Enterprise Sales for Hackers
themacro.com
themacro.com
you can consider the typical “coin operated” sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.
The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:
The “coin operated idiots” mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It’s why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.
But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you “slot onto” your organization when you need to...
Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.
[1] http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-...
"Meter" isn't quite the right noun to go with the adjective here, .
I do a lot of sales now, and I've watched a lot of enterprise salespeople do their work.
As in any other human endeavor, some of them are phenomenal. I routinely sat in on one friend's sales meetings and calls. After being raised watching Gil, the hapless salesman from the Simpsons, this was like watching Billy Joel play the piano or Roger Federer play tennis. It was obvious he was a master craftsman. He was so expert at getting people to act in their own best interest, while making it look pleasant and effortless, it was - seriously - beautiful to watch.
Other salespeople... not so much. I've seen them too. They don't have the intellectual horsepower, they don't prepare, they... I mean, frankly there are a million reasons they're mediocre. Their mediocrity is overdetermined.
I think that's all the author meant by coin-operated salesperson or "script kiddie" salesperson: a mediocre one.
It's sometimes unfairly used as a slur on the whole profession. Here he seems to be talking about that class of poorer salespeople who need to be told exactly what to do, given precise scripts, can't leap hurdles themselves, etc.
It doesn't work very well, and it tends to result in a very toxic culture. You get a restaurant that's packed on opening day but the food sucks, or there's no food and the sales guys run across the street to McDonald's in desperation and try to pass it off as high cuisine. Then they blame everyone else.
Now that tech types often found and run companies I think we have an opposing and probably retaliatory mindset emerging. Now all you need is a few super genius engineers and the rest... well...
Unfortunately this doesn't work well either and also tends to result in a toxic culture. You get a restaurant with five star food and a lot of empty seats. Everyone else tends to get blamed here too.
In a healthy company you have a culture that respects the need for a wide variety of skills.
"It's still very common on the east coast."
I've also seen the opposite even more - bringing in (average or lower) salespeople usually adds to the bullshit.
That said it takes time to build trust. You can establish it over time by building authority and offering social proof in any industry.
Going direct to customers is a good way to start revenue but it's tough to scale. HP sells 80% of its revenue through partners. Instead of going direct to customers you should build a channel sales program and build up partner relationships.
Partners you work with should have clients already, clients you want. Clients that trust these partners because they do a good job.
That's how you get into enterprise quickly and scale.
I have built and sold five companies in the last 7 years. I was CIO at a $50M/year sales organization by age 24, now I am going to be taking over 170 (as of writing this) startups through a probono training on how to do sales for enterprise. I'd like to extend an invite to everyone on here if anyone is interested in joining our session. No cost to anyone for as long as I enjoy hosting it. It's going to be hosted over a webinar on May 26th. Email me hn (at) strapr (dot) com to get on the list.
What does this mean?
Do we want inferior products to win?
short term versus long term?
edit: I'll add - sales would suggest building a faster horse.
Wrong - the customer would ask for a faster horse. A bad salesman would sell them one. A good salesman will get them to want a car.
The salesperson is the one that says "you're not going replace horses with automobiles, unless they're faster or more reliable than a horse".
As well as the one that says "don't make a faster aeroplane, make one with lower fuel burn instead"
You're not gonna get much enthusiasm here for negative dev stereotypes, especially if you're gonna cast sales as noble protectors of the business in contrast. Many devs (especially in "enterprise") are quite conservative. In fact, I've seen sales/management sometimes care more about the latest buzzword shiny than development.
> salespeople are perfectly capable of grasping
Doesn't mean they'll care, especially if they'll be out, commission in hand, by the time the debt hits.
> The salesperson is the one that says "you're not going replace horses with automobiles, unless they're faster or more reliable than a horse".
I'm not sure cars were either of these.
And the point is, how do sales know what the customer wants, if the customer doesn't know what they want?
http://brandonb.cc/enterprise-sales-tips-for-hackers
Mostly orthogonal to the OP, but there are a few overlapping points.
Based on research into the field of sales.
In summary one of the key differences for enterprise sales is that it's a long process with many people involved.
Do you have any insights into how startups can achieve $1M+ in annual contract value (ACV)? What differentiates their product and pricing strategy from a startup that sells software for say $100K a year?
[1]: http://themacro.com/articles/2016/05/enterprise-sales-for-ha...
The ways that can work are quite varied: it could be very expensive software that's necessary to control a certain business process, or a standard app that is going to make small (but by an enterprise salesperson, quantifiable) improvements to the productivity of 40,000 staff, or something that's sold with metered usage that the enterprise wants to use a lot.
But ultimately to sell at that scale you're almost certainly using "value based pricing" where you start by trying to identify how much the enterprise customer will make/save from your product compared with their next best option, and negotiate down from there.
Equating "selling" to "pwning" is not a good way to think about any kind of sales. Talking about "hacking" a customer suggests that they are somehow inferior and that the goal is to somehow beat or triumph over them, to trick them or exploit a vulnerability. No company should think of their potential customers in that way.