Hey Startups, I’m calling bullshit. You don’t understand sales

It turns out that understanding how to make a website handle an influx of visitors is also important.

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"2 x $30,000 sales sitting at a probability of 10% to close, 1 x $500 sale sitting at a probability of 75% to close", and so on. How does one estimate these probabilities?

I really like the way he adds up the current value of the prospects in his funnel. I think it's a really great way to keep track of how much value each activity you could be doing right now will create so that you can more easily decide what to do next.

This is something any perceptive founder will pick up on very quickly (if they weren't aware of it, as I wasn't, before their first project).

However, in my experience, learning to do it yourself is not an efficient or effective solution. You may have no other option at the beginning, but finding someone who actually does this sort of thing for a living is vastly easier (which is not to say it's simple).

There are challenges to this as well, including how to afford them, how to pay them, and how to engage them, but that still costs less time than attempting to learn a trade that's based very heavily on things technical just don't usually do much, and the results are far better: If you think you'd make a fine salesperson, despite never having worked extensively in sales, you are almost certainly wrong.

He's right.. even seasoned sales people don't understand their own pipelines a lot of the time. Try coming into a sales-person oriented company with the job of building a marketing/lead gen system for them, and then introducing them to their first CRM (previously saving all their data in personal Excel spreadsheets). Then convincing them of the value of a marketing program to drive them leads, and how giving me their sales data actually helps them in the long run... It's a common problem in a number of corporations. There's a funnel to the pipeline and sales people often just focus on chasing their one or two current hot leads.

As a programmer doing sales, this is really informative albeit abit short. Does anyone have a good book to recommend on sales?