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Comment by npsomaratna | Hacker News Reader

Question: how do you guys structure this at DO?

Don’t get me wrong I get that many companies do this and it’s the industry norm when it comes to enterprise sales but on average I think the incentive structure leads to a number of issues and sure there can be stand out sales folks that aren’t selling but really aligning with the customer, but can’t go based on exceptions, have to look at the average sales person to see what kind of an individual that incentive structure creates.

I also think you can augment the customer success team to take care of that especially if you have a wide variety of customer profiles.

There is massive potential inside of companies customer support organizations that go unrealized.

They know the product, the customers, the bugs, they are the front line for down time, or bad deploys by engineering. I think the sales model is an old model that will eventually get up ended.

Customer Support > customer success > inbound leads

And if you do customer success right the customer will naturally grow with you or you find the limitations of the platform and that’s critical product feedback.

Btw, your description of a great sales person also works equally well for a great customer success individual.

I'm not sure I follow. How do you approach sales at DO? Do you do sales the traditional way using customer success people or how do you bring in new customers?

Sometimes being too close to the product can hurt the person’s ability to make sales.

I think this concept is pretty similar what Peter Thiel suggested at Zero To One

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution— whether they're in sales, marketing, or advertising— has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called 'account executives.' People who sell customers work in 'business development.' People who sell companies are 'investment bankers.' And people who sell themselves are called 'politicians.' There's a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we're being sold.”

The problem, I think, is pricing. If you have a reasonably good way to charge bigger customers more automatically then you can go with a low touch sales process. If you don't (and virtually every product doesn't) you have to do value based pricing which pretty necessarily entails sales people.

Be careful - I have seen many companies think this is the way and what happens is they lose all the dedicated customer support peeps because the "sales-y" customer reps schmooze with clients instead of solving problems; and frankly some clients love that.

Then you start seeing sales goals for the account managers, and a year later the entire team that used to be helping customers is really spending most of their time trying to upsell them on things they barely need - because its what their bosses bonus is based on.

It's hard for a CSR to qualify a lead, though. I mean, a CSR may identify some obvious need, but will only be in contact with the techs at the target company, not the decision makers. And they won't understand the customer's budget, so they may not realize that there's no budget for the customer to get what they actually need.

The sales guys tend to understand that structure a lot better, so they can qualify the leads from support and perhaps package that advice for the people who need to hear it if it's funneled to them appropriately.

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