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As someone who wouldn't in a million years buy anything from anyone who was trying to sell me something, how do I learn sales?
The secret isn’t making everyone say yes but to have as few people as possible tell you no.
Hey there, my friend Waseem tipped me off to your question. Your situation is why I wrote Founding Sales: https://www.foundingsales.com/ The full text is available online on that Squarespace site. I wrote it after selling my last company - it chronicles what I learned going from a PMM / PM at VMware to a business generalist founder, who then had to learn how to sell, and then manage sales people. Also, this deck will…
Sounds very interesting, but if I cannot buy a PDF of it, I am not going to bother.
Take a professional 4-5 day sales course offered in a conference room at a local hotel. Xerox used to have a terrific one; perhaps it still exists. Here is a summary. 1. The key to selling is listening. Your goal is to listen for buyer requirements and then to support them actively with specific products features that meet THEIR needs. (Certain features of your product that your company is proud of, but your prospect…
Pro-tip: HN does not recognize ordered lists. You need two line breaks between list items, just as with regular paragraphs.
Always.Be.Closing!
Why the downvotes for an innocent joke?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Basically it's that people overestimate how funny their jokes are, and that sort of internet humor grows like kudzu, so HN users are sensitive to the need to contain it, a bit like weeding a garden. Non-obvious witticisms do fine on HN—they're just rare.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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Interesting! > you interview as many prospects and customers as possible Did you do that before or after completing your product / service?
both. this is 4 years ago, the market we were going after were the cloud warehouses like Redshift, BigQuery and Snowflake. In the beginning, we just had an idea for a specific product / service. but we knew that the customer would be the lonely data engineer in charge of building the analytics stack. I started with cold outreach via my network and linkedin. I would use pretty broad language around data warehouse usag…
BTW: feels like you could write an entire book about your experience ;)
I think when most people hear the word sales, it usually has an adverse reaction. Someone mentioned here that being a consultant is a good way to approach it and I've found that to be true.
I've recently heard of a great acronym that helps you think of how to approach sales: S - Serve - go in w/ a service mindset A - Ask questions - don't go yapping about your offerings just yet. Find out what their pain point is. This way you know what to offer and what to skip L - Listen intently. I think a lot of times, I'm very guilty of "waiting to speak" vs listening. E - Emphathize - with the customer and their pain. This is why they are coming to you. S - Summarize in your own words what you heard.
Then you can "do your thing"
Marketing in 1-to-many. Sales is 1-to-1. So sales generally only makes sense in the context of B2B, not if you are selling $30 B2C software.
Sales isn't that hard (afterall sales people can do it!). Talk to the right people, find out what they want, ask for the sale (if appropriate). Don't take it personally if they don't buy.
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Note the opening five words: "Advertising is a marketing communication..." Your tone is unnecessary and off-target. The above quote from line one is exactly what I said. You don't just wake up, roll out of bed, and advertise. Well, you can but waste a ton of money. In any case, that message needs to be crafted. That's marketing. Advertising is how you disseminate that "plan." Logo - marketing, not advertising. Style…
Folks are getting bound up in shallow semantics in this whole thread and are missing the nuance in your distinctions.
I have many years of sales, operations, business and finance experience in the Internet infrastructure industry. I'm an engineer by training, albeit from two decades ago. I want to partner with highly technical co-founders to build and take a product to market.
I had earlier tried routes such as going to Meetups but with the COVID-19 situation that looks not feasible. I would like to meet technical people interested in areas such as 5G, hybrid multi-cloud, Blockchain/Cryptography, IoT, Machine Learning etc.
My email is in my profile. Please contact if you are interested.
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I would argue against this comment... it is very useful to actually learn the culture and the techniques. Not that the general advice here is in poor taste, just saying that simple concepts won't help you fully understand something that is inherently complex.
And I would disagree with your comment on similar grounds. There is undoubtedly a lot of nuance and experience in sales, technical requirements depending on the industry, but forgive me, I’m not going to outline everything in a comment. I am arguing that a book won’t cut it and may do more harm than good. Advice from great salespeople must be taken with a grain of salt. Because the core of sales, making deals, is mor…
What if he's not a motherfucker but actually a motherlover? How does that change your sales technique?