[HN Gopher] How to sell a B2B product
___________________________________________________________________
How to sell a B2B product
Author : polote
Score : 322 points
Date : 2020-05-02 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calv.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (calv.info)
| jjguy wrote:
| I frequently recommend https://openviewpartners.com/blog/founder-
| led-selling/ as a good early stage enterprise sales framework. It
| is addressing a different, but complementary, set of questions to
| this post. If you're at a stage to need this kind of feedback,
| you should read it too.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. For me, this was the biggest takeaway.
|
| > In every case, a viable option for the customer will be to "do
| nothing". They don't have to buy your product, or any product for
| that matter. The best way to prove the case for your product is
| with your metrics. Doing nothing should be a very expensive
| option.
|
| That fundamentally speaks for having a problem to solve and not a
| solution looking for a problem. I think this key distinction is a
| good sieve to filter out potential ideas especially if you're in
| the business of SaaS.
| bob33212 wrote:
| In enterprises there are plenty of problems that are just not
| important enough to spend money on. For example there may be a
| yearly reporting process which takes 30 days for an accountant
| to complete, which could be automated by a SaaS product. That
| is less than $20k a year of cost. The CFO may be perfectly fine
| with the manual process. Just because someone could save money
| with your product doesn't mean that they will want to.
| yoshyosh wrote:
| Assuming I'm paying that accountant less than 20k for those
| 30 days, it doesn't make much business sense to switch when
| presented that way. Businesses don't always optimized for
| saved time even if it's obvious, it has to make business
| sense on an ROI level aka that solution only costs me 2k
| rather than the $20K I spent on the accountant. Also like you
| said they just may have bigger fish to fry since 20k is
| nothing compared to their other issues
| goatherders wrote:
| That's not how you sell that product. You sell it by saying
| that once a decade the accountant is going to make an error
| that costs your company a billion dollars during due
| diligence before an IPO or sale. In the enterprise 20k isnt
| cost savings at all and, agreed, not going to result in
| many sales.
| netcan wrote:
| eh...
|
| In enterprise/saas... you eventually always have a solution
| looking for a problem. You have a salesforce or whatnot, and
| you have to sell it.
| abtom wrote:
| > my #1 rule for this is teach people something they didn't
| already know.
|
| You just went full meta
| seneca wrote:
| Due to person experience, this strikes me as pretty ironic. My
| company had a very bad experience with Segment, so much so that
| we changed product roadmaps to move away from them. In my mind
| they're an example of how not to sell a product. Very much not a
| company I would want to partner with again.
| calvinfo wrote:
| Author here. I'm sad to hear this and want to understand how we
| can do better.
|
| Do you mind following up over email? I'm calvin at segment.
| piranha wrote:
| Hey, I'm really interested what is wrong with Segment if you
| don't mind (not affiliated with them). Email is in my profile.
| coderintherye wrote:
| Having been on both sides of this, I think this is great advice,
| but misses something key. If you are selling a relatively high-
| cost product (>$10k min spend), then there needs to be some
| acknowledgement of that up front. It's a waste of everyone's time
| if I'm running a startup that can easily spend $100s/month on a
| product, but simply have no way to invest tens of thousands in a
| product. Whereas, when I'm leading an established company that
| can easily afford tens of thousands of dollars, then I care about
| the value. In short, know your customer should include, know when
| your customer is a 2-3 person seed stage startup and either offer
| some version of the product at a price that they can afford and
| growth into/with you on, or just be upfront that it's out of
| range right now. A great example of this would be Looker. Great
| product (in my opinion) and provided a ton of value to Kiva, but
| it's a significant investment. I'd love to use it at my small
| startup but the price is out of range so for now we use Google
| Data Studio instead. And yet the sales agents come knocking
| anyways. Understand your customer, know when something would
| provide value they can afford vs. is way out of current range for
| current budget/scale.
| polote wrote:
| Well, in enterprise Saas usually the pricing is not shown on
| the website without contacting a sales rep, so it usually
| eliminates companies which don't have a lot of money.
|
| But even if a small company is reaching to you, as a
| salesperson, this is your job to qualify the lead, and to not
| loose your time on a lead that has low chance of signing
| sebslomski wrote:
| What's the reasoning behind not putting the prices up? For me
| that's always a huge downer and means ,,that's going to be
| quite expensive".
| jlokier wrote:
| If "that's going to be quite expensive" is a downer for
| you, that's fine because you aren't the target audience. If
| you saw the actual price you'd probably think "no way am I
| paying that", so showing the price doesn't help the seller.
|
| The target audience is companies that don't really care
| about the price, as long as it's in some vague order of
| magnitude they are used to paying for other things.
|
| Also the price is usually not fixed if it's not listed. The
| answer to "how much is it" is implicitly "who's asking and
| what can you afford". I.e. it's negotiated, and
| negotiations are much easier when the buying side doesn't
| know what everyone else is paying.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We have lots of small companies with 1-3 employees sending
| a handful of messages a month, to big multi-national
| corporations sending many thousands of messages a day.
|
| For the big companies we're typically a crucial part of
| their business and they typically require several
| integrations and other specialized modules which have
| upkeep. So we charge a bit more for the software. On the
| other hand, they typically have a very high message volume
| so they get a decent message volume discount.
|
| For smaller companies the software is typically a bit
| cheaper, but with a significantly higher per-message cost.
|
| Then of course there's negotiation for each contract which
| would make "web prices" rather moot anyway. Maybe a company
| wants lower fixed cost but can accept a higher per-message
| cost, as messages are often directly linked to their
| revenue, or vice versa.
| polote wrote:
| In enterprise sales, the price is not the main decision
| maker, you will usually only disclose the price at the end
| of the sales cycle.
|
| Not showing the price on the website is one way to push
| people to contact you. You don't want people to decide on
| their own if they should buy your product, you have a big
| sales team to help them do that.
|
| I've wrote about it here, if you are interested :
| https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-be-
| succe...
| [deleted]
| airnomad wrote:
| I was on a call with their sales rep and he was awful. Even if I
| told him what kind of volume we're looking at, the guy didn't
| want to talk costs, over two meetings. Very poor experience.
| Seems like they're designing pricing around how much money you
| have.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| My brother and I cofounded a company together. We're both
| engineers and by far the hardest part has been learning sales.
| We're not full-on nerd stereotype engineers who can't talk to
| customers or network but a master's in comp-sci covers exactly
| zero sales or marketing.
|
| We finally embraced that we are not going to be the best at sales
| or "always be closing" but the things we are really good at are
| automation, experimenting, and iterating which has enabled us to
| talk with more prospects and slowly improve conversion rates. In
| non-sales speak that means we have more customers having more
| success on our platform which is awesome.
|
| We honestly believe we are offering something powerful to our
| customers to change their lives. That belief doesn't put food on
| the table though and shameless sales tactics like cold emailing,
| LinkedIn messaging, Instagram DMing, etc DO. (though we are super
| respectful and won't hound anyone that isn't interested)
|
| I have a friend who works for transamerica selling financial
| packages and recruiting other people to transamerica. His ability
| to talk to anyone anywhere is constantly amazing and
| embarrassing.
| goatherders wrote:
| I think there is some slant against "shameless sales tactics"
| here because many HN'ers aren't in a position to recognize
| exactly how valuable sales is. There are some well known and
| well loved "tech companies" that grow to be 90% sales and
| marketing and 10% engineering after they put their funding to
| use. And for those here that arent familiar, quite often VC
| money is meant for growth via sales and marketing, not via
| hiring more engineers.
|
| What's interesting is that if you do think what you are
| providing is actually useful or meaningful, then there is
| nothing shameless about promoting it directly to those that
| might get use from it. And you promote it to people where they
| are: in their inbox, DMs, LinkedIn, etc. (We actually get
| tremendous results by supplementing cold email with phone
| simply because people are so surprised that we went through the
| trouble to call. But that's a discussion for another time.)
|
| All that is to say that reaching out to people that might
| benefit from what you offer isnt sleazy in the slightest and is
| a practice as old as time itself. They will let you know if
| they arent interested, usually by ignoring you. Doesnt mean you
| should stop or feel bad about it.
|
| Best of luck to you.
| orasis wrote:
| Beautiful. Thank you.
| raghava wrote:
| > The infrastructure used to run our Salesforce instance probably
| costs somewhere on the order of $100 per month. Yet, they charge
| us tens of thousands of dollars per month... how?
|
| Not really. Unless the subscription is in tens of hundreds, that
| benefit-of-volume is not possible. Even more so when the solution
| involves bleeding edge stuff (AI/ML/real-time analytics etc).
| Easy to say, very very very hard to even achieve decent margins
| on such infrastructural cost. It's always a tradeoff between {
| feature-richness, time-to-market } and cost-efficient SaaS. Only
| the players who got a solid customer base would ever get to enjoy
| that privilege.
|
| > Though it's far down in the acronym, the identified pain is
| really where you should start with the customer. You should be
| able to answer in great detail why their life is currently
| painful, and how they handle the problems you solve today.
|
| There's a slippery slope. Any "solution" won't help, in the era
| of "disruptive solutions". During the initial stages of
| industrial revolution, cities were scared of all the horseshit
| they thought they'd have to deal with. A 'con'sultant would've
| typically come up with an efficient way to dispose off all that
| manure into the sea. Only a mad scientist working on an
| automobile somewhere ended up solving that poop of a problem
| really. And in hindsight, every mildly lucky person would
| consider themselves "disruptive" without actually having to be
| one though. Such is our world! :D
|
| [edit] just noticed that all comments in this thread that are
| critical of the narrative are voted down. one is fine, all of
| them?
| ec109685 wrote:
| The author was talking about the marginal cost of Salesforce
| running their instance. If they stopped being a customer, it
| would save Salesforce $100 in server costs, but Salesforce
| would lose $10k's. That means, Salesforce needs to deliver that
| much value to the customer in order to keep them. In addition,
| they need to deliver that much value over any lower cost
| competitors.
| raghava wrote:
| That's what am saying as well. Such thing works for SFDC. Not
| for any ordinary B2B firm that's struggling to gain their
| 10th/100th customer.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| A rule I gave myself after running a company for several years is
| that I never reply to incoming offers or sales pitches. In my
| opinion it's very rare that someone really offers something that
| my company needs at that exact moment, so most interactions
| resulting from such offers will be a waste of my time. In the
| past I reacted to such incoming offers, but I always regretted it
| and usually burned some money and time as well. Now they only way
| I pick suppliers is by sourcing them myself exactly when I need
| something.
|
| I think many executives / entrepreneurs have developed a similar
| adversity towards incoming offers, and my own experience with
| cold outbound selling seems to confirm this. I've contacted
| hundreds of companies myself trying to sell our service, but the
| only deals we closed so far were either with companies we already
| knew via our network or ones that did actively seek out our
| services themselves. It's of course possible that an experienced
| sales person would be able to generate outbound interest, but as
| a founder without much sales experience it is very tough. I
| therefore think inbound sales is the future, at least in B2B.
| Advaith wrote:
| Thats an interesting perspective. Maybe narrow down the cold
| outreach based on research such that you're sure your product
| will fit into their stack?
|
| It just seems hard to believe that cold outreach won't work for
| SaaS
| goatherders wrote:
| I'm telling you flat out it works EXTREMELY well.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Unsolicited inbound requests go into the spam folder without
| looking.
|
| Where things are getting bad now is with cold calls, LinkedIn,
| Twitter etc messages. There isn't a channel that salespeople
| aren't using. They'll come by the office or send you a letter.
| If they can't get to you directly they'll go to your
| subordinates or peers... It's neverending.
|
| It's to the point where it's just exploiting the urge of
| business managers and leaders to not be jerks.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I've been at a startup with strong sales people and it
| definitely work to get clients, and pretty big ones. But the
| catch is that they were selling at a higher level than the
| operational teams, to not very technical buyers. Needless to
| say the usage was then often disappointing.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| C-levels and other executives of large enterprises typically
| approach companies like Gartner for this. As a SaaS startup,
| we've been quite successful partnering with Gartner which
| opened doors to us we otherwise would never be able to.
|
| In general, I think it's better for a technology provider to
| partner with organizations to handle this tough enterprise
| sales process than to do it yourselves, but it depends upon
| your market and organization (we're a database provider).
| kristianc wrote:
| > I think many executives / entrepreneurs have developed a
| similar adversity towards incoming offers, and my own
| experience with cold outbound selling seems to confirm this.
|
| This article wouldn't disagree with you. When you're building
| the product the trick is to build your product almost alongside
| your first customers - invite them in and show them Figma
| mockups and ask what would provide them value, and bring them
| on the journey with you. Come with a compelling enough value
| proposition and solve for a large enough pain point and you'll
| absolutely get executives of at least SMEs on calls.
|
| Once you have that first customer, the outbound motion becomes
| a lot easier as you have references. It's easy to fall into an
| 'if you build it they will come' attitude with inbound sales.
| In truth it rarely works on its own. (Work in sales / marketing
| for a large vertical SaaS)
| ghaff wrote:
| >When you're building the product the trick is to build your
| product almost alongside your first customers
|
| I agree with you up to a point. Real customer use cases are
| important and good references are gold--both for getting
| other customers and for getting onto some analyst radars.
| However, it's important not to pivot towards building what a
| customer wants so much that you basically end up being a
| consulting company doing a bunch of one offs. (Assuming
| that's not what you want of course.)
| kristianc wrote:
| Of course - you'd want to do validation with 4 or 5
| companies, and identify common pain points, as well as
| separating 'nice to haves' from 'table stakes'.
|
| Usually by the time you've done 3 or 4 calls with customers
| in a good target segment, you start to hear some common
| themes again and again. As you say though, you have to
| avoid the temptation to wrap yourself around the weird edge
| cases of one customer (especially if that customer is a
| 'big fish').
| goatherders wrote:
| Well said, and I appreciate your perspective.
|
| I also 100% disagree.
|
| Inbound is a waiting game. Referrals are a waiting game. And
| hoping to be found at the right time by the right buyers ENOUGH
| times puts external factorsnin charge of your business but just
| thriving, but surviving.
|
| My business exists precisely because we believe so strongly in
| outbound as a strategy. But wherein you are right that random
| cold outreach is distracting and a waste of time, outbounding
| that is targeted well and focused on problem solving can be the
| best ROI you have all year.
|
| The difference, we have found, is between prospects who are
| aware their businesses are imperfect AND are curious about
| solving problems and prospects who know their businesses are
| imperfect and willing to live with those imperfections until
| such time they become intolerable. Those that choose the status
| quo until such time that they choose to go looking, as you have
| self-identified.
|
| Candidly, there are a lot more of the latter than former but
| there are still plenty of the former.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| Another way to say this is that if you wait for customers to
| come to you, you are not in control of your own destiny.
| katzgrau wrote:
| Agreed. I use Hubspot as a model - stellar inbound strategy,
| but still has a very strong outbound strategy too.
|
| And tbh, the majority of sales I've ever made were from
| outbound. Usually very targeted outbound where I had the
| prospect more/less pre-qualified (after talking to lots of
| prospects you develop an instinct)
|
| Been in business for 8 years, dev turned sales
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Maybe I just didn't get any good inbound requests so far
| then. We're a small startup so I think we don't attract a lot
| of outbound interest, this might be different for larger
| companies of course. Taking time to learn about the specific
| interests and needs of a small startup with little budget is
| probably overkill, so we just get the "spray and pray"
| treatment I guess.
|
| Do you have a good strategy for identifying open-minded
| companies that are willing to learn about new approaches?
| kristianc wrote:
| > Taking time to learn about the specific interests and
| needs of a small startup with little budget is probably
| overkill, so we just get the "spray and pray" treatment I
| guess.
|
| > Do you have a good strategy for identifying open-minded
| companies that are willing to learn about new approaches?
|
| The answer to both your questions is segmentation,
| segmentation, segmentation.
|
| The trick with segmentation is to find clusters of
| companies who are likely to share like-minded problems,
| hone your messaging and positioning to reach them (Basecamp
| is a classic example of how to do this well, they have
| always had a very clear idea of who Basecamp is for and who
| it is not for), and then identify the _individuals_ within
| those organizations who are most open to change.
|
| Again, the temptation is to head straight to the C-suite -
| this is usually a bad place to start. C-suites are time
| poor, usually quite cynical about new software, and removed
| from the problems of the people on the front line. Usually
| better to start in middle-management with PMs, and arm them
| to build a business case to take further up the org.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It's of course possible that an experienced sales person
| would be able to generate outbound interest
|
| I am at the receiving side of them, with currently no way to
| escape. (Ouch!) But well, the strategies I see them using are:
|
| 1 - If you see some large change on society (laws, tech, etc),
| focus on solving the problem those bring. That way, everybody
| will have the same problem at the same time, and you can pitch
| for it.
|
| 2 - Keep in contact until they need it. Maybe even try to help
| your possible clients in solving the problems that make your
| tool "not our largest problem today".
|
| 3 - Have a portfolio. Discover what problems the client has
| first, so you can decide what to sell second.
|
| That said, I still didn't buy nor have seen anybody buy
| anything from a company that approached us first. As I said,
| those are techniques I see the experienced sales people using.
| I didn't see them working, but I assume sometimes they do,
| otherwise those people wouldn't have a job. Also, all of them
| look very expensive in some way.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| Not sure why the negativity here. This is actually a great post
| that sets up a high level framework for thinking about the
| problem. Regardless of your personal experiences with Segment its
| good advice.
| xwdv wrote:
| I wish I could even start a B2B startup, but I have zero
| experience in any other industry beyond software, which pretty
| much limits my possibilities to just making software tools.
|
| God I wish I had knowledge in more domains.
| pault wrote:
| Isn't this the reason that non-technical founders are a thing?
| thestepafter wrote:
| Just start, you can read about starting all day long and doubt
| yourself or you can start, today. Decide on your first step and
| complete it, then choose your next step. You will have
| sleepless nights and tearful days but once you start, you
| learn. You don't have to have it all figured out or a plan,
| just start in the general direction.
| dreamer7 wrote:
| Having experience in other domains would be great. But it is by
| no means the only way to build successful companies.
|
| You only need to have passion for a particular domain to then
| engage with people who share your passion and also have more
| experience in that field.
| qnsi wrote:
| Why is the CTO talking about selling? Dont mean to be harsh just
| curious
| rhizome wrote:
| Because revenue is dependent on the "T" in "CTO."
| neeleshs wrote:
| I'm a CTO and I work closely with our CRO. In my experience,
| being involved in the sales process is an eye opener for a CTO.
| In early stage startups (heck, even in a billion dollar
| company), a CTO cannot be disconnected from sales. This allows
| help bridge gaps in product and how engineers think about
| product features. It also makes the CTO leave their ivory tower
| of technology and be more grounded to reality. I'll probably do
| a blog post on my experience some day
| bgilly wrote:
| A good CTO is at least involved in the pre-sales process if not
| the entire sales process of large deals. Especially when the
| product being sold was built by the CTO's team. That's been my
| experience anyways.
| qnsi wrote:
| Thank you for explaining! Makes a lot of sense
| rdli wrote:
| Every executive in a company at a minimum should have a general
| understanding of other functions. If the CTO knows what selling
| looks like, then the CTO can better assist the sales team.
| Likewise, if the sales team understands how software
| engineering works (at a very high level), they'll generally
| understand that "getting a very complicated feature RIGHT NOW
| for one deal" is ... not realistic.
|
| etc.
| goatherders wrote:
| The CTO should start every program or problem by thinking "how
| does this generate more revenue for the business?" And that
| means thinking through a sales lens. I would want to work with
| a CTO that DOESNT think about sales.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| I don't know, but I want more of them.
| OlgaAgility wrote:
| I love these drawing!
| psaux wrote:
| Know your customer, works well for me. I focus on Fortune 500 at
| my job, and people forget to ask what the customer wants and go
| straight into a sale. Meta: not sure about this blog, it is in
| itself a sales page.
| wrnr wrote:
| A miserable sales page, I still don't know what Segment does,
| something with analytics and apis?
| psaux wrote:
| I have no clue, always magic.
| nojito wrote:
| Segment is backed by a ginormous sales operation from its
| multiple successful funding rounds.
|
| This article is very fluff heavy and contains almost no
| actionable insights.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > At the end of the day, selling well means that you are helping
| the customer actually understand their problem, and the path to
| evaluate a solution.
|
| Lipstick on a pig in 99% of cases.
|
| I've been a CEO, CDO, a consultant, a middle manager and an IC.
| Well functioning high output teams (in any sector of business)
| almost never need a new tool/service to provide value. On the
| flip side, poorly functioning teams are constantly chasing new
| tools and processes as fixes to their broken organizations. So
| the vast majority of sales are convincing broken organizations to
| buy organizational nudges.
|
| The single place where I am consistently happy to spend money is
| on things that our organization cannot internally build that we
| need to scale immediately. In the long run though, I want to
| eliminate as many outside dependencies as possible, so my goal is
| to either absorb you or build processes and systems that replace
| your service.
| [deleted]
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > Well functioning high output teams (in any sector of
| business) almost never need a new tool/service to provide value
|
| High output teams benefit as much, if not more, from new
| tools/services than anyone else.
|
| - Accounting is much more effective with an ERP
|
| - Sales is much more effective with a CRM
|
| - Engineering is much more effective with CI/CD
|
| None of these things are necessary, but they make good people
| even better.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| That advice only applies to a narrow set of functionality
| within the organization though. It's usually not cost effective
| or wise to write custom marketing systems if you can get one
| off the shelf. Your teams turnover rate, documentation,
| support, and feature creep all contribute to the maintenance of
| that system. No way it makes sense in the short or long term
| for non-core business functions.
| polote wrote:
| So no sales high output team needs a CRM ?
|
| no engineering high output team needs a versioning tool ?
|
| no designer high output team needs a design tool ?
|
| High output teams _always_ need several tools
| mikst wrote:
| I think we picture "high output team" differently.
|
| The way I see it, a "high output team" usually knows all the
| tools in their respecive field, and knows 99% of them are
| trash and this fundamental thing has to change before a
| better tool becomes possible. Which in turn makes
| conversations with salesmen mostly pointless.
|
| On the other hand not a "high output team" don't know exactly
| what they need and just chase hype.
| rhizome wrote:
| You're thinking in black and white. This is all hypotheticals
| of course, but the teams you speak of probably already have
| _something_ , but why should they switch to yours? What do
| you even know about what they might already be using?
| vladf wrote:
| I think "vast majority of sales" is too cynical, though there's
| undoubtedly some merit to your sentiment in certain cases.
|
| I manage a high-output team, and we _love_ Mode. Could we write
| our own connectors to our BI warehouse to extract tables into
| pandas and jerry-rig streamlit to make our own Mode? Eh, maybe.
| We actually did dumber versions of this in the past. But we can
| stay lean by not having to worry about all the stuff Mode
| worries about for us, like credentials, auto-updating, pushing
| to slack, setting up a python environment? Absolutely, as long
| as it makes financial sense.
|
| Again, maybe we're just disagreeing about software being shitty
| 99% of the time vs just 80% of the time. But I think my point
| would be that it doesn't have to be a sophisticated tool to be
| a pain point.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| I too have had those roles, starting my career as an IC, then a
| middle Manager, then a consultant, then a CEO/founder, and now
| a CTO. What I've focused on is how to help my teams and then my
| company operate as efficiently as possible while spending our
| resources where it benefits our customers the most.
|
| Some examples of decisions I've made:
|
| - IT/engineers won't spend time building and maintaining email
| servers, we'll spend $5/month/employee on G Suite and use their
| time on things that make our products more valuable
|
| - We won't outsource support even though that would dollar for
| dollar be more efficient, because understanding and building
| empathy for the customer is more important
|
| - no we won't spend money on email lists, but yes we will spend
| money on tools that allows our outbound sales team to more
| quickly determine prospects that fit our ideal customer profile
|
| - bringing finance in-house much sooner than other people
| recommended because being more efficient at Accounts
| Receivable, Renewals, and thus cash flow allowed us to grow
| faster than we otherwise would have
|
| - paying for a third party SSO solution for our products and
| instead using engineering time to build first class
| integrations between our products and complementary products,
| because having an artisanal SSO System doesn't benefit our
| customers
| mikst wrote:
| > IT/engineers won't spend time building and maintaining
| email servers, we'll spend $5/month/employee on G Suite and
| use their time on things that make our products more valuable
|
| In-house email servers are not constrained by the time to
| build them, but rather by reputation/spam considerations.
| Sorry, but that's a lucky guess ;-)
|
| > paying for a third party SSO solution for our products and
| instead using engineering time to build first class
| integrations between our products and complementary products,
| because having an artisanal SSO System doesn't benefit our
| customers
|
| That's one of vendorlockiest vendor lock out there, which is
| a very YOLO decision.
|
| The idea that buying stuff is more efficient then building it
| yourself is at the cornerstone of the modern economic theory,
| but that's only a theory. In the wilds there's much, much
| more factors to consider then just comparing cost of building
| versus cost of buying.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'd venture to guess that for the tools and services that you
| buy, you weren't sold them, you sought them out and bought
| them because you recognized a need to buy vs build. I'm not
| saying don't buy things. I'm saying, if you're being
| successfully sold to in this fashion then you likely have
| more fundamental organizational problems.
|
| My Dad told me something when I was little that stuck with
| me:
|
| "You never see ads for broccoli"
|
| Of course while that's not strictly true (weekly grocery
| flyer) his point was that, if you actually need something to
| survive you'll figure out how to get it without having to be
| sold to.
| ScottFree wrote:
| > if you actually need something to survive you'll figure
| out how to get it without having to be sold to.
|
| And if you don't know what you need to survive?
| kristianc wrote:
| > On the flip side, poorly functioning teams are constantly
| chasing new tools and processes as fixes to their broken
| organizations.
|
| The data suggests otherwise. Historically the industries which
| have the most broken and convoluted processes also have the
| lowest investment in technology.
| mikst wrote:
| Could you share what kind of data points you use to describe
| "broken and convoluted processes"?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| As someone who has been on the other side of the table as a
| buyer, I'm not particularly fond of this advice. Especially when
| the customer is the one who reached out. Time is valuable and
| it's not feasible to have a close relationship with every vendor;
| I'm buying a product because a need has been identified, your
| product fits that need. Most likely I am _not_ looking for:
|
| - consulting
|
| - running a brainstorming session with a third-party
|
| - learning something I don't already know about x/y/z
|
| - sharing sensitive info such as success metrics
|
| Sometimes you really want a hands-off, transactional
| relationship, where the partner simply delivers what you paid
| for, no more, no less. I understand this approach might be very
| valuable for a certain kind, or stage, of company, but it won't
| be ideal for every enterprise.
| troquerre wrote:
| Great post from Calvin. Every founder, even if they're the CTO,
| should learn at least the basics of selling. Having the whole
| team aligned on what moves the needle makes a huge difference.
| It's not enough to offload thinking about selling to the CEO just
| because it's not the CTO's primary responsibility.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| And if possible this is a great lesson for early employees, up
| to maybe 50.
|
| Having an engineer or PdM take 1 hour per week to jump on sales
| calls and just listen is one of the best things they could be
| doing early on.
| golemiprague wrote:
| This is basic stuff that everybody are doing, the most important
| thing is to have people who are connected in the industry and are
| likeable. People that your clients will want to go to a strip
| club with, play golf or share a booth in a sporting event,
| depends on their preferences.
|
| In the B2B world, if you are doing anything valuable, there is
| always some competition so you need to build good connection with
| people so they pick you out of the many other options or give you
| a chance if you are the first to do something, which is rare.
|
| This is true also for software development, at the end of the day
| it is not the methodology, if you have a good team of people they
| will find the way.
| brenden2 wrote:
| Step 1: Get tons of VC money.
|
| Step 2: Hire a big sales team.
|
| Step 3: Be really good at marketing.
| danieltillett wrote:
| The process really goes 3, 1, 2.
| dhruvsodumb wrote:
| Calvin is a monkey man
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