Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

salesinvaders.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#22

Post by salesinvaders1 »

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #20

This service definitely has merit and I love you guys just putting it up right away rather than building out a full-site. A lot of founders underestimate the importance of sales people early on. Suster has a couple of good pieces about start-up sales people vs corporate sales people (they are very different skill sets). My biggest concern would be outsourcing the feedback loop that is created by those initial sales c…

Ah ha! I love when someone "gets it". Which you do. The feedback, is going to be extensive, we are still early in the process, but one thing we considered, is taping the sales interaction, and providing it to the startup, but it may "skew" the comments and feedback from the business owner. It's a problem that we are going to solve, and knock out of the park though.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#23

Post by joshmlewis »

For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers? No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#24

Post by MattBearman »

mrfusion wrote: post #13

This is really cool. Maybe brand it "Sales as a service"? Are you offering 100 customers for $1000? Or did I misread?

I read it as for $1000 they will pitch to 100 potential customers. They say on their site that they provide value if the lifetime value of your customers is over $100, which implies they expect a success rate of at least 1/10.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#25

Post by IdAgreeWithThat »

salesinvaders1 wrote: post #22
rcarrigan87 wrote: post #20

This service definitely has merit and I love you guys just putting it up right away rather than building out a full-site. A lot of founders underestimate the importance of sales people early on. Suster has a couple of good pieces about start-up sales people vs corporate sales people (they are very different skill sets). My biggest concern would be outsourcing the feedback loop that is created by those initial sales c…

Ah ha! I love when someone "gets it". Which you do. The feedback, is going to be extensive, we are still early in the process, but one thing we considered, is taping the sales interaction, and providing it to the startup, but it may "skew" the comments and feedback from the business owner. It's a problem that we are going to solve, and knock out of the park though.

That's a lot of commas.

On a more serious note, I think more information about the service would be nice. My personal interest would be in enterprise sales. Is this within the realm of possibility for you guys?

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#26

Post by pbreit »

johnnyg wrote: post #4

This is short on details but nothing like this exists today that I'm aware of. I read HN for stuff like this! I've emailed our team internally and said "this exists...how do we plug in?" We shall see.

Agree. Would like to see more details, mainly who is behind it and what kind of talent can I expect.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#27

Post by ryanbrunner »

joshmlewis wrote: post #23

For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers? No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.

If your company has extraordinarily complex deals like that, I can't see why you'd even consider outsourcing them to a generic sales service like this. Being able to close those sorts of deals is going to be an essential core competency for your company, and even if Sales Invaders was successful in deals like these, you're essentially throwing away an opportunity to learn how to do these sorts of deals in the future.

It's like demanding that Heroku focus on servicing billion dollar companies - there's really no benefit in using an "easy to get started and scale"-type service in large, complex scenarios.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#29

Post by robert_tweed »

gk1 wrote: post #18
salesinvaders wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. Cold-calling to me, as I am using it on the site, is contacting a business who is not expecting it. Rather than use the phone, or email etc, we are sending someone into the restaurant/bar/dog groomer etc for an in-person interaction, pitching your product/service/app etc.

To add to the feedback of others, this was confusing to me as well. I saw repeated use of "call" and "calling," and understood that to mean using the phone, which was inconsistent with "feet on the ground." Doesn't matter what you think it means - if it confuses everyone, just change it.

To be fair, it's actually quite correct, as in "to call on someone at their doorstep". That usage is a bit archaic, but the terminology is pretty standard in sales. I'd suggest rather than change it to something nonstandard, just clarify what packages may include with a bit more copy.
Post reply on HN