Introduction

Startup sales is all about growing monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Sales can be divided between Inbound Sales and Outbound Sales but there are many specific sales techniques within these 2 categories.

I pretty much tried every type of startup sales techniques. These are the 5 that worked the best for me when it comes to generating leads but also closing deals.

Startup Sales Strategy 1: Social Selling

Social Selling is by far my most favorite startup sales strategy, not only because I own a Social Selling Software but because it brings the best ROI.

The fastest growing startups are growing with social selling without spending any dollars on ads. I already covered some social selling examples but here let's see how to make it work for growing a startup MRR.

Why Social Selling works in startup sales?

The three pillars of Social Selling

Social selling is basically a mix between content marketing (1), sales prospecting (2) and relationships building (3).

Every best salespeople knows this: the best sales you make are the ones when you're not selling but when you're building relationships.

Social selling helps you stay top of mind by always engaging with your prospects. you basically can't fail. It's like being a constant ad that your prospects see every day.

This is why when it comes to B2B sales, 78% of salespeople are outselling their peers with the use of social selling. We're mostly talking about startup sales people here, so SDRs, BDRs and AEs.

How I do social selling to sell my startup

To land more sales for my startup, what I've done is that I created a social selling loop.

Step 1: I use 2 different social selling software

Social selling can be time consuming if you don't automate certain parts of the job.

First, I use a content scheduling tool called FeedHive which helps me schedule and repurpose my content across LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube and much more.

Secondly, I use my own tool for the sales prospecting part of social selling to manage both cold & warm prospects but most importantly to interact with them.

Step 2: I track my prospects on social media

Once I've imported leads in Breakcold, I need to add their LinkedIn URLs and/or Twitter URLs to be able to track their activity along with their company ones on social media.

The time you save on prospect research is incredible

Step 3: I engage with prospects to generate leads and/or close deals

This phase is arguable the most important. By engaging leads, I mean liking and commenting their LinkedIn posts or Tweets.

Startup sales strategies to generate leads with social selling

If you want to dive more into these strategies, I've covered in detailed how to generate leads with social selling.

1/ Build a dream list of 100 prospects

For high-quality prospects, build a list of your dream ICP (persona). The goal is to hyper-personalize your outreach and to ultimately make all of them as customers.

2/ Social Warming on high-quality leads

Once you've built your high-quality leads list, social warm them. Social warming is basically a term to describe the action of liking and commenting prospects posts on LinkedIn for a few days/weeks before even sending them a DM or a cold email.

Social warming is a new concept in B2B sales

3/ Send a DM or a cold email

Once you've engage for a decent amount of time your prospects, it's time to contact them. If you're connected with them on LinkedIn, send them a LinkedIn message otherwise cold email is the way to go.

If they are active on Twitter, only send them a DM if they follow you because it's really hard to stand out from the inbox there and most prospects have their DMs closed.

Example of a prospect successfully reached out on LinkedIn

Startup sales strategies to close deals with social selling

If you want to dive more into these strategies, I've covered in detailed how to close deals with social selling.

1/ Engaging sign-ups

For example, every time I have a new sign-up on Breakcold. I track them and then I engage with their LinkedIn posts until I see something interesting to reach out.

That way, I proactively contact my sign-ups instead of sending them a generic automated email sequence. It helps to build trust and they might open up quicker on why they tried your startup solution and why they didn't convert yet.

It's a way to create a feedback loop so you can build a better product that convert better with future sign-ups. this is how you grow MRR in the long run.

If you've put your prospects in your social selling pipeline, it's super easy to contact them

2/ Engaging with called prospects

Once I have a call with a prospect, I personally dislike keeping the conversation going with basic follow-up emails.

Obviously, not every prospect is active on social media so it won't work all the time but if you can do it.

Step 4: I post content on LinkedIn & Twitter

Every day, I engage with prospects but I also post content.

The good thing about this social selling loop is that the more you engage with cold/warm prospects, the more they'll see your posts on LinkedIn or Twitter.

If you've created a strong bond with them, they'll also comment your posts which will bring their peers that are also part of your ICP.

This startup sales strategy helped us brining more than 2,000 sign ups in just a couple of months.

LinkedIn magnets are great sales techniques to re-engage warm prospects

Step 5: I keep bonding with paying customers to avoid churn and increase word of mouth

Once you've closed some deals or new subscriptions for your startup, you need to focus on retention. Churn is the evil for any startup and it ruins the effort of the sales team.

According to Profitwell, it goes like this: Monetization> Retention > Acquisition. It means that acquisition is the easiest part of any given startup.

Engaging with paying customers will help you grow MRR even more if you create super fans that will be able to spread the words about your product.

You can interact with multiple leads at once thanks to the prospecting feed

Startup Sales Strategy 2: Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Account Based Marketing is basically a technique where you focus on a small group of prospects instead of thousands to generate leads and/or closing deals.

Why Account Based Marketing works in startup sales?

If you have a high-paying offer or if your Lifetime Value (LTV) is high, you should consider ABM as a valid startup sales strategy.

ABM works because the high-value customers are not reachable with traditional sales prospecting. This kind of prospects need to be approach with caution because the total addressable market is pretty low (eg only 500 potential clients).

How I do Account-Based Marketing to sell my startup

Account Based Marketing is marketing based so it's mostly content marketing targeted strategies. Therefore, it's generally the marketing team which handles it.

ABM can be used with hyper-segmented email sequences which adapt to certain personas.

Visual explanation of Account-Based Marketing

Startup Sales Strategy 3: Target Account Selling (TAS)

Target Account Selling is the sales version of ABM. TAS selling is basically the fact to focus on a selected group of prospects to engage and contact them from the cold prospect phase to the closing phase.

There's many debates around the real difference between TAS and ABM so let's just remember that ABM is more for your startup marketing team and TAS if your your startup sales team.

Why Target Account Selling works in startup sales?

TAS works because it uses the dream 100 prospects method we mentioned above.

Basically, you know that the accounts you're targeting can become customers but you don't know when. Therefore you need to constantly work on them so that when the prospect is ready to buy, you'll be their first choice.

How I do Target Account Selling to sell my startup

Like the social selling strategy, you'll need to:

• build a list of 100 ideal prospects

• track them using a sales lead tracking software like Breakcold

• engage and contact prospects when it's relevant to do so

Quick-tip: target multiple individuals within the same company. Why? Because it will increase the likelihood that they'll talk about your solution together. If you manage to emulate multiple individuals from the same department (assuming you target an enterprise account for example), you'll have more chances to close the sale.

TAS selling is most suited for startups with high-paying subscriptions

Startup Sales Strategy 4: Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is one of the easiest way to generate sales for a startup, whatever the industry you're operating in. Everyone is using emails. So technically, you're only one cold email away from landing a call with anyone!

Fun-fact: Breakcold was originally a cold email software so we've written like +30 blogposts about cold emailing.

Why Cold Emailing works in startup sales?

Cold emailing is an excellent startup sales strategy because you can:

• send as many emails you want per day with a top-notch deliverability

• invalidate an offer

• validate a startup idea

• land SEO partnerships

One thing that people also forget is that cold emailing softwares are actually very well suited for warm emailing (ie the fact to nurture leads with emails that are not part of an email marketing sequence).

How I do Cold Emailing to sell my startup

My process when it comes to cold emailing is very brutal: I send 300 cold emails a day, period.

Step 1: make sure you deliverability is on point

You need to have set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Custom Domain Tracking. Finally, you email domains should have been warmed up for at least 14 days.

Make sure to have many cold email domains warmed up

Step 2: every 2 week, I go to Apollo to get leads for my startup

Apollo is a cool mix between Builtwith and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can filter leads by many parameters (technology they use, location, company size etc).

I build my lists with Apollo but sometimes I use Findymail to get leads that have been active in the last 30 days in LinkedIn because they fit better my ICP.

Quick-tip: if you want to bypass Apollo's limit, you can use Findymail (this tool also finds more emails than other email finders in the market).

Step 3: I import leads and prepare the email campaigns

My cold email campaign framework is the following:

• 10 cold email domains

• 30 emails sent per domain per day (except on weekends)

• 2 steps in my sequence

Disclaimer: it works for us but this framework will probably don't work if you have a small total addressable market. It's quite an aggressive strategy to be honest.

I've written about cold email personalization and copywriting if you need to improve on that.

Example of a cold email sequence I sent to more than 3000 prospects

Step 4: I forward the positive replies to engage them with social selling

Once I got warm prospects, I work on them with social selling to turn them into paying customer.

Before talking about the 5th strategy, an honorable mention should be made for SEO as an excellent startup sales strategy.

Startup Sales Strategy 5: Warm Emailing combined with LinkedIn

Warm emailing is the process to send emails to people who know you (eg they signed-up to your product etc).

Why warm emailing combined with LinkedIn works as a sales startup strategy?

Reaching out warm prospects is normally pretty easy. But nowadays, we're all fighting with an exterior force named: attention.

Getting the attention of prospects is hard, that's why you should use what you saw on LinkedIn to follow up on them via Email. This extra effort will help you to stand out more from the general noise.

How I combine Warm Emailing with LinkedIn

For this example, let's assume that I send warm emails to newly signed-up prospects.

Step 1: add prospects on LinkedIn

If prospects accept your LinkedIn invite, it's jackpot.

Why?

Because it will allow you to send them LinkedIn direct messages in the future but they'll also see your posts as you'll engage with them.

Step 2: track the prospects activities on LinkedIn

Like we did on previous sales strategies, track the lead in Breakcold to be able to aggregate the LinkedIn posts.

Step 3: engage with their content

Like and comment the LinkedIn posts when you see them in your prospecting feed or when you open the lead profile.

All these actions can be performed in one shot with Breakcold

Step 4: send a warm email

To send my warm email, I use the news of my prospects along his/her company ones to craft a hyper-personalized email.

Excluded Startup Sales Strategies

I excluded 2 startup sales strategies from this list.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is not part of our startup sales strategy because it's too much time consuming of a small like team like ours. Considering our ICP, it's also not the best channel.

However cold calling can be a great way to grow MRR as a startup. Indeed, cold calling is less and less use by companies which create opportunities to land meetings with it easier than ever.

Mass Mailing

Mass mailing is a sales technique from the past. Deliverability is terrible. if you want to send cold emails at scale, you need multiple domains and to warm up your email addresses.

The sales prospecting techniques that worked the best for us with our startup