Ask HN: How to learn sales?
First time entrepreneur here. I am creating a product that will solve address a large potential. The more I think about it and read about startup, I am finding that a key to early and often success is Sales.
I am been engineer by choice and engineering manager by profession. I have never done sales. I understand you learn by doing similar to driving. I am a bit talkative but sometime I have hard time not getting bogged down by emotions.
How do I get started? Can you share books, videos, tutorials, prior recorded sales call references?
Where can I learn about metrics to track? Any ideas?
242 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 1940 ms ] threadI like HubSpot for tracking / metrics. They have an always free tier too.
"Never Split the Difference" is good even if it leans a little hard on a single rhetorical device, and it offers really easy to practice stuff in an ontology that makes sense to engineering brain for every day life.
"Barbarians at the Gate" is borderline academic but unbeatable for understanding how all deals, no matter how big, are shaped by personalities and emotions. Huge huge time investment but worth it if you have serious entrepreneurial ambition.
https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/close-more-deals-with-meddic...
I think sales can be broken down into:
1. Foundation of being perceived as an authority
2. Lead generation
3. Persuasion and conversion
4. Re-sale
Breaking it down makes it easy to become better at the sales process.
All the book recommendations in the thread are solid.
All the best. Try out a lot with short feedback loops so that you can course correct suitably. Always respect the customer and their needs.
It doesn't matter how good of a sales person you are if you are not getting any leads. Conversely, you can be a bad sales person, even with a bad product, but with enough leads, eventually they will buy - you can see this with crappy restaurants at airports for example.
Successful startups are very aware of this and they setup processes to generate enough leads so their sales people can close them, to generate their target revenue. Also, the sales person's responsibility is to close the people that "come through the door", but it shouldn't be their responsibility to bring those people in.
So just go about doing the usual sales thing of describing your product, finding prospects, and talking to them. A lot. I think density of rejection is actually key to thickening your skin.
For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.
For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.
I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.
For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).
Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.
:-)
Three years later he drove in to the office lot with a brand new Porsche 911 which was a portion of his commission for closing the deal after something insane like 33 months.
He was happy to have that deal done.
It’ll be a big deal for all of them, but just getting everything in place for them to all agree and sign is just insane - my longest sales process before this was maybe 4 months, 400 hours - this has easily eaten tens of thousands of man hours so far.
One thing I’ve observed is that the deal almost becomes secondary - by this point, there’s an entire self-sustaining bureaucracy around the deal, many of the deliverables the deal specified are already in place and money has changed hands, hires have been made, everything has essentially happened as though the deal has gone ahead - yet I’m spending this afternoon rejigging information security roles and responsibilities to make the interfaces more on parity with the security team of one of the blue chips, because until the contract is signed, the deal isn’t done, and all parties are just merrily swimming out into deeper waters together, growing technical and operational dependencies around each other with no legal agreement. At this point, the businesses are just getting on with stuff as though the deal is done, the counsels are screaming because nobody is interested in moving the boring paperwork forwards, and I’m charging by the hour. Buys a lot of popcorn.
Sales is weird.
Edit: just realised we might be talking about the same healthcare customers.
Close, but not quite.
Marketing is the brand, the image, points of differentiation, etc. It's the message.
Advertising is the broadcast. It's how the message is communicated. It's the medium.
Marketing + advertising = prospects and leads.
Sales is the last mile. It takes the results of marketing + advertising (i.e., leads and prospects) and guides those to closing.
Contrary to myth, successful sales is about listening, not talking.
Sales is
Advertising is how that's communicated.
Using a billboard or a TV advert is not marketing.
Of course, marketing needs to be advertized. Else you'd just be sitting around a confernce table all day. Sooner of later the (marketing) message will need to be...advertised.
And yes, the medium can be the message. But a magazine advertisement is not a brand style guide. Tradeshow swag is not a tag line.
It not a question of placement - inside or out - it's simple proven definitions.
"Advertising is a marketing communication..."
Your tone is unnecessary and off-target. The above quote from line one is exactly what I said.
You don't just wake up, roll out of bed, and advertise. Well, you can but waste a ton of money. In any case, that message needs to be crafted. That's marketing. Advertising is how you disseminate that "plan."
Logo - marketing, not advertising.
Style guide - marketing, not advertising.
Positioning of the brand - marketing, not advertising.
And so on.
Marketing is the plan. How you wish take and place your brand / product to market. Advertising is the communication of that to thd market. Advertising is what happens when the meeting ends and its time to engage the market.
Marketing = what we have to say and who we wish to say it to.
Advertising = Got it. Let's see what tools we have to best make that happen.
No dreams. That is how it happens.
Advertising is part of marketing.
Futhermore, of course marketers will say they control everything (i.e., including advertising). Now let's go ask an advertising agency if they agree. Let's go ask a promotions agency if they agree.
I'm speaking about the process and activities; devoid of typical biz structures and models that manifest those. It's a fool's errand to discuss the latter without first understanding the the basics, the foundation. The fact this thread is off target proves that point precisely.
It's simple. It's called Advertising for a reason. The outputs are called Advertisements for a reason. Whether that's within Marketing's "power grab" or not is not really relevant.
Obviously for software and B2B it is a bit different, because budgets are often smaller and there is more pressure for A/B testing if there is any Return on Investment.
For me "promotion" is more like "price strategy", but they put the word into the 4P since it fits nice.
Many firms that don't advertise--or do very little advertising--and are still able to generate leads, that's why it's normally included in marketing as one of many channels.
Effective marketing people also talk and listen to customers.
I've been in pre-sales for about 8 years now. From the vendor and reseller side. Mostly on the technical side (SE) but I also know the process side of the account executive (AE) very well at this point.
Yes, you need to listen. But you'll never sell anything if you can't articulate a destination, lay out the path and showcase to the customer how what you're representing will benefit them more-so than the products you're trying to displace or something new that will bring with it a myriad of gains for said customer. If a customer is always telling me what they need from me then I'm not providing any value. And, honestly, it's very rare to find a customer who's ahead of a good sales team. We have full access to PMs, internal business units and access to far more insight to our bits and pieces than any reseller or customer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying customers can't be experts. But I'm here to know and bring things to the plate that they just can't.
Understanding your customer is often times more valuable than listening to them outright. I've found paths for the customer that has helped them avoid making mistakes, saved them money or improved their operations through paths they hadn't considered or didn't know existed. Good sales teams work hard across the board through strong technical positioning as well as strategic deal creations.
There are sales teams that rinse and repeat for every interaction and then there are sales teams that are looking to help their customers, trying to find where the wins are for the prospect. I've walked away from deals by telling a customer we weren't a fit for them. Sales gets a bad rap, but there are some of us out there that walk into every conversation not with the only intent of closing quota, but trying to make a positive impact.
But you don't know where the customer is trying to go...you don't know their pain...you don't know their priorities...
Without listening.
If you don't listen you can't do what I stated above. And if you can't do what I stated above then you're not going to be able to help the customer and, ultimately, not be all that successful in sales.
Case in point... I had a customer years ago about to spend roughly a million dollars on a remote site upgrade architecture we had been jointly working on for about 6 months. In the background I was tracking a new product that would make their initiative cheaper and had both better ROI and performance specs due to refreshed hardware.
I made sure to present this, get all the information in front of the customer, engage in discussions using our PM and derive a strategic deal that would save them money over the three year term for buying a new product early.
They didn't do it. My counterpart appreciated the option even though it would have slipped their project by 2 months. Him and I are still friends even though I've moved on since then, but the moral of the story is he still brings that up because, in hindsight, he said he should have trusted our proposal. They spent more, got less and had to upgrade earlier due to unforeseen circumstances. Part of it was bad luck, the other part was a cognizant decision he made against the sales team better judgement.
I listened. I knew the customer very well, in fact. But I had knowledge and experience with the products that outstripped his for navigating this situation. That's how a good sales team operates.
Listen is a big word, one has to take all meanings into account.
Sales can best be distinguished by indirect sales and direct sales.
Direct sales is where you go out and find clients.
Indirect sales is where you go out and find partners to bring you clients.
You don’t buy Coca Cola from Coca Cola. You rarely by HP from HP.
Companies tend to be more successful when they find ways to grow using “channels”.
This is a good summary of finding your path toward channel sales:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297479
This is a good kit to start a channel sales program:
https://chanimaluniversity.com/product/reseller-program-kit-...
Keep in mind there's a 30% cut from AWS, plus if you're in the EU, you need a tier like payoneer to channel your revenues back into the EU.
Good distribution channels solve three aspects:
- Logistics: Technical delivery - pretty good, as it's cloud as usual, with the bonus of solving how to run on the customer's side of the trust boundary (vs. normal centralized saas), + pricing features like app-defined utility fees
- Marketing: Cloud marketplaces fail to do demand gen (low-traffic search, no promotional campaigns, ...), as opposed to engaged partners who will
- Sales: Trialing is better than an on-prem thing but they harm success by not having a person involved nor allowing you to know who your users are, so overall, hurt closing. They are good-ish on solving procurement/invoicing
So again, pretty bad as an overall distribution channel, but for handling the paid POCs of a sales/marketing pipeline defined elsewhere, they can be nice.
Long-term, I think these can be massive, but they're currently immature/underinvested/etc. Ex: hw fee + 20-30% sw fees for such a poor distribution channel is quite unattractive for most serious b2b partners (distribution partners normally take 5-15% and do much more work, not ~50% for so little), so looks like a symptom of PM fiefdom politics vs senior leadership investing in these to be big. They could take Stripe's 1-3% payments fees, add 5% hands-off reseller fee, opt-in for special programs for another 5%, and poof, multiple $B businesses.
I have done technical sales-like engagements and this is the number one pattern I see from relationships that went well. The customer determined, for whatever reason (rightly so) that I could solve their problems. So they opened up and explained what the problems really are. If you can't get this, you can't help someone.
Solution Selling by M. Bozworth
Bob’s background is in engineering and it feels far more accessible to me than other sales books as a result. I’ve been trying to get my head around this stuff for over a decade. The ideas in this book have made me feel comfortable about selling for the first time.
Looking forward to digging deeper into the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory with Clayton Christensen's book on "Competing Against Luck"
I think that selling, especially the selling you’re talking about has a lot to do with mindset. I am also an entrepreneur and I have found for my own sales process that mindset and a bias toward action have produced more results and a more comfortable, natural selling style that fits me personally rather than trying to sound like someone else or use someone else’s techniques.
For this I highly recommend “sell or be sold” by grant cardone. Ignore the macho bravado, and take the mindset of sales that he has. Really helped me a lot in selling myself and selling my company rather than selling a product (although it la good for that too). I also recommend “if you’re not first you’re last” and “the 10x rule” also by grant cardone. Good luck!
My biggest advice is get a coach/mentor/consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional sales people learn in practice (eg from a sales manager). This will accelerate you learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise it’s easy to flounder on the wrong ones.
RE metrics- closed business is the only one that matters! Do whatever gets you that as fast as possible.
I wasted a year when I first founded Amplitude trying to brute force it myself and closed a grand total of two contracts for $36k. After that I ended up working with a guy named Mitch Morando and got from $36k to $1M in ARR in less than a year. He cost me $5k a month and increased our market cap by $20M, it was well worth the investment. I’m happy to make an intro if you’d like.
Good luck on the journey ahead and I’m excited for you!
I just did a podcast on it if you’re curious: https://theboostvcpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ep98-the-e...
I am very curious as a bootstrapped founder myself. Would you be willing to tell us more on some of the high level things Mitch Morando helped with ? What bottlenecks did he solve that you didn't/couldn't know ?
We went from literally $0k ARR to high 6-figure ARR in 8 months before getting acquired. He taught me everything I know about SaaS sales.
Mitch was recommended to me originally by Peter, CEO/Co-founder at Segment.
Most of the books recommended in this thread assume that you're working for a established firm, with product / market fit, etc.
Clearly that's not the case for a start-up.
Read up on what Pete Kanzanjy publishes https://www.foundingsales.com/ - it covers the the "founder-led sales" phase.
How I did it:
- you interview as many prospects and customers as possible
- you understand what keeps them up at night, what specific pain points they have, the language they use to describe their situation
- you shape your messaging to solve those specific pain points, using their own language
- wrap your messaging into a story - the worst you can do is "problem / solution". people don't buy that way. people buy change, and you use the story to communicate that change.
I wrote a totally too long Medium post on the whole topic:
https://medium.com/@larskamp/the-5-cs-an-operating-framework...
as somebody else pointed out on this thread - be read to deal with objection! You'll likely collect 9 "No's" for each "yes!"
It sounds like everyone ‘improves’ their offering based on feedback - but some folks seem to ‘just know’ what they are going through, and that somehow resonates with others.
I’ve always wondered if there’s a difference between approaches or if it’s all just window dressing.
What browser are you using? Sounds like maybe a Memberspace issue with a config you have?
Check to see which of these chapters you can access: https://www.foundingsales.com/table-of-contents
It might also be that the redirect after registration goes back to the home page, and the chapter buttons are below the fold if one doesn’t scroll down. Probably would be better to redirect to table of contents after registration. I’ll see if that can be configured through Memberspace.
> you interview as many prospects and customers as possible
Did you do that before or after completing your product / service?
this is 4 years ago, the market we were going after were the cloud warehouses like Redshift, BigQuery and Snowflake.
In the beginning, we just had an idea for a specific product / service. but we knew that the customer would be the lonely data engineer in charge of building the analytics stack.
I started with cold outreach via my network and linkedin. I would use pretty broad language around data warehouse usage, to cast a wide net with terms like "usage, performance, metadata, etc.", and cover all potential use cases. Engineers are always short on time, so you need to be affirmative, authoritative and present a clear ask that shows what you want and how the engineer will get value out of spending 30 min with you.
Of course I pulled the founder card, and that does help. I made it clear that we don't have a product, but working on building one. Turns out that most people are helpful, and want you to win!
The first signal that you're onto something is when they reply to your message, and are intrigued.
we built our first product around that feedback. Companies like Postmates, WeWork and Udemy bought version 0.5!
I made a point out of keeping in touch with every customer, and do a quarterly check-in. What's changed? What are your plans? For this coming week, month, quarter and year. Where do you want to be in 2 years? What problems are you trying to solve for your company? What are the expectations for you and your team? What tools are you using to solve that problem? What tools have you looked at and decided to not use them, and why? Etc., etc.
I rolled around in THEIR situation, trying to walk in their shoes. We'd talk for sometimes 90 minutes, often in person here in SF, over lunch. We'd often not cover our product until the final 5 minutes.
Of course, that's a huge chunk of time out of your calendar. Huge opportunity cost, in particular for a founder.
So here's actually something I'd do different. We hired our first sales reps after our first 10 customers. That was a mistake. Our product was very technical, it's not like selling email software. So you need a technical rep. Our first rep was a class act, but let me tell you, it was a goat rodeo for him.
Rather, I should have hired a customer success person, and have them do the quarterly check-ins. That way I could have kept selling. Then let the customer success rep also write (technical) blog post, customer stories / case studies, and documentation. You're building out (credible) marketing materials that build the top of your funnel.
BTW: feels like you could write an entire book about your experience ;)
Too much money gives you a false sense of security.
Also called a Field Application Engineer in some circles.
> Then let the customer success rep also write (technical) blog post, customer stories / case studies, and documentation.
Also sample code, sample scripts.
Today we would call it Corportae Blogging.
I created a product, a blog CMS (very poor on the M) and wanted to convince companies of SEO and blogging. Non of it where anywhere on their radar.
And 0 sales experience from my side.
I fail and realized I needed sales experience. So I applied and became a key account and a slazy company which sold crappy websites to estate agents.
Worst job ever. Learned a lot.
If you want to really learn sales, start selling. Just change your job for a while.
We kept crafting our message over time, using email and cold calls, and used a lot of copywriting books to find messaging and pitches. I think the best one was The Copywriter's Handbook. Straight and to the point book. It's more about advertising, but messaging is key for sales, too. A headline is basically your elevator pitch. I think we also used the book Spin Selling.
It really made me better at handling customers, even as non-sales
The secret isn’t making everyone say yes but to have as few people as possible tell you no.
You will find that #2 applies to MANY aspects of life. Good luck!
Book: To sell is human. Daniel Pink
Secondly, follow Close.com blog, there is tons of great sales insight, and download their Startup Sales Resource Bundle - https://close.io/resources/startup-sales-resource-bundle
Thirdly, watch Steli Efti's keynote about startup selling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55z5yl_naco&feature=emb_titl...
You're all set ;)
First things first, I think before selling, my understanding of sales was largely grounded as an "art", and by far the largest turning point in my understanding has been that sales has a pretty large "science" component to it as well, by which I mean tried and true repeatable steps that can be applied consistently.
As a founder, before sales, you need feedback. Assuming you don't have product-market fit (which you almost certainly don't know, because you don't have users), it is MOST important that you talk to customers to get a handle on what they need. The two books I found most valuable here are: - The Mom Test - Talking to Humans
(The Lean Startup has a good section on this as well; if, like me, you haven't reread it since starting a company - I would highly recommend doing so, you grok so much more than when you first read it without any experience to ground it to.)
Once you have some intuition around your market and that your product is actually tackling the right problem. I would read Founding Sales (https://www.foundingsales.com/). I was recommended this book by a founder-friend who told me "Literally stop whatever you or your team is doing and take the next two days to read this book" and I'm glad I did that. The book has given me a solid anchoring, vocabulary, and makes a compelling case that founder-sales are fundamentally different than regular sales: regular sales are what happens AFTER you have a repeatable process, founding sales requires much more of a product mind to rapidly integrate feedback and live-iterate on the product.
From there, you'll realize you have two skills you really need to learn: marketing and sales. Broadly: marketing is about getting leads, sales is about closing them.
Marketing: There are a whole bunch of books and articles I've been recommended on marketing (Traction being one of top recommended ones). However, after having done a lot of this I'm not convinced that this is a good use of time as a founder. So much of what I've heard / seen is that your first few customers WILL be warm intros from within your network. So a better use of your time may be a LinkedIn subscription and to go through the network of: your VCs, any former companies you've worked at, any school you graduated and shamelessly ask for intros. A good article that popped up on HN recently was: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales. (Also, for the theory of marketing, I personally found Crossing the Chasm a solid book to contextualize what phase of selling I was in and how it might change over time.)
Sales: Is hard. The best advice I've received is: remember it's about them. Not about you. When someone is gracious enough to take a phone call with you, do not immediately pitch them. That makes it about you. Instead, ask them about their process and the pain point you address. This helps both: you discern if it's a real painpoint, them realize that they have / the magnitude of that pain. Two frameworks that have helped me are: - BANT: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/bant - MEDDIC: ostoh ↗ thank you for sharing this helpful information