‘In a high-dollar B-to-B business, building and scaling sales can’t be done remotely’ This is provably incorrect
Great! Now, where do I get to see the proof?
Be where your business is
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Be where your business is
#52‘In a high-dollar B-to-B business, building and scaling sales can’t be done remotely’ This is provably incorrect
Yep. Our biggest deals (7 figs) are remote.
I do buy into getting on a plane or having someone local. That generally speeds up and increases close rate + renewal. But if you nail distribution or PLG.. can run enterprise sales much more efficiently and without as big a hit, and reinvest that saved $ elsewhere. But that's a high bar. More reliable to take heavy VC $ and burn it on expensive field staff to paper over all the gaps and hope accounts don't churn too fast. Things change again as a market saturates, but for new categories, all this is pretty established in b2b..
Re: Be where your business is
#53> Erin’s VP of sales had just bought a condo in Miami to be next to her aging parents […] > > Her VP of Sales might be wonderful, but with the all the travel the company is only getting her half-time. Erin needs a full-time head of sales in New York. Time to have a difficult conversation. Hustle culture nonsense. Family is important https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html IMO there’s always a way to do both.…
> IMO there’s always a way to do both. If there really isn’t, choose family.
Huh, this choosing family is a kind of luxury not everyone can afford. Otherwise we would not have mass migration of working people across cities, states, countries and continents leaving families behind. Unless of course they are all stupid enough to not know the value of family.
Re: Be where your business is
#54I think the moral of this story is to spend time thinking about what you _actually_ want and do _that_.
I agree with Steve's advice here. If you don't want to be in New York/SF/Wherever... don't. But accept choices have pros and cons.
E.g. I spent 7ish years in Los Angeles. Now I live in Asia. I'm having a great time here, but it _does_ mean there are certain California opportunities I have to say no to, and that's fine!
In this example, if the founder _really_ doesn't want to be in New York, make the decision one way or the other now, and commit to it. Trying to do multiple things at once will never be as efficient as focusing on one thing. You'll always be beaten by the person/team who has laser focus. You can have anything you want in life, just not all at the same time.
A great example I see of people trying to have everything at the same time is buying a house. They'll want a house they love that's ALSO an excellent investment. Usually what they end up with is a house they kinda like that's a mediocre investment.
Re: Be where your business is
#55Steve's example is financial services companies in New York but this applies to the digital realm too, especially if your customers are less geographically-concentrated. Be where your customers are: forums, slacks, discords, social media bubbles, etc. Cultivate real relationships and build authentically from within a community. Live alongside your customers instead of selling into a community from the outside. Intera…
Are there really online communities that are so welcoming to salespeople? How can one authentically exist in a community while taking money to do so? It feels inauthentic, a lie by omission, astroturfing. I'm genuinely curious if there's a way to exist "authentically" when money is attached. That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corpor…
At the risk of getting downvoted: most of the impressions IT people have on other jobs are extremely one-dimensional and naive. In my personal opinion, a lot of IT people have the impression that their job is "the most important and complex" job, and they could easily do another job of they put their minds to it.
My suggestion is to put your money where your mouth is, and try it. You will most likely figure out soon enough that - like any almost any service job where you have a lot of independence - sales is really hard, nuanced and requires a lot of strategy, tactics and logistics.
There's a huge difference between someone who's using a phone script to book an appointment for a utility provider, and someone who is selling high ticket services like the one that most likely pays your wages. The fact that you've had a few people of the first scenario on the phone can give you a hugely wrong impression about sales (pars pro toto).
Sales can be as complex or simple as software development: there is a huge difference between someone who uses an if statement in an excel formula and somebody who builds an extremely optimized HFT system with FPGA or whatever they might use...
In fact, I think there might be lots of parallels to software architecture: you need to figure out the proper model that helps you to actually sell something: not only making sure the buyer has BANT (budget / time / authority / need), but also making the buyer aware that you exist, that he trusts you, what his triggers are, when he gets triggered, how the buyer process works, who your champion might be, macro-economical factors that make your sale a no-brainer, how the sector you're active in works, what your competitor landscape looks like, how the politics in the organisation work ...
Why do I have the need and think I have the authority to say this? I've been doing both sales and development, and being an IT guy first, my arrogance of "I can do sales and marketing too, it's just some ads / SEO / phonecalls and follow ups" has cost me almost a decade of opportunity cost. It's been a humbling and eye-opening experience that finally made me realize that - even though there are some jobs where you don't need your brain - a lot of jobs are way more complex than you can imagine. Parallels to "I can build that in a weekend" are not far away from "I could switch to a high end sales job by just reading a few books over the weekend".
Re: Be where your business is
#56Steve's example is financial services companies in New York but this applies to the digital realm too, especially if your customers are less geographically-concentrated. Be where your customers are: forums, slacks, discords, social media bubbles, etc. Cultivate real relationships and build authentically from within a community. Live alongside your customers instead of selling into a community from the outside. Intera…
Are there really online communities that are so welcoming to salespeople? How can one authentically exist in a community while taking money to do so? It feels inauthentic, a lie by omission, astroturfing. I'm genuinely curious if there's a way to exist "authentically" when money is attached. That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corpor…
If you're seen as someone helpful first, company representative second, then it works. That also includes recommending and advising on competitor products, if it's the right thing for the person asking the question.
The real issue is too often, sales is often seen as a short-term thing - wow them, grab the money and move on to the next one. Whereas this approach is about trust and long-term relationship building (something old-school travelling salesmen used to often talk about). You might not get a sale from the person you recommended the competitor product to - but you will probably get several referrals ("these are really good people to deal with, and honest to boot - you should talk to them").
Re: Be where your business is
#57> Erin’s VP of sales had just bought a condo in Miami to be next to her aging parents […] > > Her VP of Sales might be wonderful, but with the all the travel the company is only getting her half-time. Erin needs a full-time head of sales in New York. Time to have a difficult conversation. Hustle culture nonsense. Family is important https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html IMO there’s always a way to do both.…
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Re: Be where your business is
#58Hasn't Steve Blank been debunked in the last decade.
Re: Be where your business is
#59Re: Be where your business is
#60And how about area where your business is but your best developpers are somewhere else.
For example if you work with certain industries here in Europe (Luxury, Pharma, Automative) but your development team is - due to shortage of talents in europe - in the US. Where shall you be?