s/sales/marketing
every point stays valid
Learn to sell
91–100 of 157 posts
Re: Learn to sell
#92> Casting a wide net is simply part of the game, of course, but wasting your prospect’s time is bad selling. Every good sales professional knows this, which is why the best ones put in the time, effort and attention to detail to make their pitches – even the opening ones – as tailored and relevant as possible.
The book "High Probability Selling" by Jacques Werth offers some good solutions to approaching sales with the intent of quickly connecting your product to the customers who want or need it most.
Re: Learn to sell
#93One of my first jobs out of college was software sales. Really opened my eyes to the absurdity of that industry. Very wolf of wallstreeet-esque. The tech was mostly repackaged opensource software with a nicer UI and the senior sales guys were doing copious drugs and bringing down like six figure commissions on multi-million dollar contracts. They hired an army of associates to generate leads and then swooped in to gr…
The rise of big tech is basically a market response to decision-makers who acted like you observed. When you've got a bunch of executives who will drop millions of dollars on open-source software because they needed to check a box, that's a huge economic inefficiency waiting to be arbitraged away. What "big tech" founder/CEOs did was say "Well, I understand the technology, I can learn the domain knowledge more easily than these buffoons can learn the technology, how would I build a company from the ground up to compete directly with them and steal all their customers rather than playing the sales game?"
And with a suitably driven, intelligent, and business-savvy founder, it works [1]. The whole "software is eating the world" philosophy is based on the idea that it's better to go radically vertical and bring technology straight to the consumer rather than deal with the inefficiencies of enterprise sales.
[1] Kind of. The key here is "suitably driven, intelligent, and business savvy founder." Most technologists are not such - they not only don't know the domain, they don't care enough about it to learn. So there's been a bit of a pullback to traditional enterprise sales for SaaS businesses in the last couple years; many of the consumer markets that have not yet been revolutionized by big tech have pretty thorny barriers to entry that no technologist has yet found their way around.
Re: Learn to sell
#94[deleted]
Re: Learn to sell
#95> Sales is the whole reason we build anything; it’s how we assign value to what we do.
What a sad sad statement.
Re: Learn to sell
#96As a sales leader and consultant, I kept being asked to offer weekly personalized sales coaching for technical founders. I launched it a few weeks ago and so far it's been pretty great for both parties. Being able to sit down on a weekly basis to game plan the sales approach, go over calls, and hold them accountable has been immeasurable. p.s. if anyone is interested - I'm in the process of launching a "Selling 101"…
Let me know when you have more info about that "Selling 101" online course. I'm interested.
Sounds good. Do you want to email me? It's in my bio. Couldn't find yours.
Re: Learn to sell
#97One of my first jobs out of college was software sales. Really opened my eyes to the absurdity of that industry. Very wolf of wallstreeet-esque. The tech was mostly repackaged opensource software with a nicer UI and the senior sales guys were doing copious drugs and bringing down like six figure commissions on multi-million dollar contracts. They hired an army of associates to generate leads and then swooped in to gr…
The rise of big tech is basically a market response to decision-makers who acted like you observed. When you've got a bunch of executives who will drop millions of dollars on open-source software because they needed to check a box, that's a huge economic inefficiency waiting to be arbitraged away. What "big tech" founder/CEOs did was say "Well, I understand the technology, I can learn the domain knowledge more easily…
How do you have such insight? If you can produce such insight so easily, surely you must be a very successful investor? This is such a strong perspective it seems.
Re: Learn to sell
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a perfect metaphor, because the tasks are so different, but it's kind of like a coach and a GM in football. If they're not on the same page, they make each other look worse.
perhaps not but: > If they're not on the same page, they make each other look worse This is right, engineers need to understand the problems that their end users have and of those problems those that severely affect sales should be considered carefully... however what seems to happen more often is sales or management end up dictating the solution to a problem... but software solutions are software engineers jobs. Thi…
That sounds very annoying, and I infer that some people have it even worse. What efforts do you see upper management making to bring the two sides together? I notice that as I get to know someone better, I can understand our differences by understanding the ways in which we process information differently. Of course there will be exceptions, but sales people and engineers (beyond their tasks/goals being different) have different strengths and weaknesses as people and processors; sometimes the differences aren't better or worse - just different. Day-to-day, how often do sales people and engineers problem solve together?
Re: Learn to sell
#99One of my first jobs out of college was software sales. Really opened my eyes to the absurdity of that industry. Very wolf of wallstreeet-esque. The tech was mostly repackaged opensource software with a nicer UI and the senior sales guys were doing copious drugs and bringing down like six figure commissions on multi-million dollar contracts. They hired an army of associates to generate leads and then swooped in to gr…
> I do feel with the rise of 'big tech' things have improved a bit Haha. I'm a technical salesperson that is the black sheep of my sales org. Things are worse now.
> Haha. I'm a technical salesperson that is the black sheep of my sales org. Things are worse now.
Besides that, how is life at Oracle?
Re: Learn to sell
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rise of big tech is basically a market response to decision-makers who acted like you observed. When you've got a bunch of executives who will drop millions of dollars on open-source software because they needed to check a box, that's a huge economic inefficiency waiting to be arbitraged away. What "big tech" founder/CEOs did was say "Well, I understand the technology, I can learn the domain knowledge more easily…
How do you have such insight? If you can produce such insight so easily, surely you must be a very successful investor? This is such a strong perspective it seems.
I've done okay. :-)