The Founder's Guide to B2B Sales

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Intended Audience Copy link
This guide is written for founders and CEOs of early- and growth-stage startups.
It starts at the beginning — how to do sales yourself and builds from there. We’ll cover everything from how to be your company’s best salesperson to how to manage your VP of sales and align your marketing team.
It takes a founder/CEO point of view — i.e. we’ll put more focus on how to manage your VP of sales than on how to manage an individual seller.
We think this guide will be of interest to executive team members as well as to anyone with a genuine interest in the B2B sales process.
The content of this guide is informed by Dave Kellogg's broad industry experience as well as the collective experience of the Balderton team . The guide expands on the first Balderton Sales Playbook created in May 2020 .
Structure of the Guide Copy link
Selling : what founders need to know about sales
Building : how to build a sales organisation
Managing : how to manage a sales organisation
Renewing/expanding : teaming sales and customer success
Marketing : using marketing to build sales pipeline
Partnering : how to use partners to improve reach and win rate
Planning : planning and the role of key metrics and benchmarks
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In 2021, Dave joined Balderton as the company's first Executive in Residence. Dave brings more than a decade’s experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across some of the world’s leading SaaS and enterprise software firms. He was previously CEO of cloud financial planning company Host Analytics (now Planful), SVP/GM at Salesforce in charge of the Service Cloud business, CEO of MarkLogic and led marketing for nine years at business intelligence leader, Business Objects, working with Balderton’s Managing Partner, Bernard Liautaud.
Dave started his career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant. During his time at Silicon Valley’s Host Analytics, he grew the company’s ARR six-fold to more than $50M before selling to a private equity sponsor; he oversaw the growth of MarkLogic’s revenues from zero to more than $80M; and during his nine years at Paris-based Business Objects, the company grew from 250 to 4,500 employees and from $30M to over $1B in revenues. Dave has served on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (AgTech), Nuxeo (content services), and Profisee (MDM), among others.
Dave's blog, Kellblog , covers topics related to starting, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups including corporate strategy, marketing strategy, messaging, positioning, management, go-to-market models, SaaS metrics, operational metrics, and venture capital (VC) financing.
As an EIR, Dave advises Balderton portfolio companies on go-to-market strategy, SaaS metrics, marketing, positioning, corporate strategy, and international expansion.
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Michael joined Balderton’s investment team in 2021 and his primary focus is later-stage investing with Balderton’s Growth I fund.
Before joining Balderton, Michael worked at Permira where he focused on large-cap technology and late-stage growth investments. He supported Pemira's companies, helping them scale, drive sustainable growth and become global champions. He notably participated in the fundraising of Mirakl, the world’s leading marketplace software; Nexthink, Europe’s leading End User Experience monitoring platform; and Safti, one of the leading French digital Real Estate agencies.
Michael began his career at L.E.K. Consulting in Paris where he worked on due diligence and corporate strategy projects for fast-growing companies, and co-founded the Data & Analytics practice.
Special Thanks Copy link
The authors would like to give a special thanks to Alice Lankester for her oversight of and vision for the project.