361–370 of 492 posts
I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.
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Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday). Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world. Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work.…
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
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Buy my startup @ https://PretzelBox.cc . Jokes aside, PretzelBox is a hosting company aka backend in a box and your comments are giving me a ton of hope.
That’s… not a hosting company though?
In my mind, I feel this could/should qualify as a hosting service
It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it. A few accelerants: 1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US. 2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me. 3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
I was wondering, how do you sell a company? It's not like there is an eBay or craigslist for companies, right?
I had meetings with potential buyers and received a LOI (letter of intent) at a price I was comfortable with.
After that came 6 or 7 months of due diligence! I wasn’t expecting the process to last that long, but the buyer took time to interview my employees and secure a loan. At the end of each month I’d have to update my complete financial statements and the buyer would have to review them and they’d get submitted to the loan application.
Finally, the sale closed and I received a wire transfer.
I stayed on working for free (or maybe minimum wage?) FT for about a month, then part time for another month or two, and then finally on call for 1hr/week but no official office hours for another few months, just to make sure all the operations and handoff went smoothly. 6mo after the close I was officially done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday). Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world. Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work.…
Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.
Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.
I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.
It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
Tell me, have you set the difficulty on the first played game to some level that might artificially encourage further play? I only ask as I've not played solitaire in literally 20 years or so and everything on the game I just played on your site seemed to fall in to place remarkably easily... .
ed - spelling, grammar
Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it. A few accelerants: 1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US. 2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me. 3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
4) Optimized for SEO. About 50% of my business came from referrals, the other 50% SEO.
I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.
What courses did you take? Is there any online one you recommend?
To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…