What's The Sales Engine all about?
A bit about what you can expect here and who I am.
Hey 👋 I’m Nate! Every week I write about the strategies for building a sales engine at companies both big & small. My goal is to provide leaders with actionable insights rooted in examples so that you can apply them to your own company. Please send me questions on the topic and I’ll do my best to provide direct advice and/or cover in an upcoming newsletter.
It’s time for a sales focused newsletter.
The Sales Engine is a playbook for building sales motions from scratch. The number of resources available to sales teams that are rooted in modern, concrete examples are limited. It’s time that there’s a collection of strategies available for everyone operating in or near a sales organization - whether at an individual contributor, manager, or exec level. And the best part is that we can build a discussion and community about these topics together on Substack.
Who is this newsletter for?
My hope is that this is for everyone because sales is so fundamental to a growing business. Every business needs customers, and this newsletter aims to help with the tactics around growing & retaining them.
The people who will likely find the most value most quickly here are sales leaders and individual contributors (at any level). Founders and executives will also find value on the management components especially as they’re putting making their key sales hires.
About me:
My name is Nate Mihalovich. I’m a repeat founder and early employee with 2 exits under my belt. My core focus over the year has been in building revenue engines from scratch. I’m currently leading the new vertical launch of Octane’s automotive business to enable car dealerships to have their own white label financing.
I joined Octane after starting The Lasso (marketplace for consumers to acution their cars to dealerships), which they acquired. Prior to that, I was the first non-engineering hire (6th employee) at BuildingConnected where I helped take multiple products from 0 to $1M in ARR and the overall team to $20M ARR in 4 years. We were acquired by Autodesk in 2019 for $275M.
I’ve also advised and invested in over 20 companies - mainly early stage. The vast majority of those companies have similar questions, issues, and needs around sales & growth. I’ve started The Sales Engine to build a place and community where we can tackle all those challenges together.
Let’s break down the value prop by different roles.
Below are examples of topics that we’ll cover by function. Regardless of where you are in this stack, understanding how the others function is critical to putting all the pieces together.
Execs
Playbooks to lead your different orgs, hiring & training effective sales leadership, choosing proper tooling.
Management
Building a repeatable sales model, setting quotas, managing managers, SKOs, working cross functionally, pricing strategy.
Individual contributors
Repeatability and predictability in role, getting to #1 on the leaderboard, pipeline management, working with leadership, career pathing.
How to start your career in sales, accelerating learning, working with management, upskilling, pitfalls to avoid.
Writing cadence
Every other week I focus on a specific role and function with examples to ensure that the lessons resonate.