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

Some advice that has been helpful for me doing enterprise sales:

"Your job as a sales person is to find the 20 people in this town who have a $100k problem."

You may meet a lot of people who have a $100 or a $1,000 or a $10,000 problem along the way. Be honest that it's not the right time to work together and move on (for now).

It's tempting to want to work with these customers but in the early days, you want to find people with a really big problem. As you grow you'll be able to expand your reach.

This is hard advice to follow because leads are so hard to come by at first and because you want to help everyone if you're passionate about what you're building.

Keeping prices high helps with this because it will disqualify a lot of people that would probably waste your time anyway.

I'm a technical consultant so the business isn't the same but I do have to do a ton of sales and I've done multiple six-figure deals and generated multiple six figures in revenue per year, so I am able to sell to some regard.

I'd recommend just reading a ton of books. There's a formula to sales that is well documented, you just have to adapt the pieces that work with your personality. The ones I'd recommend reading are:

* SPIN Selling

* Never Split the Difference

* Getting to Yes

* To Sell is Human

* Read any free information online about SPIN/NEAT/Sandler

I read all of those cover-to-cover right before I started my consulting business and it made a marked impact on my ability to sell. Like anything, it's a combination of study and practice. Read a book, figure out the nuggets that are important, then practice those tactics. Learn, rinse, repeat.

First and most importantly is a shift in mentality. You are not a technical cofounder. You are a sales person. It is a pretty big change, one that I didn't adapt well to.

But basically sales is making lots of calls, and asking questions. You will not be doing a lot of talking, but asking questions about their problems. Then you talk and specifically outline why your solution fits their needs. Let them digest it, then ask for the sale. Surprisingly sales people are afraid to ask for that because they don't want to be seen as pushy.

But again you don't need to talk all that much. I've listened to a business partner land a 100k deal and probably did 10 percent of the conversation.

Also practice and expect to be uncomfortable for hundreds of calls.

Edit: if you have a good source of leads and make a lot of calls, get a service like phone burner. It automatically leaves a voicemail for the 95 percent of people you don't get a hold of on the first try. I had a boss that refused to use that service, was making at minimum a quarter million a year and would spend an hour+ every day leaving the same message. Apparently 50 bucks a month was too expensive.

One book that came up recently on another thread ( and probably quite a few others as it is written by a YC founder) is "The mom test". I just read it recently, and it is really good! it has an emphasis towards tech people but the advice is applicable to everyone. It essentially guides you to be very clear about what what you want to get out of your interactions with people, avoid people giving you misleading information ( like "wow, great product" when they aren't really interested but don't want to discourage you ), recognizing real commitment from people vs niceties, and having a conversation strategy that leads to good info.