[HN Gopher] Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
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Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
Author : micaeloliveira
Score : 105 points
Date : 2020-11-25 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (micael.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (micael.substack.com)
| gumby wrote:
| > Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest
| way to go about this is to solve your own problem.
|
| The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is
| rarely good.
|
| First the bad:
|
| 1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it,
| it's likely that your potential customers can fix it for
| themselves too.
|
| 2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out
| by believing that your potential customer thinks the same way you
| do. If your prospects are quite different from you (say you're a
| programmer writing a tool for doctors) you'll work harder to
| understand their real _and_ perceived needs.
|
| But sometimes this is good advice:
|
| 1 - Even if you are different from your customer (say you're
| writing something broadly applicable like a web site design tool
| for small business), "eating your own dog food" will find bugs
| and infelicities faster.
|
| 2 - if your customer has the same needs as you perhaps you
| already know how to meet said customer easily, such as trade
| groups you're already in.
|
| In general the advice in this post was pretty basic and generic
| but I didn't want to let the issue above pass I commented.
| qppo wrote:
| I've worked in multiple startups/bootstrapped enterprises that
| started as consultancies to pay for the development of internal
| tools with the ultimate goal of licensing the tools. It doesn't
| always work but its the least bad validation strategy I've
| seen.
|
| I find 1) and 2) of your "bad" items to be more nuanced. Mostly
| because outside of software development most industries do not
| have the capacity to build a solution outside their particular
| flavor of a problem, and they don't do it internally. They hire
| consultants to do it, and there are enormous inefficiencies
| that prevent their solution from turning into a product.
| taffer wrote:
| I think you make good arguments, but #1 is a typical techie
| argument: Why would I ever use $SaaS if I could just cobble
| something together with rsync and Excel? Well, because $SaaS is
| a much more polished product with all the headaches removed.
| hnracer wrote:
| This was the basis of the scepticism towards Dropbox in that
| infamous HN thread. In the end if I'm either an individual
| consumer or a business consumer I just want my problem solved
| really well and not have to always build a custom solution in
| house for everything.
|
| But I can see other contexts where OP's advice applies,
| either when requirements are very bespoke or when the problem
| is little more than a small annoyance and existing tools do
| the job just fine
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| SaaS is less about the capability and more the opportunity
| cost. Anyone can do anything with the appropriate amount of
| human capital and resource investment. It's more can you
| provide the service cheaper by specializing and providing the
| service for cheaper than they could do themselves?
| amoorthy wrote:
| I'm an engineer turned bus-dev/sales person. I found the
| transition very difficult and was recommended to sign up for
| sales coaching. It was excellent advice and I learned a lot about
| my inherent weaknesses when it comes to selling and how to
| compensate for them. I wrote a few of my lessons on my blog. A
| bit dated but perhaps of value to others:
|
| https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/134157/Sales-trainin...
|
| https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/135376/Secret-to-sal...
| micaeloliveira wrote:
| interesting. thanks for sharing!
| reubenswartz wrote:
| This is great stuff. Want to come on my Sales for Nerds podcast
| and discuss in more detail?
| kevsim wrote:
| As part of an accelerator I did with my startup [0], I had the
| chance to check out a talk by Scott at https://salesqualia.com/.
| While we have less of an enterprise sales approach and more of a
| bottom-up distribution approach, I still found Scott's structured
| approach to thinking about sales really useful. I recommend
| people check it out.
|
| 0: 0: https://kitemaker.co - the product management and
| collaboration tool that's crazy fast, loaded with hotkeys, and
| has deep integrations to your favorite tools like GitHub, Figma,
| Slack and Discord.
| preommr wrote:
| > 5. Listen and improve your pitch.
|
| > Listen! You will get a lot of feedback from customers during
| your first calls, use that feedback to make adjustments to your
| messaging and improve your pitch.
|
| It's easy to say just listen to your customers, but it's a lot
| more complex than that.
|
| People will often give bad advice in an attempt to be polite, or
| because they're not understanding something.
|
| It's not just about taking customer feedback at face value but
| also trying to figure out if you're getting the feedback you
| expected. And to be able to draw out as many insights as
| possible. Something that's rarely if ever straightforward.
| nof1 wrote:
| You're often not selling what you think you're selling or not
| selling it to the person you thought you'd be selling to.
| Approach your sales process the same way you did your product
| development - you need to beta it. Get a few early customers in
| and really learn from them. How did they make the decision? What
| do they think the main benefits are? How are they using it? What
| would they tell a friend? Who influenced the purchase and who
| paid for it?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| 3 is only an issue when you are small. Everything's different the
| moment you have spare funds and engineering manpower.
| gkoberger wrote:
| The advice says "Don't commit to things you cannot deliver on."
| No matter how big you are, if you can't deliver, this is the
| correct advice.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| The qualifier is that in true enterprise, you can do proserv
| deals to ramp them to full size, and you can sell roadmap
| pretty hard because a lot of the time the decision and the
| implementation happen in different quarters or years. So it
| definitely _does_ honour their process to let them know
| something is coming if they 're making a 5-10 year decision
| and something is only a few months out. You definitely have
| to follow through, though.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| The most important thing to remember when selling anything, is to
| understand whether or not the person you're facing wants to buy
| it. The word sales people use is "qualification".
|
| If a person is qualified to purchase, selling them your product
| is a no brainer. When you qualify a person wrongly, you're going
| to regret it. Waste of time (yours and theirs) and money (mostly
| yours).
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