Ask HN: How to learn sales?

- Sales and Marketing go together, but the paths diverge once you know the importance of each function. It is good to get a broad idea of both. You can do some courses on coursera/MooCs, and try to get hands-on with running some marketing campaigns. - "The Challenger Sale" is a fairly easy and good book to read in general. - Have a look at SaaStr channel, there are some nuggets there https://www.youtube.com/c/Saastr/videos

All the best. Try out a lot with short feedback loops so that you can course correct suitably. Always respect the customer and their needs.

As a new salesman, your main issue is getting over rejection. If you don't learn how to do this properly, you'll end up not explaining your product properly, hesitating to present to marginal prospects, and changing your product too readily from criticism.

So just go about doing the usual sales thing of describing your product, finding prospects, and talking to them. A lot. I think density of rejection is actually key to thickening your skin.

You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.

For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.

For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.

I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.

For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).

Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.

Bob Moesta's new book has some good pointers on it, it's currently on sale on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progr...

As an engineer turned founder, your instinct to jump in and start doing it is correct. It’s hard to learn from books. I never did, neither did the successful engineers turned sales people that I know. The key is learning to read each situation so you can apply the right approach. You also seem self aware which will help you learn faster.

My biggest advice is get a coach/mentor/consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional sales people learn in practice (eg from a sales manager). This will accelerate you learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise it’s easy to flounder on the wrong ones.

RE metrics- closed business is the only one that matters! Do whatever gets you that as fast as possible.

I wasted a year when I first founded Amplitude trying to brute force it myself and closed a grand total of two contracts for $36k. After that I ended up working with a guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year. He cost me $5k a month and increased our market cap by $20M, it was well worth the investment. I’m happy to make an intro if you’d like.

Good luck on the journey ahead and I’m excited for you!