Immediately’s Branko Cerny on the rise of bottom up sales and the importance of branding

One of the most groundbreaking themes in the world of enterprise sales in the last few years has been the rise of bottom up sales techniques due to its ability to allow startups to target hundreds of paths into a company.

In contrast to the more traditional top down, generally involving the sale to a CIO or VP, the bottoms up sales approach enable each employee to be a credit card carrying decision maker.

In our latest interview with Branko Cerny, Founder and CEO at Immediately we discuss the exponential increase in buyers, leading to the inevitable increase in the world of sales processes.

Now that sales processes target individuals, sales cycles are much shorter. The realization of the need to target individuals resulted in the fundamental thesis surrounding Immediately, branding.

As employees are all credit card carrying decision makers the ability to influence them through branding becomes ever more important. As Branko emphasises in the interview, “employees are buying into the lifestyle brand,” and going even further to state that “enterprise companies can learn a lot from dominant consumer brands such as Tinder and Equinox.”

However, branding is only one side of swaying the decision making of the ever growing consumer employee market. The other determinant has very much become the product itself.

Following up the branding which educates and entices potential customers, the product must now stand and deliver, forcing the customer to convert from a trial to a paid customer status.

The culmination of these two factors; the presence of a brand and the beauty of the product leads to SaaS companies being able to effectively spin a customer acquisition flywheel that can be utilised to generate enough new customers to scale the business very quickly.