Bottom-Up & Top-Down Selling

Sales Process
1

Hi all,

Today I published two new glossary articles regarding Bottom-Up and Top-Down Selling.

Writing these posts and my experience in the recent months really gave me to think.

Why this? I have always thought that top-down selling is superior to bottom-up selling: you speak directly to the decision-maker, who is often also the economic buyer or has a direct link, e.g. if you sell to the COO, the CFO is often only one office away. If you sell from the bottom up, you often lose time because individual contributors and lower level managers are afraid of damaging their careers and reputations and will not push hard internally. Furthermore, if you have an executive buy-in, they can hold people accountable for deadlines and have the power to build pressure internally.

So what might have changed my mind? In my current environment I also work with a lot of accounts that are already customers. If the account has a low usage/adoption rate, the reason is often that a senior executive decided on the solution, it was implemented top-down, but the people who should be using it on a day-to-day basis didn’t know how to use it, or simply refused to use it because they weren’t involved in the decision making process. The result: customer churn after a few years, probably when the executive moves on to another job.

Why does it matter to us as sellers? Yes, we are likely to make the sale if we sell top-down. However, if the customer churns after a short period of time, it will not be possible to build a sustainable business model, which will ultimately backfire. The last few years have been about unsustainable and unhealthy “revenue growth at all costs”. But companies have to think holistically and look at profitability, even in tech. Otherwise, sooner or later, these companies will implode.

So what is my idea and my appeal to the industry?

  1. A combination of top-down and bottom-up selling, taking operational users with you and securing executive buy-in as early as possible.

  2. Acting in good faith and ensuring that the business is sustainable - early churn is a loss for all.

  3. Adjust the quota and incentives of the sales teams accordingly, not only to meet the net new ARR target, but also to reflect the retention rate more strongly. Also: Measure and reward customer success teams based on hard KPIs (e.g. Adoption Rate).

What are your thoughts on this?