The SSIC Method for Startups

Full-time or part-time sales hires, lead gen agencies, typical consulting firms, and other startup sales solutions are typically unnecessary to early-stage founder-led startups, often hurting growth due to their poor-fit with the startup world, or due to unintentional mismanagement of sales solutions by founders.

The SSIC (SPFF Sales Improvement Cycle) Method provides you with a process driven by a fractional director of sales/GTM strategy and backend team that truly partners with your startup team and its existing resources (financial, staff, customer base, insights, etc.), working from where you are  to drive the following cycle of continuous improvement for your company’s sales organization.

The SSIC (SPFF Sales Improvement Cycle) for Startups - Grow Early-Stage Sales Strategically

What you’ll get

  • ✺

    An assigned industry-experienced, fractional Director of Sales + SPFF backend Sales Strategy Analyst(s)

  • ✺

    Go-to-market strategy development, refinement, and standardization - building toward your own FlyWheel stage of sales maturity

  • ✺

    Guidance to prevent startup failure from these 3 common issues: 1) running out of capital, 2) choosing the wrong sales/marketing strategies, 3) poor product-market fit

  • ✺

    Direct sales outreach, sales technical operations support, and consultation on key aspects of your past/current efforts as well as our mutual learnings from doing sales together

  • ✺

    Access to our Sales Strategy Advisory through being a customer. Insights from our work with all clients will come to you, for your benefit, as part of our solution process

  • ✺

    A true sales partnership, not order-takers. We sign on with you, and then we drive the effort for you, testing our strategy in sales, coming back and giving you homework for enablement/collaboration, generating ideas based on data/buyer feedback, etc. We don’t need you to manage us, we just need reasonable, agreed-upon goals so we’re aligned

The SSIC Method Online (Coming Soon…)

Creating Strategy

Executing Sales

Standardizing Sales

✺ Frequently asked questions ✺

  • While the exact engagement can be customized based on your resources which impacts your specific cost with us, the complete solution starts at:

    • $50,000 / year

      • $4,167 / month + any commissions that are cash collected within a month

    • 10% commission

    • Month-to-month billing with a gentleman’s handshake to keep at this for a year. Due to startup volatility, you and we need to be able to pivot if we find poor product-market fit, or unexpected financial events in the business, etc.

    • We aim for an OTE of $100k, meaning we want to earn $50k in commission with you over the course of a year, which requires $500k in revenue for your company at least.

  • 1) A weekly meeting with your team to review strategy, track action items, gather strategy insights from our reps sales efforts with buyers, identify enablement needs, and some open forum time to ideate on sales improvement.

    2) Our team puts time into strategy backend in between weekly meetings. This is mostly analytical and creative, so the result comes in the form of good questions we should answer, recommendations on where we need to focus, generation of content that could help us achieve goals, and the like

  • If we find our SSIC solution is a fit for your team, we source a sales professional in an industry that is the same or close to yours, then that rep executes sales 98% of the time, fractionally, typically spending about 25 hrs / month in direct outbound/sales admin to generate new relationships, expose strategy insights, and guide your team on improvement in tandem with our strategy service.

  • I can get you in touch with customers should it become necessary, however, the solution we provide is designed to manage risk for you.

    Most recent customer success: 9 meetings within 6 weeks of starting the engagement, at an hour per day, with very little onboarding. That’s 1.5 meetings per week in a very short time, in a new industry that the SPFF team hasn’t sold in before.

    Past customer success example: 5 first meetings in the first month, with little to no onboarding into their industry/product. 8 the next month, 13 following that.

  • It depends on your situation. We don’t fit for everyone, but we can’t know that till we get into the details.

    1) Do you have a sales strategy, or if I asked you that, would you just improvise and say a bunch of things about your product / market generally, without a formal process to point to?

    2) Have you acquired your customers through existing relationships and warm family referrals, or have you been doing straight B2B sales from the beginning? Do you feel like you know how to guide a cheap sales hire in doing sales for your company?

    3) Do you have time to manage a sales rep while doing everything else for product development, customer success, raising funds, and your own part-time sales efforts?

    We have to explore the details and decide if there’s a fit.

  • Lead gen agencies will have the sames struggle that a new hire would. If you don’t have a strategy, if you haven’t done lead gen for your company yourself, then the lead gen agency will either get lucky, send you a bunch of unqualified and sometimes qualified leads, or fail miserably.

    I’ve interviewed a few lead gen agencies. You know what they ask for? Your sales strategy, messaging insights, buyer qualification, etc.

    Lead gen agencies might make sense, after you’ve first worked with us to build your foundation in sales.

    We’re not against other solutions, we’re all about using them at the right time.