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Comment by pclark | Hacker News Reader

Jessica Livingston had a good quote about how sales was making a few people love you and marketing was making a lot of people know about you.

I agree with you regarding sales and why its effective in real-time, but it doesn't have to be that way — technology is rapidly changing that, software is getting so good you can now just signup for products you'd typically previous have to talk to a human to use.

I think this trend will continue, and with Journey my belief is we can accelerate that even more with powerful marketing tools.

I would add that sales is absolutely also storytelling - a great example is fundraising! I joined a B2B technology company (AdRoll) and worked there for 4 years and saw first hand how effective sales people sell - by telling stories, not reading from slides.

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I agree with both of you. You're absolutely right that effective salespeople are fantastic story tellers. They are also fantastic at reacting to the subtle and overt signals the buyer is giving off. I struggle to see an Enterprise sales person (or buyer honestly) going for something like this today. So much of sales is relationship building and non real time communication methods will never be that.

I'm not even sure you can ever replace salespeople flying out visit people, even with 50 years future VR tech, because part of the value of flying out is the sacrifice of time, money and focus that helps build that trust and relationship.

I really really like this product and I feel it could have a sweet spot in that upper SMB space where it's still fairly short sales cycles with fairly short close times. Those buyers are not getting any personal attention today and something like this would probably feel more akin to 'flying out' than they'll get otherwise.

I hope there's a bunch of analytics in there too because that would be another awesome part of this. Seeing engagement through a set of materials would be pretty interesting. Nice work!

Thanks for the comments. We’re still figuring out the ideal target market from a b2b sales perspective (as you probably can see :)). However, on one side, we have enterprise sellers with ACVs above $1mm willing to put time into the journey creation as well as SMB sellers creating journeys “at scale” with light personalization via templates. We think its been powerful that a Journey typically gets shared with 3+ people inside an org so it helps with async stakeholder management instead of getting a 10 person buying committee on a zoom call (but the next zoom call will be more impactful due to the context shared in the Journey!). Lastly, we have detailed viewer insights/analytics on Journeys as well as the ability to email gate or password protect!

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