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Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

Never underestimate the capability and connections of a good sales person.

There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them, a single experienced professional sales person can work wonders, even for a startup that is still a few pivots away from its final shape.

This may not be the most HN-compatible opinion, and there are certainly many additional ways to sell to big companies, but I worry that a lot of founders, especially technical ones, overlook staffing sales until later than they should.

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Wish I could offer more votes.

Having the right sales (not marketing) person can be the difference between success and something else. The right sales person can target and create a relationship the wrong person will just waste resources.

The most successful companies founders I've seen combo of sales and technical. If you are a technical solo founder get an experienced sales vp and give them 20%.

Marketing is usually a team effort so a more junior team can help. Don't hire someone to do both.. hire for sales first.

Sales before tales.

Just curious because I've come across differing definitions of this. How would you define the differentiate between sales and marketing ?

The way I was taught is that Marketing is really about communicating the value that your product creates for the customer, and then capturing the company’s portion of that value created. Some textbooks call this Dual Value Creation.

Sales is a part of marketing, in the theory, and they actually do a bit of both, communicating and capturing value. Communicating when they talk to prospects, capturing when they close deals.

The typical responsibility of Sales is to guide prospects/customers through the “sales funnel” or if you want to be really snazzy, the McKinsey “consumer decision journey.” Actively pushing new clients closer and closer to a deal, cross-selling and upselling current clients, etc.

But you wouldn’t expect salespeople to be writing advertising copy or making webpages, that’s the job of the broader marketing team

Correction : * How would you differentiate between sales and marketing

> There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them

Do you have any tips?

I do. Don't shop price when hiring sales people. Hire the best available at the market rate.

Reward them extremely well when they over perform. One sales person can easily create more ARR than 3 or 4 average ones. Make sure you pay them accordingly, and you can save yourself a lot of headaches and wasted hires.

Agreed. In most cases, you can afford to not hire the absolute best tech talent (assuming you aren't trying to break ground on new tech frontiers), but you should get the best sales talent possible, almost always.

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