Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I am mostly cold emailing companies hiring for position

One very large mistake you're making is assuming that companies make any decisions. They don't. People at companies make decisions. So here are some steps to follow.

Step 1. Find "right company".

Step 2. Find "right person" @ "right company". This person should personally gain something by your product. i.e. spend less time doing something they hate, look good to their boss. Linkedin can be super helpful for this.

Step 3. Figure out how to get "right person" on the phone. This could be shmoozing the secretary(called gatekeeper in sales), or e-mailing someone higher in the organization and asking for a downward referral. "Hey CEO, we want to save you lots of money via data science. Who is the best person in your org to talk about this opportunity?"(It's always easier to get a downward referral. Your boss is usually much more willing to waste your time with a sales call then you are to waste his.)

View on HN

This is great advice, I want to add to this:

> This person should personally gain something by your product. i.e. spend less time doing something they hate, look good to their boss. Linkedin can be super helpful for this.

to include "This person should be someone who might be the _purchaser_ of your product" (e.g. the person who can buy it, since they're the person you need to convince)

In a lot of cases two are not the same. User of your product (person who is going to benefit the most) might not be same as purchaser (VP or founder)

This means you're going to have a really hard time selling this product until you figure out how your product can benefit the purchaser.

Ever wonders why it seems like a bunch of products spend so much time and effort on useless reporting that only one dude looks at on a dashboard once a month for 5 minutes? This is why :).

Also think about how the benefits to your target audience role up to purchaser. Is that through reduced turnover, increased sales, enhanced developer productivity?

Basically instead of pitching the data science guy and saying "Hey you know this thing you do, that you hate that takes a lot of time. Well use my product and do less of that!!" Pitch the owner and say "Hey you know those expensive data science guys you write big checks to every month to solve data science problems, well they're wasting a bunch of their time and your money doing this "thing". Well our product means they spend less time doing that "thing" and more time solving data science problems that makes you money. If we could show that we free up 33% of your data scientists time to work on your "business problem" would you be willing to pay $1000 for that?"

Yeah currently trying downward referral thing. Wondering would my email have more probability of getting noticed in downward referral or directly to person getting affected?

If you have the contact info of the person being affected reach out to them. Downward referral is just a technique to get the contact info for the right person. If you already have that then you're golden.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com