“Advancing the chains on opportunities.” Garrett MacDonald – Vice President, Strategic Sales at Airpush – uses this football analogy to describe one of the many reasons that he relies so heavily on CRM software to do his job successfully at this rapidly growing mobile advertising platform company.

Airpush wants to redefine mobile advertising for publishers and advertisers.  According to the company, more than 100,000 publishers and 5,000 advertisers depend upon Airpush to deliver an array of effective ad formats and innovative targeting technology.  

Founded in 2010 by CEO Asher Delug, Airpush has approximately 140 employees and offices in Los Angeles and Bangalore. According to Airpush, revenue has grown from approximately $10 million in 2011 to the $50 million range last year, with projected revenue blasting towards the $100 million range for 2013.

MacDonald, who focuses on selling to advertising agencies and brand advertisers, reports to David Kawamoto – Senior Vice President, Sales and Business Development. Cindy Carr – Vice President, International Sales – is playing a leading role in the worldwide revenue growth of Airpush. Airpush's competitors include Admob, Millennial Media (which recently acquired additional competitor Jumptap) and InMobi.

The Airpush sales team relies extensively on CRM software solutions to turn revenue opportunities into accounts. MacDonald describes the key benefits of sales CRM as:

• Having access to key company, contact and deal information remotely, including documents and details about meetings and conversations.
  
• Knowing where you and the rest of the team are in the sales process / timeline, enabling better forecasting.
  
• Creating a collaborative sales team, sharing best practices and information and communicating in near real-time to determine how to get deals done.
  
• Getting to know your customers better.
  
  

Big challenges for technology providers like Airpush are the vast quantity of sales people selling to a shrinking number of prospects, and the reality that buyers are faced with too many choices, according to MacDonald. He adds, “Digital buyers have 300 reps calling them, do not have enough time and are often undercompensated for their efforts.” Hence, the importance of a great CRM software solution to get every possible advantage over the competition and bring in new customers.

“You don't get paid for how hard you work,” says MacDonald. “Just how quickly you close business.”

So you think you have a great idea for a new business.  You are inspired by the fact that your friend or your college roommate or that cousin you have not seen in seven years just launched a startup after receiving angel funding or being accepted into your city's best accelerator.

After thinking about “going for it” and deciding to move forward, a huge portion of your business activities relate to sales, well before you start selling your product to customers. I have been through this process many times and the art of sales becomes a consistent and major part of your life.  

Here are some examples:

-- Once you make the decision to move forward with your startup, the process of selling the idea to your spouse, friends and others close to you begins.  After all, you probably have heard the saying “Happy Wife, Happy Life.”  If your inner circle does not believe in what you are about to embark on, the path to success becomes a bit more challenging. On the other hand, major support from people you trust can be a vital ingredient for success.

-- You will also need to recruit team members to join the company and become part of the mission.  This process requires heavy sales and frequently involves convincing people to leave what they are currently doing and to jump onto your ship.  A strong salesperson (with a good concept, of course) will find himself surrounded by a solid team much quicker than someone who is a mediocre storyteller, lacking in confidence.

-- There will be a great deal of salesmanship involved with networking in your industry to find advisors and mentors who have the connections and relationships to maximize your company's odds of success.  These people will need to be convinced that it is worthwhile for them to carve out a portion of their valuable bandwidth for you and your company.

-- And of course, there is the perpetual selling to get accepted into an accelerator, to successfully pitch angel investors and VCs and to continue to receive necessary funding.  I often recommend the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, evangelized by author/investor Guy Kawasaki as a great selling tool when addressing potential investors.  Simply put – keep your presentations to 10 slides, 20 minutes in length and use a 30-point font within PowerPoint or whatever software tool you are using.

And all of this takes place before the product-related selling truly begins.   How do you sell?  In general, to create an efficient and effective sales process, a company needs to orchestrate a series of steps through which a sale passes, from prospecting through closing the deal. Even in the early days of a startup, I would highly recommend a user-friendly CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software package, such as Pipeliner CRM to help manage sales. 

With just about every insider and onlooker – from friends to colleagues to investors to possibly the press – wondering how your startup is doing, every sale counts.  Even a tiny sale to an unknown customer can help support the all-important bottom line and move your startup to cash flow positive status.  In the current world of startups and entrepreneurship, “traction” is a major buzzword and one of the key metrics in determining whether a company is heading in the right direction.   No matter how you look at it, sales and traction are best friends.

[Disclosure - Pipelinersales is a client of Halperin Marketing & Digital Innovation, LLC.]

Every month, I expect to receive a handful of survey requests via email.  Invariably, the surveys take too long, are not very user friendly and the survey provider offers some sort of second-rate incentive (i.e. a chance to win an iPad).  In fact, I just received one, moments ago, while writing this article.   Osurv – a Los Angeles-based startup – is on a mission to provide smarter mobile-based surveys, superior user experience, real-time analytics, wide-ranging mobile phone compatibility and the highest survey completion rates.

I first met the two key principals at Osurv – CEO Jad Meouchy and COO Aaron Abram – through my work as a mentor at StartEngine, one of the big startup accelerators in Los Angeles.  [Osurv graduated from StartEngine more than a year ago.]  Meouchy has an engineering and mobile software background, while Abram is the company’s “closer” with a deep business development experience.   There are five other full-timers on the Osurv team.  Aside from some financing from StartEngine, Osurv has been self-funded and is currently running on cash flow.

Osurv has developed a new mobile research platform that allows companies to engage customers with their smartphones, often at a venue or in-store, getting feedback in real-time.   Abram says the typical Osurv survey “takes 20-30 seconds for completion,” taking into account the short attention span of a mobile user.  Meouchy says he believes that the “magic sauce” for mobile is providing the user with seven to ten questions and adds that a big differentiator for Osurv is that app downloads are not required.  With no log-in or other barriers, Osurv serves up via the mobile Web what the company describes as easier, shorter and simpler surveys that generate important data for their clients.   Competitors include SurveyMonkey, uSamp and SurveyGizmo, none of whom have Osurv’s mobile focus, according to Meouchy.

Osurv was founded in late 2011, focused on developing an image comparison game app, which Meouchy describes as “'Hot or Not' for ads.”  Osurv pivoted after discovering a much larger opportunity around mobile surveys.  The comparison game app remains a feature of Osurv’s research offerings, which include behavioral profiling and analysis of studies relating to loyalty, quality and service.

Live events have played a particularly important role in the company’s history, providing the impetus for Abram to join Meouchy on the Osurv team.  Meouchy and Abram were both running technology-focused event groups when they met at a startup gathering.  They immediately connected, realized they had a great deal in common (both had worked in the real estate foreclosure business) and began using mobile tools to survey attendees at events.  According to Osurv, the results were impressive with the typical response rate at 75% of the crowds.  In addition to live event-related customers, Osurv has landed clients in the hospitality, entertainment and restaurant categories.