Other Types of Early-Stage Sales Collateral

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

As you might imagine, there is a whole universe of other types of marketing collateral that you can invest in. PDFs! Webinars! Infographics! Blog listicles! Content marketing! Oh my! What we’ve covered are the basics that you want to get going before you start in on anything else. This isn’t to say that you can’t start selling if you don’t have a video overview. But it will make it easier for you to set appointments if you can embed one in your email templates. And you don’t need to have a formal demo script in place before you start taking customer meetings. But it can help make them more effective. You should be thinking about collateral as features in your go-to-market plans—each one involves time, energy, and cost, and that should be weighed against how frequently it will be used and the value its use provides.

One-Off Requests

Often you will get a request from a prospect for some sort of collateral that you don’t have. “Do you have a one-pager overview on this?” “Do you have customer success stories?” Most of the time you should think about the question under the question (more on this in Handling Objections. Consider whether an existing piece of collateral already handles their request before running off and manufacturing something new. Often that will be the case, so you can simply reply, “You’re looking for what others who have used the product have said about it? Great! We have a number of testimonials on slides near the end of this deck I’m attaching!” or “The first ten slides of this attached deck give a great overview for anyone you’d like to share it with. Oh, and this video overview is quite helpful too.”

On-Demand Collateral

The one place where one-off collateral makes sense is when it is highly customized to the prospect. I’ll say it once again: customization of marketing materials, whether a live demo or something that is recorded and repeatedly consumed, is very powerful. On-demand collateral to respond to prospect requests, or even to anticipate them, can accelerate sales conversations dramatically. One of the best ways to accomplish this is screenshotting and screen capturing. At TalentBin, our market development reps would often take screenshots/screen captures of search results to send to prospects.

Or account executives would do one-off five-minute Jing recordings of a certain search, creating a walk-through that was hyper-specific to client needs, maybe both covering comparative search counts and digging into profile data and contact information. The recording only took five minutes to do, could be shared with a hyperlink, and, importantly, could be shared across the entire prospect recruiting team—maybe 20 people or more. Five-minute investment, potentially massive impact.

What would this look like for your offering? What is the customized screenshot that you could send to prospects to make them sit up and pay attention? What is the customized five-minute walk-through that your prospects need to convince their CFOs that this is worth taking a look at?

Equipped with a smart deck, irresistible outreach templates, a prospect-focused demo, and a burgeoning video library, you should have no problem getting into the market and starting to sell. Each asset will require iteration as you learn from your prospects, but the important thing is that you have a full quiver of the basics you need to close your first few dozen customers. Next, we’ll discuss how to find the folks you’ll target for that selling!

Further Reading on SDR Email Templates

• Leading SalesDevelopment (Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan)

• The Sales Development Playbook (Trish Bertuzzi)

• Fanatical Prospecting (Jeb Blount and Mike Weinberg)

• Predictable Prospecting (Marylou Tyler and Jeremey Donovan)

• Sales Development (Cory Bray, Hilmon Sorey, and Ryan Reisert)