Live data from Hacker News

SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

salesinvaders.com

41–50 of 54 posts

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#41
post #6

Is this for cold-calling, or an actual salesperson that is on the ground? It's a little unclear.

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.

Interesting.

Door-to-door-salesmen-as-a-service sounds a whole lot more impactful that cold calls over the phone. which could theoretically even be off-shored as well as outsourced.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#42

Cool. You mention restraunts/salons/dog groomers. Any plans to move higher up the chain to SaaS enterprise type sales? I haven't formalized my process enough to hand off sales to someone else, but I am champing at the bit to try something like this once I get there.

I think enterprise sales would be difficult to do other than salaried employee with commission. The sales cycle is too long.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#44

From your site: How much does it cost? We have packages starting at $1000, depending on your needs, we can pitch up to 100 customers in your vertical. --------------------------- So you are going to visit 100 customers for me, for the price of $1000? This seems to be quite low. From my experience (10 years, outside sales B2B, full commission) a sales person can only visit about 10 locations a day if they are actually…

[deleted]

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#45

From your site: How much does it cost? We have packages starting at $1000, depending on your needs, we can pitch up to 100 customers in your vertical. --------------------------- So you are going to visit 100 customers for me, for the price of $1000? This seems to be quite low. From my experience (10 years, outside sales B2B, full commission) a sales person can only visit about 10 locations a day if they are actually…

That copy may be confusing, but we have packages starting at $1000, we have the infrastructure though to visit 100 places (depending on your niche), but that is our top tier; where $1000 is our lowest tier.

Tracking of where/when/how long on site, who they visited etc, is all handled via an app. The customer has literal access to the route driven by a particular rep, how long they were on site etc.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#46

Cool. You mention restraunts/salons/dog groomers. Any plans to move higher up the chain to SaaS enterprise type sales? I haven't formalized my process enough to hand off sales to someone else, but I am champing at the bit to try something like this once I get there.

I think enterprise sales would be difficult to do other than salaried employee with commission. The sales cycle is too long.

I think there is a sort of "enterprise light" market where this could work. Let the outsourced staff handle most sales, and hand off to the company for the more complex sales.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#47
First off, I want to say this is a great concept. All startups either hate sales or need more sales, so it sounds like your business fits for both categories. I have some experience with door-to-door sales teams and cold calling for 2 different startups. The few comments I have are similar to other discussions but still need to be addressed:

1) Sales Team - Who is your sales team? What is their background? When I was on the door-to-door sales team I was working along side a lot of college students that were not motivated. This was a huge let down to the owners who paid for the sales team. Be upfront with your customers on who will be contacting their potential customers. As a startup founder I do not want my name/brand to be tainted in the industry as a company forcing outsourced sales team to pressure my customers into buying my product (this is an extreme case but does happen).

2) Channel - It sounds like you are cold-calling only, if this is the case then do not include "door to door" and "feet on the street" in your title if you are not going to be talking to potential customers in person. My recommendation would to have packages for cold-calling and a separate package for door-to-door sales. This may be beneficial for businesses to have the option and would be a great upsell for SalesInvaders!

3) Customers - It sounds like you are trying to cover most small business as a target customer. My recommendation is to specialize in one industry. This will allow your team to get better at coming up with pitches for the same industry while understanding your target customer. Also, your chances for getting other clients in the industry will increase when you can tell them that you got X amount of sales for another company in that same industry. This is a crucial selling point, as you would know since your in the business of sales.

Good luck with the idea!

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#48
This is a good idea and I can see why a lot of small business could have a reason to use it. Just wondering, you may come up with lots of "what people want" ideas as part of your discussions (not necessarily connected to your "client"). You could perhaps try to do something out of those ideas to serve as "leads" for others.

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#49

Our team (YCW11) did "sales as a service" as ElasticSales for 2+ years. You can read some of our story here: http://elasticsales.com

"ElasticSales is currently booked out for the rest of the year and therefore not able to accept any new clients at the moment."

"Think Amazon AWS for Sales."

Have anyone ever seen a message on the aws.amazon.com website saying "Sorry, AWS had sold all available computing resources and would not be able to buy more servers till the end of the year"?

Don't get me wrong, I like what you did and I like close.io (and I may use it soon), but the page you're now showing on elasticsales.com has the word "Failed" written all over it. Well, at least that's how I see it, I might easily be a minority (and I usually am).

Re: SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think enterprise sales would be difficult to do other than salaried employee with commission. The sales cycle is too long.

I think there is a sort of "enterprise light" market where this could work. Let the outsourced staff handle most sales, and hand off to the company for the more complex sales.

This.

I'm also looking (as in 'ready to pay') for a similar service for enterprise IT SaaS with a very light entry level offering to boot from.

Post reply on HN