This is also why one of the most powerful bits of advice I've ever picked up from HN is Paul Graham's (paraphrased) "if nobody makes fun of your crappy product when you launch it, you waited too long to launch". For a lot of developers, the resistance to sales shows itself in a strong feeling that the product isn't done, isn't ready. The Steve Blank process is a pretty good antidote to this.
Also: startup hipsters and MBA types will talk down cold-calling, but I have a friend hustling a pretty complicated product right now and I have watched him make cold calls work. Again: wince, then jaw drop. Then learn.
My first company was an ISP that we started with a $40k seed investment, out of a basement. I literally sat down with the phone book and started phoning companies to people to host web sites with us. This was in '95, and many of the people I called did not even know what the internet was, much less had any idea of why they'd want a website, so it was a difficult proposition.
All I knew about sales, I knew from a one day course and two weeks experience doing calls for a charity.
My main takeaway from said charity, who had professionalized extracting money from people, was that if you worry about your product, you don't understand; when you do cold calls, it's 99% about emotion and gaining trust. They'd even diagrammed out how you wanted the person on the other end to feel at any stage of the call.
And it worked, scarily well. Despite the fact that I'm an introvert and was painfully shy and lacking in social skills. I winced before making every call. I'd sit there and have to breathe to calm myself before dialling even the first digit.
Way too often when people complain that their product isn't ready to sell, it's because they try to sell it on price and feature bullet lists without building any kind of rapport and trust first. That's hard enough in person, when people have far more to judge you on.
But if you cold call, if the person on the other side does not trust you, you could not even get them to accept cash from you for free.
If you don't get them excited about you, no feature list in the world is going to get them to buy it from you, because all their defences will be set to "full nuclear deterrent".
But if you get them to trust you, they'll often go out of their way to give you all the information you need to successfully sell it to them. Sometimes that mean you go away with a list of changes you need to make to your product because you genuinely wasn't ready. But if you get people to be excited about you, sometimes you can even get them to pay for some of those changes as custom development.
http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Closing-Sale-Zig-Ziglar/dp/080...
Modern, top-tier MBA programs are increasingly driven by entrepreneurship, and less by traditional, hidebound business courses and corporate line-management skills. A lot has changed, and much of it changed in reaction to the embarrassments of the late '90s. Furthermore, engineers make up an increasingly large percentage of MBA cohorts these days; the old MBA/engineer dichotomy could use a refresh. The two skill sets -- engineering and analytical business strategy -- are often quite complementary. MBA programs have recognized as much, and today, being an engineer is a serious advantage in an MBA curriculum.
That's not to say you won't find your fair share of entitled, naive, or opportunistic MBA students in any given program. They're still around. But their numbers are dwindling, because many industries (finance and consulting notwithstanding) have realized they don't want that type. In time, these people will become the exceptions, and not the rule. That may already be the case at many MBA programs.
I'm not here to play apologist for the reputation MBAs have earned in the tech world. A lot of it has been deserved. At the same time, a lot of it is no longer as fair or accurate an assessment as it once was.
I'm an "MBA type" running a very early-stage startup and I am only too painfully aware that cold-calling is the way forward to get our first few hundred sales. Somehow we spend so much time reading about digital marketing, and optimising this sign-up flow, and A:B testing this and that, that we forget that a significant number of users can be persuaded to use your product just by being compelling and enthusiastic.
6 months in, we're doing more revenue each month than we did all of last year.
If you're an MBA with a CS degree, or even simply someone who has actually done your share of boots on the ground dev work, this attitude probably doesn't apply to you. MBAs have a perception, rightfully so I think, of not really understanding what happens to turn all of their great ideas into working software. There's also nothing like company wide (or god forbid, external) emails promising features by a specific date without having consulted developers on timelines, or worse, having consulted them on the timeline without taking into consideration that it requires moving everything else they're working on down the line to meet that deadline. "Oh, it's just adding a textbox here, plugging it into a formula, and spitting it out over here here and here, how hard can it be? An hour tops."
Pre-product, when customers would say "Yes, I would buy this," we asked them to sign a non-binding LOI to that effect.
Nowadays, if a prospect says they'll buy when we have feature X, we ask them to sign a modified customer contract that says they don't have to pay until we mutually agree that the feature is done.
It has saved countless developer months spent on features that were not the real reason the customer didn't want to buy. And it sometimes causes the prospect to start saying, "well, actually, the issue is..." and then you can get the real feedback.
The key is to keep following up with questions until you arrive at a point when they say "and yes, then we'd buy"
See more about it here if interested: http://blog.close.io/sales-hacking-kung-fu-how-to-virtually-...
At least with No, you get feedback and that is valuable. The only way you can get to "no" or "yes" is by pushing the customer to give you an answer and people in general are hesitant to be that pushy.
And if you are a cofounder, whether technical or not, you are a business person first. If you aren't sharing your opinions on the best way to sell to your prospects you aren't doing your most important job as a founder.
I didn't start making significant sales in my businesses until I learned to stop focusing on the tech stuff and just throw together a manual process and start working on selling.
I did just this with a startup recently, and the feedback we collected was immensely helpful and very insightful. For those interested, I wrote about it here: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/usability-testing-case-study/
Two other co-founders where obsessed with doing this type of shit.
Otherwise you are just throwing darts blindly and hoping they hit.
A lot of people would argue that this is a key part of understanding your market. If you don't have a such a list, it probably makes sense to hustle, cold-call, talk to people you know closer to the industry, etc (i.e., exactly the same steps people are describing as "sales") to get one.
Using outsourced lead gen. is great if you can describe exactly how their staff can identify what makes a good lead, and can follow them up closely to give feedback about which leads were good and which weren't, and why. But unless you've done the whole process yourself first, you're unlikely to know exactly how to best instruct them.