How To Scale Sales With a Customer Service Mindset with Sean Tierney #237

In this episode we meet Sean Tierney, Director of Sales for Pagely, a premier managed WordPress hosting provider. Sean has over twenty years of experience in tech, marketing and sales roles and specializes in automation and sales systematization. Sean lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal where he mentors startups in the Startup Lisboa incubator. We talk about his 7 step process on how to scale sales organizations and do so with a customer service mindset.

7 Step Scale Sales Process and Philosophy

Sean’s sales philosophy has a mindset that sales is just customer service before they are a customer. He breaks it down into 7 steps.

Map out the flows of the current reality. This is broken into two parts:
1. How information is moving through the system:
  - Where does it live?
  - How does it get there?
  - What are the forms on your site?
  - What systems does it flow to?
  - What’s done with the data?
2. Understand the buyer journey:
  - How do people go from not knowing your service to knowing your service?
  - How do they get onto your website?
  - How do they buy?
  - How are they onboarded?
  - How do they receive support?
  - How are they upsold?
Track KPIs – Key Performance Indicators. Metrics are tactical, KPIS are strategic eg. MRR Monthly Recurring Revenue, ARR Annual Recurring Revenue and Sales cycle time. Have a spreadsheet but just track the metrics that matter.
Establish a Process – use a CRM or a Kanban style with a pipeline and method for following up.
Flintstone It – Do things manually to start and then automate over time.
Delegate – Map out your org chart when starting and note the roles you’re playing. He found the SDR role was bottlenecking him. AE Account Executive role and Onboarding role he could still own. To grow staff he had one intern listen to calls recorded and placed in knowledge based.
Automate – tools are a set of scaffolding for doing tedious stuff. The goal is to make each person more efficient.
Scaling Personal Attention – a philosophy on automation. Despite size, highly personalize and create powerful experiences that scale with a boutique feel. e.g. pagely.com/explore took the consultative sale process with interactive videos.

Take Action Now

If you can’t explain what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t be shooting from the hip. Map it out, understand your sales process and you’ll understand it at a very deep level.

Tools Mentioned

Put your email on automation with Active Campaign.
For a calendar consider Calendly.com and YouCanBook.me
For scheduled sending and email reminders using Gmail Boomerang
Text Expander using Typenator

How To Find Sean Tierney

This is his company Pagely

This is Sean’s personal blog

This is his podcast for digital nomads.

How to Manage Sales Teams

Let’s keep the conversation going. Listen here today!