
Sales for Hackers - jamest
https://stormpath.com/blog/sales-for-hackers
======
manishsharan
As a techie , I dreaded making sales calls. I hated my accent, I hated my
voice and I dreaded being rejected.

Then recently someone on HN mentioned this book "Go For No" by Richard Fenton
and Andrea Waltz. I have it on my kindle and it changed my attitude towards
sales. I have yet to get traction with my bootstrap but I am learning more
with each conversation. Rejection is so much more informative than A/B testing
you web page.

~~~
Hates_
I read the same book after it was mentioned here on HN. Definitely worth a
read and isn't particularly long either.

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rrggrr
This is the single best piece of advice I've ever seen on HN, apart from this
bit about love:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617915](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617915)

Your time is your most valuable commodity and you will have less as you get
older. Don't waste it on unqualified leads, ever.

------
innertracks
Personally, I'm very strong on the social networking side. And I love the
engineering side, too. Part of the attraction to consulting for me is in
meeting and getting to know new people. Especially, C-level. I've always done
best reporting to or working directly with senior management or owners.

Spending too much time in one can leave the other feeling under-utilized. I'm
guessing I'll end up needing to have engineers on contract and have 70:30
business dev to engineering ratio or something. I'm not sure but that ratio
seems about right given how much time the social networking side needs to keep
money coming in consistently.

Plus, there's the downtime needed to make the mental switch from one to the
other. Or maybe just contract out all the work and do my various hobby
projects on the side to satisfy the engineer in me.

Edit: Cold Calling: Things I learned in a non-tech venture.

Visualizations, and rehearsals (mental and physical) of each step of the
calling process were very, very helpful. One click dialing straight off a
spreadsheet of cold contacts made things easier, too.

After getting through the first 100 or so numbers dialing started to give me a
rush. Fear was starting to be replaced by excitement. Very curious experience.

One other thing. I was told to expect, and found, roughly speaking, half of
the numbers I dialed on an industry specific list of small to medium sized
companies, no one answered. Another quarter were busy or couldn't talk and it
really had nothing to do with me.

These numbers held across a few different industries. Since I was rather
likely to NOT reach someone for a conversation I found it much easier to dial.

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luckyisgood
This is a great lesson from the article: "Prioritize the opportunities that
are furthest along, biggest, and most likely to close. If you do that, you’ll
manage your pipeline most efficiently." -> the best way to learn how to
prioritize is to fill your pipeline with more sales leads than you can handle.
Nothing like a 14 hour workday in sales teaches you about how a good lead for
your business looks like. You can't give every sales lead an equal chance.
It's basic sales triage: don't concentrate on leads who you'll win anyway or
who you can never win, focus your most work on leads who need your expertise
to make a decision (for you).

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asalazar
Hi folks. Author here. Happy to answer any questions if you like.

~~~
sumang
I follow up but never a response. Do you think its good to bug them following
up more and more?

~~~
asalazar
If you're following up and are not getting a response then set a limit to the
number of times you'll try again. I personally do 3 follow-up email over the
course of a 3-6 weeks. On the last email, I let them know it'll be the last
time I follow-up and let them know how they can reach me if they'd like to
talk in the future.

If you just keep following up and never stop, you'll likely annoy someone who
is probably not interested in what you're selling and you'll likely get spam
filtered.

Sometimes we just have to take the hint :)

~~~
cykho
One other spin on the follow up comes in timing and content: Follow up after 2
days, 7 days, 2 weeks, 3 months, and annually. This increasing time frame
rarely is found to be annoying and is an effective way to keep in front of
them. Also try and send a new set of content after 2 contacts.

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vyala
We are 3 months old startup, have ipad and tablet apps in developement, zero
experience in sales, our developers are freshers except me with 10 years exp
in coding. We thought of trying to get some customers and strangers feedback
about our product and their interest before launching the apps on app store.
When we mail the prospect about our product, they don't even reply, it may be
discarded.

We then tried showing up some data about prospects in our app, attached
android, ipad images, at least they could say that they are not interested at
this time, or they may decide and let us know sooner. Some of them pick our
call, clarify their understanding about apps. Some of them are going ahead and
asked for price, how to get the apps working on their mobile device.

For each prospect, our sales rep has to spend a lot of time preparing the data
that is relevant to our potential prospect, to send the screen shots.

This article is very good to target high potential prospect who can give us
good business even if we spend a 2-3 days to prepare the data for them. Since
we lack in sales, we don't know the best way to get this done. For each
prospect we have to spend a lot of time, if they are not interested, we are
losing our time.

------
adwf
One point to note is that you don't necessarily need to explicitly ask their
budget, you can ask questions about the size of their operation instead. eg.
For an IT sale, ask about number of employees in the IT department, number of
desktops serviced, tech refresh cycle frequency, server numbers, etc... You
can then get a gauge on what their true overall budget is without having to
ask for it - as that will possibly be lowballed. A 100 man department with
10000+ desktops to support can probably afford a 6-digit equipment sale,
whereas a 10 man dept. with only a hundred users will perhaps be looking at
low 5-digits spare on their budget.

Similar applies to the authority question. The larger the department/company,
the less likely that a huge sale will be authorised by just one individual.
Although the contrary can also sometimes be true in this case - very small/new
companies may have the directors signing off on all the major purchases.

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rcarrigan87
Really great advice. All of the points made in this article can be distilled
into one maxim - LISTEN. If you actually listen to your customer instead of
trying to "sell" your product the conversation will naturally lead into
discussions of budget, time frame, objections, etc.

The biggest mistake I've made with sales is getting nervous and talking too
much. Ask open-ended questions and let the prospect do the rest.

Can't stress getting to the top quickly enough. It's so rare for a sale to
close from the bottom-up in my personal experience.

~~~
brettinlj
I have a counter to the emphasis of getting to the top. I used to work for a
much larger company (definitely "enterprise") and as a product manager I was
often the decider of a vendor to use. There were times where the vendors'
sales teams wanted to make an end-run and get to someone on the upper
management/executive level to influence the decision.

If anything, that became more of a negative because it meant that I had to
spend more time managing those conversations rather than analyzing the fit for
their product.

I would change "getting to the top quickly" to "identifying the decision maker
and getting to them quickly".

------
lettergram
I liked the article, the standard book on the subject is:

[http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-
Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-
Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394591078&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=invluence)

I know there are some techniques I use from the book that helped me
significantly.

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dkyc
I'm sorry, but my inner hacker just has to mention this: There's a syntax
error in your BANT script - one closing paranthesis missing at
"(match(features, needs)". But the article overall is great!

if ( (budget >= price) AND (Authority.isInvolved()) AND _(match(features,
needs)_ AND (timeframe == now)) {

    
    
       proceed(); 
    
     } else { 
    
       quit(); 
    
     }

~~~
civilian
btw there's a syntax error in your markdown.

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markhall
Great post! As a sales guy (non-hacker), I think this post properly lays a
foundation for technical founders and hackers to begin the sales process from
MVP to first sales-hire. Like the author, I'm open to offering any tips/advice
to help you make progress in your efforts.

Best of luck to all.

------
owenversteeg
Reading this was incredibly difficult because the letter F didn't show up in
any words for some reason. Arch Linux + Firefox Aurora.

------
Jugurtha
I agree on the content, but disagree on the form of some of the points.

Example:

Budget:

Validate leads. Yes, of course. However, I don't like that asking someone how
much they're willing to spend. Not under this form, at least.

This information is none of anyone's business than the prospect (speaking as a
prospect). However, it's an important information, so the salesman needs to
adapt to _get_ that information. He might not _ask_ for it, but needs to get
it.

Some cues on the means of the prospect can be visible, but this can be
deceiving. Bling bling people often are broke overcompensating folks.

Conversation fu can also be used indirectly to get the information, but the
prospect can be good at that and drop just the right amount of hints to convey
he can afford it..

Authority:

Speaking to the right person. Yes. However, this is done on two sides:
Convincing the pockets, using the daughter as leverage.

Asking the father "Besides yourself, who else is involved with the purchase"
isn't, in my opinion, the right form.

Because it's like asking a man "Is your wife grabbing your ___? ". A man will
never admit someone else holds the power. Those who do, the "I won't lie to
you, she's the boss.." are way beyond the point of no return, but at least,
they're at peace and you can go for it.

But with those who won't admit to that, you need to be careful not to scratch
the ego. The problem isn't the fact he has no power inspite him being the
earner, the problem is that you mustn't know. So you always make it seem it's
his decision, and won't acknowledge the fact the wife or the daughter chose.
He must feel good about the decision he -someone else- made.

With this, too, observation is key. You see a man with his daughter and wife,
and you know. You see how they interact, and you see who's a daddy girl or a
bossy wife, who's a wimp and who's dominating and who'se _domineering. These
are all subtleties one observes.

Needs: Agree. How about a Cayenne ? It's fast, it's German, it's luxurious (a
Porsche, after all) and it's got 4 doors. You drop the kids, and pick-up a
young lady a two minutes later.

Handling objections is of paramount importance (Sometimes triggering them
helps, too. I know it may sound weird, but triggering an objection on a point
early on when the objection doesn't really matter (because there's no action
tied to it at _that_ time) is useful for when you go over that point later
because the objection was already triggered earlier (or about another, less
important point)).

I haven't sold a $100M for anyone, but let's say I have a slight knack for
enabling people to do what they really want to do, but didn't find a way to.

------
notastartup
as a developer, how can I target the enterprise market, namely ERP, CRM type
of software? I wouldn't mind creating one from scratch or based on some open
source software and delivering that.

