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Ask HN: How to learn sales?

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Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#211

Post by m0zg »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #138
m0zg wrote: post #86

TBH, having witnessed the work of some great salesmen as a VPE of a successful startup, I think with training you could do a _passable_ job of it, but you're unlikely to be amazing at it. So do what you can in the interim, but spend an unreasonable amount of effort trying to find that magical sales guy/gal who can sell ice to people inhabiting the polar stations. Such salespeople exist, and they're worth their weight…

Everyone needs to sell at some point though, even if to just get though the interview process to land a dev job.

That is true, but you don't need to be a genius at that. The bar is really low - most people don't even negotiate their pay.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#213

Post by lmeyerov »

blueblisters wrote: post #123
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great summary on sales and marketing but neither is a monolith. Sales can best be distinguished by indirect sales and direct sales. Direct sales is where you go out and find clients. Indirect sales is where you go out and find partners to bring you clients. You don’t buy Coca Cola from Coca Cola. You rarely by HP from HP. Companies tend to be more successful when they find ways to grow using “channels”. This is a goo…

Has anyone had success doing B2B SaaS sales using cloud marketplaces like AWS marketplace, GCP marketplace, Azure, etc.? I wonder if that qualifies as "channel sales".

IMO, they are failing to be good distribution channels overall, but as currently done, can be a nice vehicle for early POC/trialing phases.

Good distribution channels solve three aspects:

- Logistics: Technical delivery - pretty good, as it's cloud as usual, with the bonus of solving how to run on the customer's side of the trust boundary (vs. normal centralized saas), + pricing features like app-defined utility fees

- Marketing: Cloud marketplaces fail to do demand gen (low-traffic search, no promotional campaigns, ...), as opposed to engaged partners who will

- Sales: Trialing is better than an on-prem thing but they harm success by not having a person involved nor allowing you to know who your users are, so overall, hurt closing. They are good-ish on solving procurement/invoicing

So again, pretty bad as an overall distribution channel, but for handling the paid POCs of a sales/marketing pipeline defined elsewhere, they can be nice.

Long-term, I think these can be massive, but they're currently immature/underinvested/etc. Ex: hw fee + 20-30% sw fees for such a poor distribution channel is quite unattractive for most serious b2b partners (distribution partners normally take 5-15% and do much more work, not ~50% for so little), so looks like a symptom of PM fiefdom politics vs senior leadership investing in these to be big. They could take Stripe's 1-3% payments fees, add 5% hands-off reseller fee, opt-in for special programs for another 5%, and poof, multiple $B businesses.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#216

Post by chiefalchemist »

pkalinowski wrote: post #194
sitkack wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks are getting bound up in shallow semantics in this whole thread and are missing the nuance in your distinctions.

Putting advertising outside of marketing is not a nuance. Advertising is part of marketing.

I never said otherwise. What I did was distinguish it's definition. That is, just because you are spending momey on advertising does not mean your are properly marketing. That is, one P does not a Four P's "cycle" make. Full stop.

Futhermore, of course marketers will say they control everything (i.e., including advertising). Now let's go ask an advertising agency if they agree. Let's go ask a promotions agency if they agree.

I'm speaking about the process and activities; devoid of typical biz structures and models that manifest those. It's a fool's errand to discuss the latter without first understanding the the basics, the foundation. The fact this thread is off target proves that point precisely.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#217

Post by chiefalchemist »

sitkack wrote: post #179
chiefalchemist wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're reading what they want to read and have failed to substantiate their position otherwise. One link to Wikipedia? Which only confirmed that was said.

It's simple. It's called Advertising for a reason. The outputs are called Advertisements for a reason. Whether that's within Marketing's "power grab" or not is not really relevant.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#218

Post by mkbkn »

ankeshk wrote: post #7

How I raised myself from failure to success in selling - Frank Bettger. It's a classic. I think sales can be broken down into: 1. Foundation of being perceived as an authority 2. Lead generation 3. Persuasion and conversion 4. Re-sale Breaking it down makes it easy to become better at the sales process.

+1 for the book recommendation. Probably the simplest book ever written on sales.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#219

Post by rvba »

gk1 wrote: post #70
chiefalchemist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Close, but not quite. Marketing is the brand, the image, points of differentiation, etc. It's the message. Advertising is the broadcast. It's how the message is communicated. It's the medium. Marketing + advertising = prospects and leads. Sales is the last mile. It takes the results of marketing + advertising (i.e., leads…

That definition is very—let’s say—unique. In my 7+ years of marketing I have never met anyone or read anything that put advertising outside of marketing. It’s even in the academic “4P” definition of marketing (“Promotion”).

The funny thing is that in most consumer faced products advertising is generally outsourced to a media agency that does all the work: both creative and media buying (say TV ads, press).

Obviously for software and B2B it is a bit different, because budgets are often smaller and there is more pressure for A/B testing if there is any Return on Investment.

For me "promotion" is more like "price strategy", but they put the word into the 4P since it fits nice.

Re: Ask HN: How to learn sales?

#220

Post by scapecast »

baxtr wrote: post #185
scapecast wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow. Thanks a lot. That’s very specific and actionable. Any other thing you would do differently this time around? I’m in the middle of starting something new myself. BTW: feels like you could write an entire book about your experience ;)

#1 thing - I would raise less money for our seed. We raised $4.2M incl a note that converted from the angel round.

Too much money gives you a false sense of security.

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