Ask HN: What is your advice for a technical founder learning sales?

There's no doubt that experienced sales people are valuable, but I would argue that there is a point in a startup lifecycle where it's too soon to hire one. For one or both of two reasons:

1. You're still trying to figure out exactly what it is you're building and how to best price/sell it. That is, you're still in more of a "customer development" mode than a pure "push the accelerator on sales for all it's worth" model.

2. You don't have any money to hire a sales person, because you're either bootstrapping or haven't raised a round yet.

What kind of sales? What's the product? Is it Software? Hardware? B2B? B2C? Self serve or high touch? Have you found product market fit or are you still trying to figure it out?

A lot like tech there are tools for every problem and in sales there is a playbook for every kind of product.

Read the book Pitch Anything. It will help you come up with ways to reach people based on what works for you. It will also avoid the extremely common problem that you're providing logical reasoning to someone whose brain has routed what you're saying to /dev/null.

My wife's natural tendency is to help solve problems for people. Before that book, she'd talk to someone, noticed that the most urgent problem that they wanted solved is her bothering them, and the obvious solution would leave her with no sale.

Now she is able to playfully get their interest and attention. She gets them to talk through a real problem that they have, it doesn't matter what. She helps them work through how to solve it. She doesn't try to sell them anything. It is up to them to decide whether the experience was enjoyable and valuable enough that they wish to work with https://www.leanst.com/ more. Enough do that sales is fun for her, and has not been a bottleneck to growth.

You're not selling consulting and aren't her, so her exact approach probably won't work for you. But I'd still bet that that book will help you.

Don't learn sales, learn people. Reading recs: * the social triggers podcasts by Derek Halpern * Start with No by Jim Camp * Demonstrating to Win (super cheesy title but amazing content)

One thing I've learned: talking to users and potential users is crucial, like everyone says, but it's also crucial to talk to the right users, and to iterate on how you find them.

In the beginning, most people are probably going to dismiss what you've built. That's normal--people have a bias against adding yet another tool to the pile (for good reason). So unless your product is an exact bullseye for solving their problem, and has no real drawbacks, they won't be seriously interested. That's actually fine. You can have an extremely low conversion rate in the beginning. As long as you can find someone who is enthusiastic about what you're doing (and ideally wants to pay you for it), they will show you the path forward.