The absence of a Sales culture in French startups

What is the problem with French culture?

For centuries, French culture has been marked by a complicated relationship with money. Our society has historically left the “inferior” (watch out for quotation marks!) of each era — the Vassals, the Jews, the Bourgeois — take care of financial and monetary affairs. Nothing shocked the nobility more than talking about money. This is where three typical French biases come from:

• The profession of Sales — we no longer dare to say “commercial”... — is ungrateful and despicable. We celebrate inventors, we laugh at salespeople, and we forget that they are indispensable to each other. France caricatures Jean-Claude Convenant (Camera (Coffee), the US is celebrating Don Draper (Mad Men).
• Knowing how to sell is a gift, it cannot be taught. What will 99% of tech sales that go through business school tell you? “I never learned how to sell there.” In fact, none of the top Business schools I haven't participated in the national best seller competition for over 20 years...
• Since it is a gift, there is no science of selling. In a pinch, the experience can make it possible to become less bad. All you have to do is take well-trained people, the rest will come.

Thankfully, Akimbo Help change that!

The typical case of a B2B SaaS startup

Consciously or not, French entrepreneurs perpetuate these biases. To illustrate this, let's take the case of a B2B (Business to Business) SaaS (Software as a Service) startup that has just completed a round of Series A. It will be called Kolixa — a completely fictional name, but the story is based on the real events of several startups.

With this round of financing, its CEO, Antoine, says to himself that he must increase the sales team and in particular recruit juniors. Antoine, who went through business school, has no idea how to source and evaluate sales. He will then opt for one of the two choices: either take a young business school graduate, because he/she is resourceful and will learn to train; or take a less conventional profile, such as a graduate of a master's degree in law/economics from Paris 1, because he will take the time to train him. The rest is not surprising: he will recruit only on the ability to empathize and listen, then he will leave his new sales in the wild.

All this until one of its shareholders, a Parisian VC fund, told him: “You should book XXX to train your sales staff in Customer Centric Selling, you'll see, it will boost sales.” “The what?” Antoine asks himself after hanging up. When in doubt, he complies, because after all, it was his investor who recommended it to him. A few weeks later, the training took place. 4 days full time, hundreds of slides scrolling by, fictional prospects appearing. Neither the format nor the content are adapted, but the company paid, so too bad.

Then, after the training, Antoine said to himself that with the arrival of new rooms, the organization must be overhauled. He read somewhere that Salesforce has a great sales organization model. “Salesforce is more of a reference, isn't it?” Think Antoine. Let's go, let's go, we're moving towards this new model and we're taking Salesforce best practices. By the way, forgetting that it's not the same company, the same culture, the same people, the same stage of maturity. In education as well as in entrepreneurship, the One Size Fits All (“one-size-fits-all” business model) rarely works...

The result? Junior sales are not performing, they are stressed and unhappy. Experienced salespeople no longer have the impression of learning, or of being properly coached. The co-founders and C-Level tell each other that something is wrong, but they don't see what. And, globally, the startup is stagnating and missing out on its destiny.

The exceptions among French startups

Of course, there are exceptions — of which Payfit is no doubt a good example. Many others exist and it is interesting to remember that the first real French unicorn, Business Objects, was a B2B company — bought in 2008 by SAP for around €5 billion.

But the reality is that a large part of French startups suffer from a real weakness of sales cultures. After interviewing over 60 sales representatives (SDR, Business Developer, Account Manager, Account Executive, Growth Hacker, Sales Coach), the conclusions are quite clear and indisputable: most startups do not know how to onboard, train and retain their sales and business talents.

France vs USA: the kings of sales culture

If we compare ourselves with the reference in sales and business development — the homeland of Uncle Sam — two factors explain France's lag in terms of sales culture:

• the youth of the ecosystem: very few French B2B startups/scaleups have reached a critical size and have developed a real Sales machine internal which would allow knowledge-sharing between CRO/VPS/Head of Sales/etc.;
• limited content/knowledge: very few content and resources exist on the subject in France. For example, there is not a single quality sales podcast in France compared to thirty in the US — Hubspot has listed the 24 best hither;
• culture: the French hate to sell themselves and even less to sell. In elementary school we organize fairs while Americans sell cookies. Later this is found again: Americans develop a science of networking and selling, when we develop a rejection of it. Anyone who has already been in Paris at a networking event (startup or not) knows what we want to talk about.

These three factors mean that most French startups have a vision and a culture that is totally distorted compared to sales.

The reality of Sales

Because the reality of Sales is that:

• It can be learned, whether it's the pitch, the lead generation (Inbound and outbound), qualification, complex sales, customer success, etc.;
• Experience plays a part, but it's like adding floors to a house: you already have to make sure that the foundations are solid;
• a well-trained field is not x2, x3, x4 but x10 more effective than a dirty one left in the wild;
• Training a sales team well produces a measurable, rapid and lasting return on results if the organization follows suit;
• After a certain stage, a company scales primarily thanks to its sales rather than thanks to its product — each new feature of the product having a decreasing marginal utility;
• strategies, methods and tools have changed considerably in the last 20 years. No well-trained salesperson believes in the ABC model anymore (Always Be Closing) or other hyper-aggressive hunting techniques.

Hence the existence ofAkimbo.

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