How sales complexity impacts startup viability | Hacker News Reader

How sales complexity impacts startup viability

forentrepreneurs.com

20 pointsbrk4 comments

This is one of the main reasons I sell to teachers as opposed to selling to school districts: I just could not possibly keep ahead of the sales cycle for educational purchasing, with pushing the sale through multiple layers of bureaucracy, getting the PO, and then chasing down payment, all while otherwise occupied with everything else I have to do.

I'm hoping to be in the 37Signals-y sweet spot for my next product: zero marginal effort for the typical sale but sufficient value to have lifetime customer values in the $X00 range rather than $29.95.

What is your next product? More importantly, how did you arrive at it?

Great article -- there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a good exploration of a topic that is often non-intuitive to engineers.

High sales complexity isn't necessarily the kiss of death for a startup; it just means that you need strong sales talent early on (preferably in one or more of the founders). Sure, you do everything you can to shift your product as far toward self-service sales as possible, but at the end of the day, if you can't sell it without being out in the field, that means most other companies can't do it, either. Presto, barrier to entry.

My startup is definitely on the high complexity end of the spectrum; our sales cycle is anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. Right now, we have no direct competitors; this is probably at least partly due to the complexity of the sales process.

My start up was founded by 3 core people, myself and 2 sales guys. People always remarked that I was the brains, but I gave them lots of credit. They went out to the shows, met the people, worked the sales. They brought in the people to use the technology I spent time building. I loved that i didn't have to handle the day to day business stuff or run out after people.

They loved that they could leave the tech stuff in my hands. It also helped that they could put me in front of potential clients and I could actually sell the product as well. And, as the tech guy, a lot of the prospects assumed I wasn't gonna try to sell them. I never lied, but damn, I was able to soothe any tech concerns with relative ease.

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