Bring Back the Top-Down Sale

There has been a ton of innovation in sales and marketing tech over the past decade. However most of it has aimed at enhancing the bottoms up sale. What I mean is that most of the recent innovation is some flavor of driving more cold emails into the inboxes of prospects.

10 to 15 years ago, marketing automation companies like Hubspot showed up on the scene. Automated email campaigns tore down walls that were previously impenetrable via cold phone call. Suddenly you could carve a direct path to your financial buyer. And if you didn’t know who your direct buyer was, a good ol’ “appropriate person” email might get you there. Or the super-emo breakup email. Remember that one?

We all did the same stuff thinking it was clever. But hey, it worked. At least for a while.

Today, this stuff is — at best — table stakes. Every SaaS company has automated emails in their sales and marketing stack. Any advantage this capability once offered has been eroded by years of inbox fatigue. Worse yet, even personalized emails are now tuned out with the rest of them.

So what’s a Chief Revenue Officer to do in order to regain her advantage over competitors? One option is to dust off some of those top-down selling playbooks.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Go back to relationship-based selling. Believe it or not, humans want to talk to other humans. Perhaps now more than ever given how cooped up we’ve all been, Zooming with the same people day after day. So flex your network, as well as the networks of your colleagues and investors to start meeting new faces through old school warm introduction.
2. Enhance conversations by leveraging other functional leaders in your sales strategy. For example, if you’re selling an HR tech solution to a senior prospect, perhaps he would want to hear from your Chief People Officer on how she leverages your product inside of her own organization.
3. Create that customer advisory board you’ve been talking about for the past six years. Not only might you get some great feedback, but a happy customer is your best salesperson. Build case studies that will resonate with other prospects. Leverage your happy customers for even more introductions.

These are just a few ways to enhance your top-down selling. There are plenty more. Whatever the case, it’s time to move beyond the philosophy that automated emailing is sufficient when it comes to prospecting.

It’s time to think top-down again.