Digital Acquisition
The Importance of Sales Skills
​Before talking in detail about my time at Red Ventures, where I was able to learn and work with digital acquisition at a higher level of complexity and volume, I would like to talk about my sales experience in general.
After all, although the digital universe brings unique and more analytical challenges, the ultimate goal is still to sell.
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As sales are a fundamental part of any business, it has always interested me, both for persuasion challenges and for being a way to get to know and deal with people, something I appreciate.
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My first professional experience in Sales was when I worked as a Partnership Analyst at FEJEMG, the Minas Gerais Federation of Junior Enterprises. The team's objective was to raise sponsorship resources, for example by offering lectures and space at events with Junior Entrepreneurs that companies wanted to hire or sell training to.
We also had the freedom to create customized "products" and offer them to potential customers. Our team of 3 people broke the fundraising record in FEJEMG's 20-year history, with each person closing at least one contract with a partner. It's not much, but also not bad considering we raised some good money selling something intangible and working only a few hours every week.
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Also, the fundraising money was considered so important that my first contract was signed in front of more than 200 people on the stage of one of the FEJEMG meetings.
A fun curiosity about a mistake I made: as we didn't have lawyers on the team, I drafted the contract myself and realized a small mistake right before signing it, so we had to make it symbolic and I sent the "real contract" via email afterward.
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I was able to find a picture of this day with Ricardo from R&L Associados, the company I had signed with, and Douglas Souza, the President of FEJEMG back then and leader of my team.
At about the same time, I was negotiating consultancy projects at UCJ and later at Imeri Capital, with "Spin Selling" as the first methodology I had contact with.
SPIN helps one better understand the Needs of the other by understanding the Implications that arise from a Problem that happens in a certain Situation.
Some time later, at nata.house, I was working as a partner in the business, and had the same challenge of participating in diagnostics and selling projects, but this time in the technology field, an area that I had less knowledge of at the time.
To make things more interesting, we had established an objective within our strategic planning to strengthen our presence abroad. One of the reasons for this was the growing demand from foreign companies for Brazilian developers. The other was that we already had an American client, responsible for a large part of the revenue, but whose contract had an expiration date.
This was the time when I decided to expand my horizon of knowledge from Spin Selling to other methodologies such as ABM (Account Based Marketing) so that we could get closer to the desired audience.
Something I like about sales is that although there are good methodologies, creativity, and details can make a difference in the outcomes of the negotiation. ​
An example below: despite the positive review of our development work at nata.house, our contract with the key U.S. client would be terminated as the startup was running out of funds and would likely go bankrupt. Having decided that we would focus on the overseas market, I asked myself: Since we want to get more clients like the current client, where did we get this one in the first place?
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It was a very private relationship, created when one of the founders and former partners of nata.house had met the clients while they were participating in the Techstars acceleration program in the US.
This made me think that we could reach other startups from Techstars and other acceleration programs, given the savings that these startups needed to make. However, we still had the problem of how to reach them.
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We tested several alternatives, but the best result came from the idea of ​​asking the former nata.house partner to recover his Techstars forum account. Knowing it was an active forum, we posted a service offering with our client's success story.
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We also asked the current client to leave a recommendation in the thread and, a few days later, we got 3 to 5 hot leads. From there, we managed to close a contract, which was expanded after a few weeks, guaranteeing the revenue we needed and contributing to the goal of tripling annual revenue.
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It is very clear to me that, despite never having formally worked in sales, I have always been in the world of sales, whether through fundraising experiences, acting as a consultant and partner to sell projects, or as an entrepreneur trying to get an idea off the ground as I did in the story I wrote about here.
Other contexts include when as a manager I was recruiting and attracting people to my own team and as a Product Manager participating in introductory calls with B2B customers, in order to help the sales team with more technical questions that would appear in the conversations.
I understand it is essential to know how to sell even when not working with sales directly.
This was one of the things that got me excited to accept an offer from Red Ventures, one of the most important players in the Digital Advertising ecosystem in the world.
After learning some of the "traditional sales" methodologies and closing B2B contracts the old way, I was now aiming to learn how to sell in the digital world, considering that knowing how to sell digitally has become an increasingly important part of "knowing how to sell".