Top Down Vs Bottom Up Selling Motions.

Good Morning. If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming an influencer, I’ve got good news for you: brands are expected to spend roughly $21 billion on influencers this year, and nearly $4 billion of that will go to creators with less than 5,000 followers. So technically, your 480 Instagram followers are now a business asset. But you probably shouldn’t quit your sales job just yet… most of those deals pay in store credit or free products, and your landlord doesn’t accept Amazon gift cards. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

Sponsor The Follow Up | Subscribe

5.5 million.

That's how many people were using Dropbox at work on a personal account.

At the same time, Dropbox's sales team was busy pitching CIOs and executives. And those sales cycles ran 9 to 18 months.

Yamini Rangan, who brought that playbook over from her enterprise experience, later said it just did not work for Dropbox. They had millions of employees already using the product, yet they were still cold-pitching execs on why they should buy.

They were trying to do top-down, when they should’ve been using bottom-up.

Today we're breaking down both motions, how to tell which one you're actually in, and how to run each one properly.

Bottoms up is more than just the line your degenerate friends yell to get you to chug your drink.

It’s a sales motion, and it’s the opposite of a top-down approach.

Here’s how to tell which one you should use: Does your customer get the most value before or after the invoice?

Pretty simple, ehh?

If people can use the product first and get value before signing a big B2B contract, you're probably bottom-up. Think Figma, Dropbox, ChatGPT, etc.

On the other end, if you have to sell to a buying committee before anyone can use your product, you're probably top-down. This is pretty much any major enterprise software. Like Workday, SAP, ServiceNow, etc.

In short, bottom-up selling is about getting your product in the hands of the user, and using them as your entry point to sell up the ladder, into the executive suite.

But here’s what that actually looks like…

Kyle Parrish was Figma's first sales hire in 2018. He and the CFO routed the product data straight into their CRM, and made it refresh every 30 minutes. Reps could pull up any account and see active users, license count, plan tier, usage data, etc.

So a rep's morning looks like this: Sort accounts by usage. Find the person who has shared the most files inside the company (because that person is their champion). Call them.

Parrish is clear that this is not cold outbound. The people the reps call are already familiar with Figma and use the product.

Kyle also says he learned what NOT to do during his time at Dropbox. The old play was calling the CIO and saying “Hey, 200 of your people are using us.” He calls this “poking the beehive”. Some companies responded by blocking Dropbox entirely.

At Figma, they flipped it and led with what the product is already doing for the business.

Top-down says what it is in its name.

You start at the top of the organization, selling to the C-suite or management team, and rolling out your product to the end users after the deal is closed.

Palantir is an extreme example. They send engineers to live inside the customer's operation and build working systems in production, on site, for weeks. They’ll land a small project, prove value, then expand. Their pilots can turn into multimillion-dollar contracts.

It works for them because their entry point is the C-suite, which gives them permission to redesign how a whole team works rather than just adding a tool to the stack.

So the top-down rep's day is basically the opposite of a rep selling bottom-up. They don’t look at usage dashboards because there is no usage.

These reps are trying to get a hold of the decision makers at the top level, and convince them that their product will make their lives better, make them money, or save them money.

The 3 main reasons why almost any company buys something.

You already know the first mistake. Dropbox forced enterprise onto a self-serve product and burned a year finding out.

Stripe made the opposite mistake. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser said relying on PLG is the biggest mistake companies make, and one of Stripe's co-founders admitted the company would be several times larger today if they had hired sellers sooner.

Sure, most mature companies eventually run both. But they usually get big by focusing on one.

Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley