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Comment by intalentive | Hacker News Reader

>First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online).

Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.

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To add to this, while this approach may work for long tail, transactional sales with low ACVs, and work very well, it will not work for larger strategic/enterprise deals.

Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.

Relationship may be secondary in a large SaaS company (you may see new key account once a year or two), but 6 figures mean paying by invoice, custom discounts and there will be inevitably some KYC process. CEO or CCO can do it and in boutique business they do it, but you probably cannot have lots of customers AND such deals at the same time.

As a career proposal specialist, I’m in complete agreement with you. Large deals take significant pursuit and documentation…at the Fortune level enterprise or for regional / state-level agreements in the US, it’s a highly competitive process. I’ve seen this first hand in SaaS sales for municipal clients and it’s simply a cost of doing business for certain markets. AI can’t be trusted with proposal responses that may be catastrophic in the contract phase.

What kind of a world do you have to be living in to think that salespeople are not needed because the Internet exists?!

If you can pay the influencer game that might be a good path.

There are influencers of all sizes, it can scale accordingly (maybe not equally effective for all sizes for all niches, though).

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