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- Top-down vs. Bottom-up Sales ⬇️ ⬆️
Top-down vs. Bottom-up Sales ⬇️ ⬆️
When it comes to B2B sales motions, there are two common approaches: bottom-up and top-down
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Today we're discussing the top-down vs. bottom-up sales motions. Let's dig in 🍽
Top-down & Bottom-up - an overview
When it comes to B2B sales motions, there are two common approaches: top-down and bottom-up. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and the right one for your business will depend on your target customer and product.
If you have a product that will resonate with executives, then top-down sales may be the way to go. If you have a product that solves pain points for individuals or small teams and can be easily adopted and spread virally within an organization, bottom-up sales may be the better option.
Top-down vs. Bottom-up
1. Top-down
Top-down is a sales approach where the sales team targets high-level decision-makers within an organization, such as executives or department heads, in order to secure a deal for the company's product.
Top-down sales usually start by identifying a lead and getting their attention. This is often the hardest part, as executives are busy and hard to reach. Once you have their attention, you need to validate that they have a problem you can solve and convince them that you can solve it. After that, it's a matter of jumping through the necessary procurement hoops and getting them to sign a contract. This approach works well for products that resonate with Executives who want to accomplish a strategic goal or move a strategic number.
The downside is that scaling a top-down sales motion also requires building an expensive enterprise sales team.
2. Bottom-up
Bottom-up sales is an approach that starts by targeting individual users or teams within a company and then works its way throughout the whole organisation or up to higher-level decision-makers. Bottom-up sales usually start with the user.
The goal is to build a self-serve product that people can adopt on their own without talking to you first. From there, you need to find a cheaper distribution channel that scales and uses it to get lots of users. Once you have a critical mass of users, you can approach companies where people are already using your product and offer them more features or bulk pricing in exchange for a contract.
This approach works well with products that solve pain points for individuals or small teams, and products that are easy to adopt and spread virally within an organization. Slack or Notion are good examples. The downside is that viral product growth is really difficult to achieve and most of the time bottom-up products do actually require some salespeople.
Case Study: Zoom
Zoom initially focused on building a self-serve video conferencing product that individuals and small teams could easily adopt and use without the need for salespeople. As the product gained traction and more users, Zoom was able to approach larger organizations and offer them more features and bulk pricing in exchange for a contract.
This bottom-up approach allowed Zoom to grow quickly and efficiently without the need for an expensive enterprise sales team. However, as the company grew, they realised they could also benefit from a top-down approach. They began to target executives at large organizations and sell to them directly. This is a great example of selling bottom-up but layering on top-down sales.
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