How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
entrepidpartners.com
entrepidpartners.com
Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-face only - lesson one :)
Email is in profile.
Moving from tech support to pre-sales within the same organization is not uncommon - support have deep technical knowledge of the product, have customer facing (at least telephone) skills, are used to juggling multiple ongoing conversations, etc.
Moving from engineering, if you are in a role that requires you to understand the whole product, you are part way there. Communication skills perhaps less so (unless you run engineering TOI presentations for other parts of the business or within engineering), and customer facing skills possibly not so well honed.
A move from engineering to profession services (which adds a customer facing element) to pre-sales, to (if that's what you're aiming for, and is still attractive having worked with sales people while in a pre-sales role) sales, might be a better path.
Enterprise sales is less about the product, and more about developing relationships ("people by from people they trust"), constructing a deal that works for both organizations, and closing the sale.
Technical pre-sales is a question of mapping the customer's business requirements to the product's capabilities, and demonstrating that your company can solve their specific needs better than the competition.
As a technical founder, these are exactly the questions I need to ask someone with sales experience!
1. The founding team is very technical and doesn't want to make sales/talk to customers themselves. In this case, it will be difficult to achieve success without taking on a non-technical cofounder to do customer development and then early sales.
2. The founding team has technical talent but also at least one person who's happy to go out and do customer development and then make sales. In this case, they should probably wait on hiring someone with Sales experience until they feel that they have product market fit, which means they've probably made enough sales to answer these questions.
Content tagged with sales: https://a16z.com/tag/sales/
Exec team with mature sales presence/leadership = hire less experienced (3-6 years).
Exec team with immature sales presence/leadership = hire more experienced (6-10 years with opp to become a VP of Sales).
Good guide - thanks for putting together.
Let’s say you are selling a $5000 piece of software and you update every 2 years. If you are counting on selling updates as part of your projected LTV, you are pretty much a subscription business, subject to the same churn considerations as a “normal” SaaS might be.
My point is that unless you are selling a one-time product with no paid updates or paid ongoing support, then SaaS strategies should work for you. Unless you happen to be selling something esoteric such as avionics or infrastructure software, it would seem most SaaS sales strategies would tend to be applicable.
Pre-sales is a really long and drawn out process when dealing with big corporates, doubly so when you’re selling what will become core infrastructure. We’re currently a year into what is effectively pre-sales with one client, involving a full due diligence process, in depth conversation with their corporate security department, and a (paid for) trial involving several hundred of their customers.
- B2B Executive Playbook
- Crossing the Chasm
But in general, the reason no one tells you how to run an actual software business is because why would they tell you what took them years / decades to learn the hard way?
SaaS Startups are a tool to fleece investors, so all the scam artists are happy to tell the world how smart they are at Starting Up. It's personal marketing.
Boring B2B Software is just a normal businesses, ain't nobody gonna tell you the secret to doing that. Get a job in industry and then learn it first hand, that's how you learn it.