🚀 Startup sales lessons & a can’t-miss masterclass

Happy New Year y’all! ✨

I hope you spent your well-deserved holiday break recharging and enjoying time with family & friends… I honestly didn’t realize how much I needed one myself. 😅

As a first-time founder, the learning curve in year 2 was equally as steep (and rewarding). We made a ton of exciting progress – including growing from 0 to 50+ paying customers, announcing our $6M seed round, scaling to 15 Accordions… with all this momentum going into 2022, it’s feeling like just the tip of the iceberg!

After a lot of reflection, I jotted down the 8 startup & sales lessons that had the most significant impact on me and the Accord team over the past year. Hopefully they’ll be helpful (or at least relatable!) to other early founders and sales leaders out there.

Here’s to more learning, growth, and enjoying the journey in 2022! What are you excited for this coming year? Hit reply and let me know 🤠

- Ross

In this newsletter:

• Ensure you’re positioned to hit your revenue targets this year: join our masterclass with top sales leaders from Rampd, Northstar, and Balance
• How to rise above the crowd with storytelling & positioning
• Success story: How UserGems increased their customer launch velocity

📣 Masterclass: How to Build a Repeatable Sales Process for Early Stage Startups

It’s no secret that startups thrive or die because of two things: revenue and customer growth.

So why do we still treat sales like a guessing game? We risk deals with ad-hoc processes – leading to misaligned expectations, slipping deadlines, and a lack of visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

Join us for a masterclass where we’ll be talking practical tips for building a repeatable sales process at early stage startups:

💪 Building and documenting a winning sales process

👏 Coaching and ramping your first 5 reps

🥺 Identifying friction in your sales process

When: Thursday, January 13 at 2pm ET / 11am PT

Meet the Experts:

• Carol Malakasis - Managing Partner @ Rampd
• Josh Weisman - Head of Sales @ Northstar
• Max Zuckerman - VP of Sales @ Balance
• Ross Rich - CEO & Founder @ Accord

🌟 How your startup can rise above the crowd with storytelling & positioning

Standing out from all the noise is harder (and more important) than ever.

The secret to breaking through? A commitment to storytelling and positioning.

Okay, there’s a bit more to it than that. Your brand’s story and your product’s positioning need to be unique, personal, simple, repetitive, and reach the right audience. But this is how you avoid getting lost in the crowd, among the 10,000s of other startups who won’t make it.

Use this simple 4-step framework to start building and sharing your unique story in 2022!

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🎙️ On the Podcast

ICYMI last week, Assemble co-founder Lisa Wallace joined us on the From Vendorship to Partnership podcast!

Lisa shared insights from her journey as a founder and her passion for driving strategic & equitable compensation decisions.

Catch up on all recent episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

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❗️ Accord: Customer Success Story

Closing a deal is a big win – but now you’ve got to make sure the new customer is set up for long-term success with your product. The key to this is a clear, frictionless onboarding process.

By using Accord to build and standardize their onboarding, the UserGems team is able to:

• Start onboarding faster with ready-to-go templates. No more hunting down past emails to copy and paste, or writing out each step from scratch.
• Make onboarding easier for customers. Inviting customers to a structured, collaborative space makes it easier for them to understand and complete steps.
• Create a repeatable process for future team growth. By standardizing UserGems’ onboarding best practices, new customer success reps can learn the ropes quickly.

Learn more about how UserGems improved onboarding to launch new customers faster! 🚀

Thanks for reading this far! Cheers to an awesome 2022 for you & your team.

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Ross Rich (CEO and Co-founder)

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