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> Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells.

Agreed. I tried for ~3 years to sell ‘general development services’. Got tangled up in mobile apps, SharePoint, web development, basically anything that I didn’t consider to be “IT”.

It was a financial and professional disaster. The solutions all sucked, because I didn’t have deep expertise in anything and there was never enough budget to “do things right”. There was no opportunity to develop any kind of reputation for anything. It is insanely hard to sell “well, I can build things”.

As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed. I started getting good at it, margins became healthy, referrals started to happen. Try getting a referral when the problems you solve are too vague to describe.

> There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.

If there’s a market for CTO-as-a-service, or anything really, you need to be able to reach it. A hyper niche service can be OK if you can reach the people that need it. Broad markets can be just as hard because you tend to need to reach lots of people (think advertising). For me, the sweet spot turned out to be “small to mid-size regional companies” because you can identify them and sell to them as a freelancer.

^ There's nuggets of gold in this comment. I went through a very similar cycle. Learn from our mistakes friends!

Is this the nugget of gold? “As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed.”

It’s the generalist vs. focused part. Many of us who have been successful in tech have done so because we are good generalists. But, that doesn’t transfer well as something that you can market. So there is great power in narrowly focusing on some skill that has demand you can meet.

It's also important to identify the thing that people request first, such as a good website. Plenty of work is done after that problem is solved or in addition to that problem.

The person who solves the "we need a website" problem gets to solve those additional problems if they want to.

That is a great point. Advertising as a generalist is hard because at the point a generalist is needed they already have a website and a developer.

You need to meet them at where they are, when they are in the market for a developer.

There is an entire industry of headhunters for stand-in for directors and senior staff.

What you are saying is gold and rings true for my experiences. Spot on.

One of the better posts I've ever read here. It's all sales. The guy who does excellent work but doesn't sell will get buried by the guy that does awful work but can sell. Period. Full stop.

Sell Sell Sell some more

No. Create value, describe that value. A salesman can sell ice to the Inuit, but that doesn't make a sustainable business model.

Create value, learn to describe that value. That's not sales, that's understanding the value of what you do and being able to communicate it.

If you disagree walk into a car dealership. If you walk out with an expensive car you don't need, that's sales. Sales is bullshit. A CTO understands technology and can create value. Sales is not necessary. Value sells itself.

I disagree with everything you wrote. There are hundreds of companies that offer inferior products and crush competitors with superior offerings. They do it through sales. SAP and Salesforce are two of many examples. No one I have ever met says "we love SAP" or "we love Salesforce" yet both are known leaders in their spaces. Why? Has nothing to do with describing value and everything to do with sales.

> Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells.

I haven't heard it phrased this way, but something about this strikes me as deeply profound and correct, and not just in this particular situation. The most successful companies I've ever worked at did the same thing -- selling something that other people sell, but just selling a better version of that.

Or not even a better version. Right now I sell accounting services (working on moving to CS), but each accountant can only have so many clients. In a service business, there's a capacity of clients per provider. So people can sell the same thing, without really competing for the same clients. It certainly helps to be pretty decent at it and deliver what the client wants.

You bring up a great point, which is the idea of client territory or domains in services. Geographical distribution is usually the main one I imagine with services because of legal compliance. Do you sell personal accounting services or do you do B2B?

100% Agreed.

I've been doing consulting on and off for over a decade (with a few full time jobs along the way) and in that time I have found two clients as inbound leads due to my website. On the other hand, calling people or emailing friends or asking people I've worked with in the past if they know anyone who might need help has generated enough leads to easily sustain a small business.

Work really hard to make sure your first few clients are extremely happy, but don't do that by undercharging. Charge your old annual salary divided by 1000 or so, or at least what you think a typical salary for you would be if your old job paid market rates if it didn't.

Get your first few clients to write you a testimonial and agree to be references for you so that future clients can read what they said and ask them about you to get over the "new consultant" hump.

Those first few clients will be probably your best resource for new work -- people change jobs all the time so make sure people at your clients' companies know your name and what you contributed. They'll move to new jobs or have friends who ask them for recommendations and if they think of you you're in a really good spot.

That said, my website is terrible and I don't think it matters. I am busy but not swamped and I'm happy with the stuff I'm working on though my one big regret is that being remote-only limits my ability to help with more hardcore chemical engineering or materials development projects. I like building stuff but it's just not realistic if I'm not at least 50% part time, and I can't really blame my clients for that. It's a back and forth conversation to figure out what you can provide. I'm disabled anyway so while this is frustrating I think it's probably just for the best sadly.

TLDR; Don't worry about your website as long as you have one and a company domain email address so you come off as doing this as a thing rather than using your aol email address ;-) But your first few clients will probably be from friends of friends or luck, so make sure to do a great job for them and make clear that you're open to and appreciative of referrals.

> Selling into a niche works when you've found the niche is organically through experience.

This guy gets it.

If one is fortunate enough to experience such a realization, they might just have found a genuine opportunity to solve a real problem, the right way.

Is there a sales 101 for nerds?

my $.02 - Sales is similar to finding product-market fit. Exhaust your network doing pain discovery interviews. Ask lots of good questions. You can't pitch a solution until you really know what their problem is. Circle back to prospect 1 after you've talked to prospect 100. Hack value for the customer before you hack growth for yourself (ie branding). Do a great job for one client and ask for referrals to others who have similar problems. Repeat customer pain discovery.

How do you do the customer pain point discovery?

Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips.

1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.

2. Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It's about people and it's about solving problems.

3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.

4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occassionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.

5. I say in every talk I give: "all things being equal people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends."

6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.

7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.

There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in. Good luck.

One of the best posts I've read on HN ever. Thanks Colin.

> Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips.

This is a great post!

> 4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.

This one is strange to me. I've bought vitamins regularly for 20 of the past 25 years and haven't bought Aspirin (or Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, etc) even once during that same time period.

Its metaphor for "people buy solutions to problems they have much more than they buy preventative care."

Illustration purposes aside, I've interestingly never bought or taken aspirin in my life, and I'm middle aged.

Aspirin seems to be a generational marker -- people under a certain age have likely never encountered aspirin. It's like the 3.5" floppy disk Save icon -- most people of the current generation know what it means but they've never seen the real thing.

Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.

This doesn't fit my experience at all. People just expect me to do things for them for free out of the goodness of my heart, and expected that even when I was literally homeless.

I've never entirely figured out why that is.

If people just found ways to give me money because I do useful stuff, I think I would have long ago stopped being poor. But I'm still poor and I routinely get treated like I'm some kind of beggar for trying to find some way to monetize my work.

So I think there's probably a bit more to it than that.

I think maybe the difference/nuance is where you mention people expect you to do these things.

The activities I mentioned arent expected. In fact, they are usually unexpected which makes them all the more special.

Not sure that helps specifically but it did occur to me as I read your post.

The only explanation I have for that expectation is that I'm a woman. It's not an explanation I like because it gives me no means to solve the problem. It's also not universally true that all women are dirt poor, so I would like to think there is some solution, but I don't know what it is.

My experience with doing nice things for people that they didn't expect is that they either latch onto me as a mommy figure and treat me abusively or conclude I'm hitting on them and they would like to hit that. The idea that I'm just social and warm and I see this as a diplomatic thing to do seems to never occur to people. They always and consistently interpret it as extremely personal and latch onto me in a problematic fashion and it doesn't go good places for me business-wise that leads to money.

I've been trying to sort that out for years and I feel I have made some progress, but it's far from a solved problem.

In my experience there are two components at work, the character of the customer and how technical you are.

Some clients just expect free work, you can try to train them otherwise, but it will be an uphill battle.

I've also found that the more technical you are, the more they expect free work. Almost as if they assume it won't take much effort on your part so they shouldn't really have to pay for it.

I've also found that the more technical you are, the more they expect free work.

Thank you. This is a helpful thought for me.

I'm in a small town and I have better technical skills than most people around me and I'm not even charging that much, but I can't seem to get taken seriously. This is something to contemplate.

A good way to combat this is to focus the conversation on solving the business problem and less on the technical solution.

This might seem like a dumb question, but is it possible that "not even charging that much" leads to "can't seem to get taken seriously"?

The reason I ask is that over the years, I've been on both the buying and selling side of technical products and services. And I've noticed it's common that extremely price-sensitive customers won't take you seriously no matter how little you charge.

On the flip side, customers who understand the ROI they'll get from your work often won't balk at prices higher than you think are reasonable.

But I know that it's not always possible to just start charging more, depending on what you sell and who you sell it to.

This may be a factor, but I also initially worked for a non-profit. That's the majority of my paid work on the ground in town here.

I'm relatively new to town and I am a freelance writer and blogger by trade and I know something about creating an online business because of it. I feel like if I am too critical of what other website people do who are more long-time locals, I'm basically cutting my own throat.

There's a lot of factors and they are hard to tease out. I feel like no one online would likely pay me to help them set up a blogspot site. I spend a lot of time on Hacker News and people here role their own and probably wouldn't see any value in paying me for what I know about the backend of blogspot and how to do design work in that venue.

I'm more technically inclined than most locals and there's a big chasm between me and them on trying to convey why what I do has value. I can see value in it, but I don't know how to explain it and I am not good at sales. I have experience doing volunteer work and I sort of fell into doing more of that, which I can't really afford to do because I'm a dirt poor freelancer. I need to find a way to improve my income.

YES!

Sales is also knowing who to target and when.

For example: early-stage startups should be looking for early-adopters.

>> Early adopters don’t need as much proof as the early majority in order to buy.

>> They take risks on products because they can. They’re often in senior positions with budgets, hold considerable social capital in their company, and can identify a specific use case need.

>> Early adopters take risks on new products because they know how much they can gain & motivated by competitive edge

>> Early-adopters are also project-driven. They are interested in the shortest time-to-value with a limited amount of resources on their end. Do not try and sell the farm and future value where results take 6 months and beyond.

>> Early-adopters are also the first group to generate real revenue.

Well done

If you want to go from deals worth thousands to millions instead then:

8. Take them to lunch, dinner, and karaoke.

Relates to #2.

It's all about people, relationships, and trust. Once you have that you have everything you need.

You are my god!

Parent comment is pure gold and condenses more theory on sales than you'll ever need. Embracing it is the hard part: How many of us are willing to pay the price of making sales our first (or the only) priority?

Thanks for this excellent reply. I want to print this out and stick it up on a wall.

Would it be an idea to team up with someone who loves to do sales?

Isn't there a service for freelancers to find jobs?

Most of the ones I've seen subcontract you out in one fashion or another, so they're constantly taking a cut of your billing (or... you're getting a cut of their billing). I don't recall seeing a 'service' that is just warm, qualified leads where you do the rest. They may exist, but I can't recall any, and I'd bet I know why. The qualifying/warm part is where you get to some degree of trust between two parties - for them to explicitly turn around and sell that to someone else they don't really know - it can potentially damage their brand. If they need to get to 'know' you as well (vetting/testing/etc), there's little reason for them to give up either end of that relationship - they're in control at that point.

As someone who absolutely hates sales, I'd be happy with a service that takes, say, 10% of my income but takes care of all the sales issues.

If you’re ok with 10% fees, you’ll do well to get an App Store like 30%. And if 30% fees drives off half the freelancers so what?

Freelancing and product development are two different things.

Also, getting an app in an App store requires a high-risk investment.

Further, I wouldn't want to support Apple's developer-unfriendly ecosystem.

Rent extraction is only one thing however.

find a subcontracting firm, and get in there. I've worked with a couple, and while they don't tell me what they bill me out at, in one case I was pretty sure there was a 20% buffer they'd built in. I suspect in other cases it's probably more like 25-30% - you'll get billed out at $100/hr, but they'll pay you $70/hr. But in those cases you don't own the relationship, nor necessarily have much visibility in to the business relationship. You're just a pair of hands at that point.

To me, the main reason is nobody has a big pipeline of good shovel ready projects. Or rather anyone with such a pipeline would be better off keeping those projects in house instead of leaving money on the table for a freelancer. The hard part is selling. Doing the work is fungible.

And here I was thinking that math and physics were the most important subjects in school. Now you are telling me that sales is even more important? Why don't they teach it?

Freelancing is generally about doing things that are billable. A team of two people who can perform billable work works well when one of the two likes sales. A pure salesperson is the wrong scale for one person with billable skills. Again this is freelance/consult/contract. It’s not a high growth startup. One grows linearly the other geometrically.

Platforms for freelancing operate in the economic where successful sales are not worth doing in house. They connect clients with tiny budgets to freelancers who are so bad at selling that the tiny budget is attractive. EverythingForFiveBucks.com doesn’t spin up a lot of multimillion dollar multi-year projects. That’s the kind of scale where full time sales might make sense.

Furthermore, the further you get from "I will build you a website for $X with these features" and the closer you get to strategic advice, high-value troubleshooting, etc., the harder it is for a sales person to go off and sign a deal with minimal involvement on your part.

At some scale, administrative assistance/client service is helpful, but in my experience dedicated sales for consulting at small scale often doesn't have a huge amount of value.

Was there any particular sales technique you used? And how did you identify good prospects?

No and poorly. After much reflection I figured out why I failed the ways I failed all those times I failed. Since then I've assessed my skills, personality, experience, business network and capitalization against what it would take to succeed as a consultant doing the things for which I might consult with the prospects I am likely to encounter.

Knowing that selling is necessary is not the same thing as being in position to sell. I have a realistic, i.e., pessimistic, view of how well all those factors match to the relevant markets. It's probably in inverse correlation with my ability to write comments like these here...or this is how I avoid selling.

ABC Glengarry.

Yup. Freelancing means marketing. Been there, done that, don’t ever want to again.

I ran an hourly recruiting business that generated nearly all of business from referrals. I never really figured out how to do outbound sales when charging for time. The thing that was great about inbound leads for my business was that closing the deal was easier because the customer had a pain point they need solved yesterday.

The business grew from just me to 15 people just from cash flow in 2 years. The thing that scared the crap out of me was I knew if to the referral pipeline dried up, I'd have 15 people to pay with no outbound sales process to keep them busy.

I had an opportunity to cash out and free myself of the angst associated with not being in control of where my business comes from. I took that check, taught myself to code for a couple years, and am now on employed as a dev.

There are plenty of days I question whether development is the right career for me, but I like it a lot more than I don't like it. There are zero days where I miss having to meet payroll for 15 people for a word of mouth business.