Über dieses E-Book
Fast Forward will help you find, win, and keep customers. This detailed guide on B2B sales tells you how to grow your revenue from zero to 1 million, 10 million and 100 million.
The authors share more than 40 years of successful operating experience as startup founder, senior executive, board member, mentor, and investor in startups. Fast Forward outlines their insider’s perspective on market segmentation, pricing, contract negotiation, sales process, customer conversations, pipeline management, reporting, sales organization, and customer success.
Fast Forward also features exclusive advice from more than 30 top-tier B2B startup founders and CEOs, including:
Moritz Zimmermann (Hybris, now SAP) - Neil Ryland (Peakon, now Workday) - Peter Carlsson (Northvolt) - Bastian Nominacher (Celonis) - Erez Galonska (Infarm) - Veronika Riederle (Demodesk) - Jonas Rieke (Personio) - Matt Robinson (GoCardless) - Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia) - Jörg G. Beyer (LeanIX) - Firmin Zocchetto (Payfit) - Avinoam Nowogrodski (Clarizen)
“This book demystifies the sales journey, breaking it down into clear phases, and is packed with hands-on, pragmatic advice. To save time and avoid mistakes, read this book.” - Bastian Nominacher, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Celonis
Autoren-Profil
Martin’s first business sale funded the launch of a student-edited school newspaper when he was 14 years old. With youthful naiveté, Martin simply walked into a local bookstore and convinced the owner to sponsor the back page of the newspaper for 50 Deutschmarks.
Martin studied law and journalism in Hamburg, Geneva, and Singapore, and later earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard and an MBA from MIT Sloan. While in Boston, Martin landed his first sales job for a local startup (Frictionless Commerce, later acquired by SAP). Here he built an entire merchant network from scratch by intensive cold-calling.
As an entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades, Martin loves to improve business systems through the use of analytics, negotiations and business model design. He transitioned into operating roles after advising the private equity buyers of Kabel Deutschland on the purchase of the company in 2003. At Kabel Deutschland, he led teams from marketing and sales reporting to business intelligence and controlling, thereby providing the analytic backbone for a combination of B2C and B2B sales and marketing channels that delivered more than €100 million in annual revenue growth. This allowed for Kabel Deutschland’s IPO to launch in 2010 and later be acquired by Vodafone in 2013.
As Managing Director for the Kabel call center subsidiary and operations director for the Vodafone Germany call centers, Martin developed a significant B2C sales channel by leveraging the company’s 50 million annual service contacts as an upselling opportunity. Martin’s sales-through-service approach and some of his innovative supplier contract designs were recognized as a global best practice for Vodafone.
Since 2019, Martin has been the Managing Director of the Munich-based deep tech incubator XPRENEURS by Europe’s premier entrepreneurship center UnternehmerTUM. He is an active business angel with a dozen investments and regularly gives lectures in leading programs such as the EMBA at TU Munich, the EMBA at Frankfurt School, the Center for Digital Management, and the University of Passau. Martin is also the author of “Startup Finanzierung”, Germany’s most comprehensive guide on startup financing.
Matthias learned his first lesson in sales while working his after-school job: washing cars for company executives. He picked up luxury cars from executives’ offices, drove them to the next car wash, and dropped them off again. Of course, it was all about the driving, not the 20 Deutschmarks for the wash. But then again… why not charge a little bit more? Maybe 50 Deutschmarks? Eventually, he ended up charging 150 Deutschmarks, having now enjoyed the money as much as the driving.
Before launching his career in international marketing, sales and board-level management, Matthias studied Business, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence at FAU Nuremberg, University of Edinburgh, and LMU Munich. In 1999, fresh out of university, he founded Avalas.com, Germany’s first mobile internet portal. He went on to spend more than 20 years in telecommunications, working for Vodafone, Orange, and Salt worldwide. His last role in this field was as the Chief Commercial Officer of Orange Switzerland, running a €1 billion business operation. In this capacity, Matthias contributed to a successful private equity investment cycle for Apax Partners, generating €800 million in enterprise value.
As CEO of MH2 Capital, Matthias has now turned full-time investor, focusing on early-stage technology with a portfolio of 20+ investments, real estate and public assets. Matthias’s investments are driven by his passion to push Germany’s and Europe’s competitiveness forward by fostering innovation both through start-ups and large corporations.
Matthias has sold
- to B2B and B2C segments
- software and hardware
- with deal sizes ranging from €5 to €50 million
- via direct and indirect channels
- at customers’ premises, over the phone and email, online and in shops
- via inbound and outbound channels
- taking anywhere from 15 minutes to two years to close a deal
- by himself and by managing sales teams of 500+ people
