Startup Stories: Kickstart Your Sales
Every startup faces the challenge of getting the first customers, proving product market fit and gaining traction. We spoke with Accelerator Academy alumni founders BlackCurve and Sideways 6 to hear how they tackled this critical need and built sales from the early days to growing and scaling.
We delved into this topic with our startup community friends at the Centre For Entrepreneurs, another organisation passionate about supporting growth journeys, which we share alumni startups with such as Sideways 6 and Cudoni featured in our Looking Ahead to 2021 event.
Check out the Kickstart Your Sales video replay for Philip and Will’s stories and actionable tips for fellow founders. We discussed:
Tackling first sales and hacks
Navigating complexities of 2020 and takeaways to power sales strategy, team and execution
Building B2B sales do's and don'ts
BlackCurve helps retailers avoid pricing items too cheaply or too expensively, shift dead stock profitably, save time and increase their inventory.
Sideways 6 helps to bring employee’s ideas to life through their SaaS platform and expert consultancy to make innovation happen at companies like AstraZeneca, Vodafone, Nestle and British Airways.
Both founders touched on how accelerator programmes played a part in their initial growth. BlackCurve was launched in 2016 and springboarded out of The Accelerator Network where Philip was part of the Accelerator Academy Semester 13 cohort. Fast forward to today, the startup has done 3 investment rounds up to this growth stage.
Will was on the Centre for Entrepreneurs programme during the inception of his business, He shared about named dropping CFE in every single message he sent targeting his initial enterprise outreach to heads of innovation at large organisation in the UK, which likely opened some doors. Landing British Airways amongst his first customers with mock ups proved his approach to identifying the problems of Sideways 6’s target persona, and finding those customers aligned to the company’s mission to go on the platform development journey together.