

Why Our Entire Team, Even Devs, Do Inside Sales - Brian_Curliss
http://blog.slidefox.com/why-our-entire-team-even-devs-do-inside-sales/

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na85
As someone who receives cold calls, I'm compelled to ask: how do you sleep at
night?

~~~
Brian_Curliss
(1) Our cold calls aren't completely cold. We dig/farm for people or
businesses we honestly believe we can help! It's not too hard to find someone
losing out on links or driving traffic away from their site who we can help.

(2) Each call is a learning experience (ref: lean startup?). We are not
pressing for sales (as you may infer from our pipeline at the bottom of the
article), but looking for their pain... setting up a demo (hopefully)... then
selling if there is a GOLDEN fit.

(3) On a avg size bed with the A/C on 68F ;)

~~~
na85
Ha ha ha, I was in sales for a while. I hated every second of it. I
legitimately felt like a bad person.

All that doublespeak about "honestly believing you can help" and "finding the
prospect's pains" is just so much trash.

At the end of the day, you're wasting other peoples' time by calling them up
and trying to shove your products down their throats.

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codva
How many people are doing this at once? Farming 100 leads by identifying
possible companies and finding a good contact is about 10 hours of work for
one person in my experience, if you are not working off of some sort of
minimally qualified list. Do you have 3+ people cranking on it? Also, getting
23 answers out of a 100 calls sounds like a pipe dream unless you are calling
very low into your target organizations. At a Director / VP Marketing level
you'll be doing good to get 10 conversations in 100 calls.

~~~
Brian_Curliss
How many people are doing this at once?

• We have a three person team.

Farming 100 leads by identifying possible companies and finding a good contact
is about 10 hours of work for one person in my experience, if you are not
working off of some sort of minimally qualified list.

• Yep! We are working off an _extensive_ minimally qualified list.

Do you have 3+ people cranking on it?

• Correct again :)

Also, getting 23 answers out of a 100 calls sounds like a pipe dream unless
you are calling very low into your target organizations. At a Director / VP
Marketing level you'll be doing good to get 10 conversations in 100 calls.

• We haven't hit the hundred mark yet (as we just started this), but that
looks like the number we are expecting. Maybe this is the "luck" part of
startups? Over time, I see your point and it will make sense that the number
evens out to a lower #

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jrochkind1
I'm not a business person, what does "inside sales" mean, the "inside" part?

But I can say as someone with some decision-making input into purchases for an
'enterprise', I _love_ it when I get to talk to an actual dev/engineer. The
less I have to talk to a non-engineer salesperson, and the more I get to talk
to an engineer, in fact the more likely you are to make a sale to me (assuming
your product is actually good).

~~~
Brian_Curliss
Basically, (human) individuals who sell by phone and normally do not leave the
office..

------
tvtime15
Early devs to a startup should always be ready and able to sell. It's not just
enough to hire a dev expert in their discipline, but rather all early startup
employees need to be well rounded enough to help in the sales process. All
things being equal, dev that can sell > dev that can't sell. Startups fail
most often from market risk vs technical risk. The early sales process is a
key component to finding product-market fit.

