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a16z has an article I read and liked recently: https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-sales-why-what/ Content tagged with sales: https://a16z.com/tag/sales/
> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of which a candidate is likely to ask you: • How long is the sales cycle (from first conversation to closed contract) on average? • What is the typical deal size (in terms of ARR)? • How is your product priced? • What are the steps of the sales process? • How do you define success in this role? • How are you getting new leads and generating conv…
1. The founding team is very technical and doesn't want to make sales/talk to customers themselves. In this case, it will be difficult to achieve success without taking on a non-technical cofounder to do customer development and then early sales.
2. The founding team has technical talent but also at least one person who's happy to go out and do customer development and then make sales. In this case, they should probably wait on hiring someone with Sales experience until they feel that they have product market fit, which means they've probably made enough sales to answer these questions.
a16z has an article I read and liked recently: https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-sales-why-what/ Content tagged with sales: https://a16z.com/tag/sales/
Bryan from Entrepid here. We disagree with the advice of hiring a head of sales as your first sales hire. You are better off finding a someone with 3-6 years of experience to be the first hire as an IC. This hire (and maybe a few others) will help you grow the company to a point where you can attract a badass VP of sales / head of sales
Exec team with mature sales presence/leadership = hire less experienced (3-6 years).
Exec team with immature sales presence/leadership = hire more experienced (6-10 years with opp to become a VP of Sales).
Good guide - thanks for putting together.
I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-face only - lesson one :)
Email is in profile.
My colleague and I started the sales team at PagerDuty. We were both engineers. Happy to meet for coffee in SoMa if anyone with revenue would like a short 1:1. I've done this a number of times over the years and hopefully those folks have found it helpful. Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-face only - lesson one :) Email is in profile.
I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
Are there actually startups selling “traditional” software? An actual serious question. The follow up would be: “why?” It seems like recurring subscriptions would have a much better LTV than selling one-time software. If updates and/or support is part of the product, then you’re essentially still selling SaaS even if it doesn’t seem pedantically correct. Let’s say you are selling a $5000 piece of software and you upd…
Pre-sales is a really long and drawn out process when dealing with big corporates, doubly so when you’re selling what will become core infrastructure. We’re currently a year into what is effectively pre-sales with one client, involving a full due diligence process, in depth conversation with their corporate security department, and a (paid for) trial involving several hundred of their customers.
I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales. However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?
- B2B Executive Playbook
- Crossing the Chasm
But in general, the reason no one tells you how to run an actual software business is because why would they tell you what took them years / decades to learn the hard way?
SaaS Startups are a tool to fleece investors, so all the scam artists are happy to tell the world how smart they are at Starting Up. It's personal marketing.
Boring B2B Software is just a normal businesses, ain't nobody gonna tell you the secret to doing that. Get a job in industry and then learn it first hand, that's how you learn it.
> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of which a candidate is likely to ask you: • How long is the sales cycle (from first conversation to closed contract) on average? • What is the typical deal size (in terms of ARR)? • How is your product priced? • What are the steps of the sales process? • How do you define success in this role? • How are you getting new leads and generating conv…
My colleague and I started the sales team at PagerDuty. We were both engineers. Happy to meet for coffee in SoMa if anyone with revenue would like a short 1:1. I've done this a number of times over the years and hopefully those folks have found it helpful. Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-face only - lesson one :) Email is in profile.