winning strategy.

Everything you need to know about sales hiring for startups—the stages of hiring, a 5-step recruiting process, and key strategies to develop a high-performing sales team.

Selling to SMB companies is a useful skill, especially in 2024. More businesses exist today than ever before. Here’s how to sell well!

Maximize your potential with this comprehensive guide to startup sales. Learn from Close's founder about what it takes to achieve long-term success and scale up.

To validate your business idea, you'll need to define a goal, experiment and refine your hypothesis, and develop a plan.

Fast-growing SMBs and startups need revenue intelligence to forecast based on facts and react to early warning signs in your pipeline.

If you’re starting your own consulting business, avoid common consulting mistakes like being afraid to say no, trying to be good at everything, or forgetting to ask for referrals.

New client onboarding can be a challenge. How do you make your consulting onboarding process smooth and easy? Learn from 8 top consulting pros.

What does it take to be successful in startup sales consulting? Learn from 8 top-tier sales consultants who regularly work with startups at different stages.

If you're looking to grow your sales skillset and gain more revenue, free sales training is the way to go.

NEW Calling on Sequences in Close. Get ready to optimize your team's workflow, remove decision fatigue, and put your best processes on repeat.

Kevin Ramani went from building Rovers for Mars to building startup sales processes for hungry founders. Learn about his story & top tips for startups who are ready to scale.

When should you hire a sales consultant? Learn the key signs your team needs one, plus 7 mistakes to avoid for a smoother process.

Ready to take your startup to the next stage of growth? Learn how Scott Leese took 5 startups from $0 to $25M ARR in <3 years.

At its best, sales is facilitation, not manipulation. Here, guided by this philosophy, you'll learn 4 strategies to improve your startup's revenue process. And bonus: I'll show you how Close can help.

Driving revenue growth is the major goal of every sales and marketing strategy. Find out the 12 effective ways how to maximize revenue by reading this article.

If you're the founder of an incipient startup, it's tempting to offer your product or service for free to get to initial traction. That's mostly a bad idea though - which is why I advise founders to focus on getting paying customers as soon as possible.

The role of the sales manager has shifted and transformed at a faster pace in the past two years than ever before. At the same time, some fundamentals remain true: Like Peter Drucker's famous adage that management is doing things right, and leadership is doing the right things.

In today’s competitive market, you need to rely on a variety of approaches to ensure you have a competitive edge. Sales collateral enables you to create content and resources that connect your prospects with your brand and help speed up the sales process.

Convincing strangers to give you money isn’t easy, especially in these times. To help startups pitch to investors successfully, this article will discuss common mistakes startup founders should avoid, what investors look for in an investor pitch, and how to create a pitch deck that sells.

Back in the days when we ran our sales consultancy and sales outsourcing company, we did a lot of cold calling for Silicon Valley technology companies. One of our clients was selling software directly to doctors. And the main challenge we had with this was that doctors are really hard to reach.

With thousands of classrooms around the world going digital, the increase in demand for online learning tools exploded. Here's how three startups quickly rose to the challenge to help serve and empower their customers.

COVID-19 has hit nearly every industry and has forced businesses to make radical shifts. We sit down with three customers in different industries to discuss how they’ve adapted to current times.

I transitioned to remote work 4 months ago, and I’ve had the opportunity to make plenty of mistakes (and learn from them). Here, I’d like to share those mistakes (plus the successes) with you and provide actionable tactics for your own WFH approach.

Startup recruiting is hard. The challenge is twofold: finding incredible talent and then making them want to join your team.

Here's how a tiny company started closing huge deals with federal government agencies—and how you too can get started in B2G (business-to-government) sales.

Salespeople are an ambitious group. We want to close more deals. Blast through quotas. Beat the competition. But it’s not just sales ambitions that we set our sights on. We’re also ambitious about moving up in our careers.

Many founders lose confidence when they meet with investors. On the quest for validation, their entrepreneurial courage goes right out the window.

Why do most startup pitches suck? Because they follow a flawed formula.

Every year, hundreds of startup founders move to Silicon Valley. But even if you’ve had success elsewhere, it’s a risky move.

You’ve managed to impress a roomful of enterprise-level executives. They love your product. They share your vision. And they laughed at the cat joke you practiced all morning.

Several years ago, I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley. I planned to build what I thought would be my legacy—a billion-dollar business that would change the world.

When your car has an alignment issue, it’s difficult to stay on course. The same is true for your company. If everyone isn’t working toward a common goal—if one tire is tilted even slightly—you might just end up in a ditch.

In the early days of your startup, the ultimate validation is money.

This is it: Demo Day. The day you’ve been waiting for, and the day every moment in your incubator was preparing you for. Are you ready?

Smartly.io is a fast-growing Facebook ad optimization solution for agencies and performance marketers. I joined them as employee #32 in the summer of 2015. A few months later, our team had grown to double that size. Now, we’re almost 120 people, and we’re looking to hire 80 more.

Is Y Combinator worth it? It’s funny: You can ask two totally different YC alumni that question and get two totally different answers, even if they both attended the same batch.

Interviews are like first dates, where the candidate and the interviewer try to pass off the best versions of themselves. Candidates sell you on their immaculate resumes, and some canned responses. You sell them on unlimited coconut water, and a foosball table.

Startup sales teams: We’ve made a mistake. In our haste to distance ourselves from the sleazy, Wolf-of-Wall-Street-style salespeople of yore, we’ve over-corrected. Now, instead of being too hostile, modern day salespeople are too friendly; not necessarily with prospects, but with one another.

If you managed to land your first 100 customers, congratulations! You’ve already made it further than the majority of startups ever will.

What’s the quickest way to tell any investor, advisor, or experienced entrepreneur that you have no idea what you’re doing? Simple. Just tell them this: “We didn’t spend any money on marketing.”

Every year, more and more people are leaving the security of their corporate jobs for the thrill of working at a startup. Maybe you’re thinking about making the switch yourself, but you’re not sure if it’s for you. And even if it is, you aren’t sure how to make the change.

You finally did it. After all that time spent on design, development, and testing—you’re ready to launch your startup. Now it’s time to figure out how to launch it.

No one worries more than a first-time entrepreneur, and it’s not hard to see why. From fundraising to product demonstrations to initial hires, it seems like there’s always something to worry about.

2015 proved that even unicorns aren’t invincible. Snapchat’s value took a 25% hit. Evernote went through a second round of layoffs. Optimizely had to let go of 10% of their workforce. (Let’s not even talk of Zenefits.) Good Technology sold for less than half of its top valuation.

Great news: Your startup landed its tenth customer today. You haven’t seen a cancellation yet, and all your clients are amped whenever you talk to them. You're ecstatic about your startup's traction.

We recently took on an intern fresh out of college—an overachiever who knows how to take care of business. She’s ambitious, hard-working, and smart as hell. At school, she didn’t just meet her goals—she blew them out of the water.

Your product has a bit of traction, but you can already tell it’s not going to push your business to the heights you want to achieve. The feedback you get is positive but lukewarm—not enough to keep your business afloat.

Here's the recording of a webinar we did on the seven deadly sins of fundraising. This was my 40 minute webinar, followed by a Q&A. This webinar is more than 1 hour long, so you can either set aside some time to watch it or download our 1-page the fast-action guide.

Here's an interview Steli did with Flavio Rump, who completed a hustle internship at Close a few weeks ago. Flavio is a very successful founder, sold a startup for millions and helped a series of startups with growth and marketing.

The path to success is paved with clear outcomes, good or bad. Most startups fail not because of their failures, but because of being stuck in the middle; what I call the maybe zone.

This is a guest post by Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures. Check out his great blog on SaaS marketing, customer acquisition & churn reduction. When it comes to sales hustle, Steli is the man. He’s taught us about thepower of the follow-upandturning failed demos into sales.

If you're a founder, or managing a team, you're probably overwhelmed by requests from people who rely on you for feedback, comments, input and approval. Every day, there's a new barrage of emails in your inbox, requiring you to respond, so that somebody else is able to do their job.

Here's a post we originally published back in 2012 on our ElasticSales blog. We're republishing it because many people are still asking us how we got into YC.

Explore essential strategies for resolving startup conflicts and maintaining team morale in high-pressure environments.

I was talking to a good friend of mine who founded a very successful SaaS (Software as a Service) startup a few years ago and is currently considering a major new direction in their product.

Inspired by the latest essays from Paul Graham urging startups to Do Things That Don’t Scale and followed up by 37Signal’s Jason Fried’s excellent post about why their newest product is launched using lots of strategies that don’t seem to scale, the Close Team wanted to share some of our most...