Setting Up Your Business Plan to Clinch The Job
How to "put the icing on the cake" to nail the role.
Last week I talked about How to Vet a Startup and Sales Leadership. This week we’ll talk about how to take all the information you know and re-engineer your number along with construct a business hypothesis. If you’re junior in your career (SDR or SMB/MM AE, and especially if you’re looking to onboard at a startup - this will separate you from the pack. I ended up doing this twice during my search and both times received offers.
Although this is a small data set, both mentioned my putting together this type of document was the reason that I was hired. We’ll cover one topic today:
How to construct your plan
How to Construct Your Plan
Let’s say that, that in last week’s scenario, you decide that you can indeed take on the risk of working for the startup we were discussing. To quickly recap, here were the numbers:
In this scenario, let’s pretend that the team has about $1.4m in revenue, comprising of:
100 customers, with a product led growth motion, In business for 3 years.
Annual revenue is $1.4mm
Product Price: $100k (all in), Starter is $10k
ACV: $14k for 1 year term
Avg ARR: $14k
Churn: 30%
ASP: $14k
Lead flow: 100 free users per month.
Max price point for this product is $100k, there is an opportunity to expand each account to $90k.
Target company profiles: mid market company, sitting in in the $10 - $1bn range.
Out of the 100 accounts though, only about 20 are in the profile of companies that can reach $100k. Ie, out of 100 paying customers, only 20 accounts are in the $10mm - $1bn range.
$800k quota/yr ($200k/qtr, respectively)
There are other questions to ask, ie what is being invested into marketing, how is product analyzing growth/usage, along with how to mitigate against SMB churn. Most importantly:
Are there similarities in the verticals of companies that are paying (ie if they’re all in finserv, maybe that shows I have something repeatableto work with)
Are the companies that are in the top 20 intros from VCs to founders or the result of product usage converting to paid, or just outbound efforts?
Long story short, are there trends, that as a sales person, can utilize to focus my time on low hanging fruit?
We’ll have to put a couple of other variables in here to crystallize how you would approach, but let’s say that this company is:
In the DevOps space and is an app that helps developers to save time on data compliance in their day to day for real time streaming data.
Let’s also assume that this company has made a lot of traction in the FinServ space, which make up a large percentage of the 20 companies that are currently in your book if you onboard.
Breaking Down Your Plan
Executive Summary
GTM Hypothesis
YTD
Land and Expand
Outbound Prospecting Strategy
Account Breakdown
Outreach Tactics (examples)
Field Tactics
Streamlining Predictability
Executive Summary
This is where you want to summarize every single thing you’re thinking through on how you’d approach this role from day 1. The most important thing here is to critically think about what avenues that will help you get to your number.
GTM Hypothesis
Here you want to summarize what are the main pillars of your strategy and what you are going to focus on and dedicate your limited time on in order to achieve your number. This is a “theory”, so don’t worry about it being right or wrong. A lot of it comes down to common sense. This relates back to the example I outlined in business mechanics and Shark Tank. All executives want a simple answer on how to get from $0 to $800k. How will you answer that question? You’ll be surprised by how many people cannot.
In the scenario above, there’s a couple of things that I would highlight as anchors in my strategy. The first being:
Elimination: I need to focus on the 20 accounts that fit in the ICP profile, the rest of the accounts I can reach out to, but not as focused as the 20 accounts which fit my company profile. At a $10k clip, it’s helpful but won’t move the needle significantly so really I’m looking at those account as automated, effortless, and gravy on top of the activities that I’m doing.
Focus on Success: If I’m seeing that the business is getting traction in the Finserv space. Dive deeper - banks? credit unions? I can also extrapolate that idea out into other areas like maybe fintech. If they have a flywheel in a specific sector, run with it. It’s low hanging fruit since the patterns in the market are there for you.
Tier out accounts and prioritize within the 100 customers? If it were me, I’m banking on those top 20, then prioritizing the ones in SMB where I can get quick $10k wins, then from there diving into outbound.
Bonus Points: During your conversations, you probably asked what are the challenges this business is seeing - highlight it. Factor that into your success plan.
ie maybe they don’t have an well oiled outbound engine? Great, you can start tackling finserv net new logos based on the work the company has done with the accounts that have been successful in that space.
YTD & Land and Expand
In these slides, slot out numbers for the year and quarter. It’ll show a systematic approach and that your conscious of numbers and growing. Under land and expand, write out how you would attack these finserv accounts.
Do they have case studies? How are these companies similar? ie credit unions, banks, large banks, fintech? Attack those personas and companies in outbound and within your existing accounts.
Outbound Prospecting Strategy
Now that you’ve tacked land and expand, you’re going to want to formulate an outbound cadence. The outbound would be set up with the lens of “fin serv companies using real time data” and those that are similar to the accounts in the existing book. This is a quick LI search for keywords, and titles. Once you have a number of accounts within the parameters of your target company profile, plug them in.
Let’s say it’s 500 accounts. Now talk about how you’re going to prioritize accounts and then how you’d *actually* going to reach out.
Account Breakdown
Highlight the accounts from an outbound perspective that have similar challenges/personas in your respective accounts and tier them out on company profile, revenue, employee count > so that you can show how you’d organize your outbound efforts. If I were at a young company, I’d focus on a couple of big boys (maybe 5) ie a Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, etc. But realistically these will take a long time to close. So I’d prioritize like this:
Top 5 Enterprise
Companies with 500 -1000 employees, revenue from $100mm - $1bn
Companies with 1000 employees+, revenue of $1bn and up
Remember, you’re making bets, the goal is to figure out what’s working, rinse and repeat. If it doesn’t work, iterate on the tactics, and once you’re onto something - scale it.
Outreach Tactics
Now put together a campaign. Use chatGPT and prompt it for a sales campaign selling to DevOps personas in fintech. Here’s a couple of snapshots of how I’d approach this:
Great, now let’s look at personas:
Awesome, since we’re looking at data compliance, let’s set up outbound campaigns:
***Not going to put a ton of pics and emails that you have to sift through here. The point is, it’ll spit out 5 emails for you. Use that as a baseline and refine it.
Show how you’d set up a cadence and provide some examples of what each touch would look like.
Field Tactics
If you’re a startup, you probably have limited marketing. It’s going to be on you to figure out how to get involved with your customer base. Think:
Meetups
Dinners with other customers and inviting similar profiles for net new introductions
Publications that run events
Other bigger companies that host events
Going to tradeshows with a general admission ticket (cheap, no booth, you got to hunt). *If you’re interested in how to approach an event this way, let me know and I can write about it.
Streamlining Predicability
The goal of all of this is to be able to find areas in your business that help you build repeatable motions to scale. Track everything, from copy in emails to success you’ve been finding in sales cycles.
Ultimately you’ll be building out data points on outreach touches (email, LI, dials >Meetings >opportunities > closed won deals). If your company has some of this done - great, build on top of it or refine it if you find a way to do it more efficiently.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you don’t need to stress out about being perfect. The goal of the exercise is to think through how you’d approach your book of business to get to your number. It will convey three things:
How you think
How you’d work towards your number
Your work ethic
You can get feedback from the hiring team after. When you send this in an email to them, you can either ask to walk through it with them on a call (if it’s not part of the interview process) or just send an email.
If you send an email, write out:
“Hey (Name),
Following up with the business plan that we had discussed. Hopefully this helps give you some insight into how I’d find success in the role. If you find a candidate more suitable for the role, hopefully this provides value for them and your org as well!
Here are some quick notes that to take into consideration as you’re reading this:
Point A
Point B
Point C
I’ve attached the deck below, let me know if you have any questions.
-Your name”
You not only want to convey your thought process and work ethic, but most importantly you’re providing VALUE upfront, without asking for anything in return. This is what will separate you from the pack.
If you have questions on this, or would help in constructing your own, whether you’re in the interview process, just started a new role, or want to refine what you’re currently doing at your role, feel free to message me so I can help!
As always, thanks for reading.
-Andrew Kobylarz