Designing a star-studded experience for your customers "If you want to build something that’s truly viral, you have to create a total mindf@#k experience that you tell everyone about. We basically took one part of our product and we extrapolated: what would a five-star experience be?" This is Brian Chesky, Founder of Airbnb, on Reid Hoffman's Masters of Scale Podcast talking about the exercise every entrepreneur should go through to figure out where they want to take their product experience. Brian details how they thought about their star experience design at Airbnb. Brian continues, "Then we went crazy. So a one-, two-, or three-star experience is, you get to your Airbnb and no one is there. You knock on the door. They don’t open. That’s a one-star. Maybe it’s a three-star if they don’t open, you have to wait 20 minutes. If they never show up and you’re pissed and you need to get your money back, that’s a one-star experience. You’re never using us again. So a five-...

How to close more deals from your sales calls Before starting Funnelll , I was IBM's regional digital sales manager in the Middle East and Africa for their SaaS portfolio. I have taken the revenue for the portfolio from $0 to $1M in 3 quarters and then to multi-millions of dollars afterward. Here is the one thing I teach my sellers on how to increase their win rate; Validate early, validate often. The easiest way to validate your lead is to establish the BANT criteria: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.  Ask questions like: Need: Why are you considering us? Understand the need the customer wants to fulfill. Are they a good fit for your product? Be honest about it. Your customer will do their research anyway so you can save yourself and them time early on. If your product is a good fit, try to establish their Compelling Reason To Act (CTA). E.g. if you are selling cloud storage and your customer's servers are almost full, then they have a compelling need to buy your solution...

SaaS Sales 101: Understanding Your Sales Funnel and How To Tune It After spending years as a technical consultant helping Fortune 500 companies design, build, and run high-performing and scale-able systems, I found that tuning a sales funnel is very similar to tuning an IT system. It all starts with visualizing the funnel starting from the top; where customers/requests are coming in and working your way downstream all the way to the bottom (System of records aka DBs in technology and Sales in business). In my previous job, I helped take SaaS products from 0 to $1M in less than 3 quarters, and then many millions afterward using the same techniques I successfully used doing performance tuning for IT systems. Welcome to lesson number 1, and the most important one; what is a sales funnel and how to tune it. What is a sales funnel? A Sales funnel is a representation of the customer journey from discovering your service to making a purchase. This journey can be visualized...