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Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?

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As a consumer, I don’t want you to find me. I’ll find you when I need you.

There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.

If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.

As someone who used to be in SaaS sales selling a complex platform, this might be the case for you if you're constantly doing a lot of research and keeping up with the market, but it's not for the vast majority of others. I can't tell you how many software engineers and leaders I cold called who thought our platform did one thing, but was surprised to learn we GA'ed a different capability, and then they'd mention they were talking about that with their team in standup recently, and then they'd take a meeting.

Again, not doubting there are people like you out there who stay up to date with vendors, but there was a lot of useful education being done in those cold call connects. That company still employs an army of BDRs doing the same thing today.

Cold calling people at work is different than calling them at home when they’re not working.

If you mean for work and business is ok then we seem to agree. This is the main thing I was thinking of.

List it in a register that people can search when they're actively looking for products like yours.

Why should shits be given? Find a better way to advertise than harassing people.

Advertising is such a zero sum game as well. The only reason companies have to cold call market is because their competitors are cold calling. So you have to participate to keep up. If no one can do it, no one is getting a leg up over the rest.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. What is the cost benefit for cold calling? You could conceivably be better off letting the competition bleed. But I suspect a legit cost benefit analysis is hard to come by, mostly because marketing sells itself to management first.

I’ve never gotten a cold call for a quality, useful product. It’s either scams or scam-adjacent.

Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.

Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?

As if we don't already have enough advertisement channels in our lives.

>how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?

You don't.

The book Traction has identified 19 different channels to promote your products, they are explained many places, one example : https://growthmethod.com/traction-channels/

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