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📈 Go to market

Roles

BDR: (Business Development Representative): A BDR’s responsibilities include lead generation, lead qualification / disqualification, outreach, follow up, and appointment setting.

AE: (Account Executive): An AE is primarily responsible for closing deals with qualified leads, including ensuring important documents like Service Agreements are surfaced and signed in a timely manner. They handle the later stages of the sales cycle and manage customer relationships.

Sales Engineer: Sales engineers operate at the intersection of business, sales, and technology. Their responsibilities include demoing, solution design based off customer needs, and pre-sales support.

Solutions Engineer: Solutions Engineers work closely with the sales team to support the sales process by providing technical expertise and solutions to potential customers, create proof-of-concept implementations to showcase how the solution can specifically address the customer's requirements and help the customer troubleshoot during their implementation.

Sales Operations Lead: Key responsibilities include sales forecasting, pipeline analysis, sales KPI management and optimization, management of sales tech stack, legal sales doc drafting and compliance.

BANT

BANT is an acronym that stands for "Budget, Authority, Need, Timing." It provides a simple framework for qualifying prospects in a business-to-business (B2B) sales setting. In order for a prospect to be qualified, each of the following 4 elements must be established:

Budget - Does the understand how pricing works at Flexpa, and have sufficient budget to pay for their intended usage?

Authority - Who is responsible at the prospect for deciding whether to go ahead with using Flexpa? Sometimes this is multiple people (ex: CPO and CTO)

Need - What is the prospect planning to use Flexpa for? Will Flexpa be able to help them with this use case?

Timeline - If Budget, Authority and Need were met, when would the prospect be planning to go live with Flexpa?

Stages of the Funnel

Stage 1 - Qualifying (BDR)

This is from the first contact with the company (by email, calendared zoom call, etc) through to hand off to the Sales Engineer,

  1. What does the first contact look like?
    1. This can occur in many forms, (cold inbound, warm intro, response to a Flexpa sales email, etc.) but the key point is that the prospect indicates an interest in learning more about Flexpa. Regardless of source, BDR should move to have Zoom call with prospect ASAP.
  2. What does engagement with the prospect look like during this stage?
    1. Preference for synchronous objection handling / N discovery (Zoom calls)
    2. Option for asynchronous objection handling / N discovery (email)
  3. What questions need to be answered before handoff to the Sales Engineer?
    1. Firm conviction that there is BA_T. Should be reasonably confident that N exists, but since often prospects have to ask multiple, detailed follow up questions about the product, it’s ok if the BDR passes off the lead to the Sales Engineer and still needs the Sales Engineer to fully establish N. This can also be discussed on Thursdays in the recurring call between BDR and Sales Engineer where they work through and discuss handoff.
  4. When does a BDR DQ rather than advance a prospect to the Sales Engineer?
    1. When any of B, A, N or T does not exist. If N isn’t fully clear yet, still ok to advance to Sales Engineer.
  5. What does a handoff look like?
    1. Email from BDR cc’ing in the Sales Engineer, and BDR then moves the deal card from Qualifying to Engaging
  6. When does a Sales Engineer have to be on the BDR call?
    1. Use case that is promising but unclear
    2. Large / Very technical audience

Stage 2 - Engaging (Sales Engineer)

This is from first communications by the Sales Engineer (usually via email) through to the Sales Engineer handing off the prospect to the Solutions Engineer (and making the intro via email - see copy below).

  1. What does engagement with the prospect look like during this stage?
    1. Preference for asynchronous objection handling / N discovery (email)
    2. Option for synchronous objection handling / N discovery (Zoom calls)
  2. What questions need to be answered and what does the prospect need to have in place before handoff to Solutions Engineer?
    1. BANT confirmed
    2. Existing or new use case clearly identified
    3. Clear understanding of where Flexpa will be embedded within workflow
    4. Technical team member(s) identified for kickoff
  3. What does a handoff look like?
    1. Email introing Solutions Engineer
  4. If an inbound prospect goes straight to testing without any other contact with a Flexpal, does this deal automatically fall into this stage
    1. No, the BDR still has to establish BANT

Stage 3 - Developing (Solutions Engineer)

This is from Sales Engineer’s email intro through to prospect completing full testing flow (defined as successfully integrating with Flexpa and making first API call)

  1. What are the roles and responsibilities of the Solutions Engineer? To answer the “how”. This entails:
    1. Ensure prospect creates a workspace (if they haven’t yet)
    2. Ensure prospect has test mode usage
    3. Confirm go-live date
    4. Answer all questions (synchronously and asynchronously) and resolve all issues stopping prospect from having test mode usage and being ready to begin live billable events
  2. What does engagement with the prospect look like during this stage?
    1. Synchronous guidance towards successful test mode usage (Zoom calls)
    2. Asynchronous guidance towards successful test mode usage (email and Slack)
  3. Does the request to go live get submitted during this stage?
    1. If possible, yes, if there are details of the agreement that still need to be discussed, AE is able to assist.
  4. What does Handoff Look Like?
    1. Solutions Engineer informs AE that the prospect is finished testing and ready to go live.
  5. If an inbound prospect goes straight to testing without any other contact with a Flexpal, does this deal automatically fall into this stage?
    1. No, the deal stays in the qualifying stage until BANT is established.

Stage 4 - Closed Won (AE)

This is once the first live mode request occurs.

  1. What does engagement with the prospect look like during this stage?

    1. Synchronous guidance towards successful test mode usage (Zoom calls)
    2. Asynchronous guidance towards successful test mode usage (email)

  2. What are the roles and responsibilities of the AE at this stage?

    1. ID the authorized signatory
    2. Ensure prospect completes Live Mode Access Form submission (if they haven’t already done so) and is approved for live mode
    3. Obtain signature of Service Agreement
    4. Obtain signature of BAA (where necessary)
    5. Set proper pricing and necessary billing details within Stripe

  3. When do they advance to stage 5

    1. After more than 10 billable events have occurred

Stage 5: Success and Support (Customer Success and Support)

This is from the first live pull onwards. Goals are to keep them actively using, increase usage, and resolve all bugs that get in the way of usage.