
SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization - salesinvaders
http://salesinvaders.com
======
salesinvaders
I am a developer, several years back, a couple friends and I wrote a loyalty
app/saas. The site, allowed a restaurant/shop/bar owner setup a couple types
of deals ie "Buy X get Y Free" among others. Each restaurant had a QR code,
and when someone would purchase something, the customer would scan it and get
a "punch". The owners could track everything via the web. Due to all of us
having a 9-5, and this being our first project, we failed, because we didn't
realize beforehand that you had to hit the streets every day, and we didn't
have the capital to quit our jobs when we figured that out. The only way, to
really sell a product like this, was cold calling. Adwords, facebook, etc etc,
does not work when trying to reach a small business owner/manager. They are
too busy working, to go out randomly searching for stuff. Needless to say, we
learned a ton about selling. So, I developed Sales Invaders!. A "sales staff
as a service". Things are pretty simple right now, as I'd like to figure out
if there is a market for this. If anyone has any specific questions, feel free
to ask!

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swalsh
I think its a really great idea, my only concern is that the sales staff you
hire won't be as dedicated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable about my product
as I am. Sales is a core aspect to a company, and while it may be possible to
outsource sales in an existing company after you've established processes, a
young start up won't have that yet. Its a job the founders SHOULD be doing
because you're still trying to get a feel for the market.

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salesinvaders
I agree. If you haven't sat down with your potential customers yet, we
probably aren't for you. If you have visited 5-10 places, can list the
questions that get asked over and over, and have your pitch down, but just
don't have the resources to hire a staff, then we can help. If you aren't
_sure_ what your customers want yet (ie haven't cold-called), we do provide
the feedback relevant to a startups needs, but that is not the core offering.

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sharemywin
can you put up your email. I keep getting an undeliverable.
sales@salesinvaders.com

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rcarrigan87
This service definitely has merit and I love you guys just putting it up right
away rather than building out a full-site.

A lot of founders underestimate the importance of sales people early on.
Suster has a couple of good pieces about start-up sales people vs corporate
sales people (they are very different skill sets). My biggest concern would be
outsourcing the feedback loop that is created by those initial sales calls.
The salesperson is your window to customers and your compass to finding
product-market fit. It's so critical you often see founders taking on the
sales task first-hand. Obviously that doesn't scale and I believe that's where
you guys come in!

I would really need to see how you're providing me sales call data and
feedback. A screenshot of a dashboard, spreadsheet or something. Allotted
phone time with the sales people to discuss what they encountered in the
field. Anyway to formalize sales feedback would be of great value. Good luck!

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salesinvaders1
Ah ha! I love when someone "gets it". Which you do. The feedback, is going to
be extensive, we are still early in the process, but one thing we considered,
is taping the sales interaction, and providing it to the startup, but it may
"skew" the comments and feedback from the business owner. It's a problem that
we are going to solve, and knock out of the park though.

~~~
IdAgreeWithThat
That's a lot of commas.

On a more serious note, I think more information about the service would be
nice. My personal interest would be in enterprise sales. Is this within the
realm of possibility for you guys?

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philfreo
Our team (YCW11) did "sales as a service" as ElasticSales for 2+ years. You
can read some of our story here:

[http://elasticsales.com](http://elasticsales.com)

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kika
"ElasticSales is currently booked out for the rest of the year and therefore
not able to accept any new clients at the moment."

"Think Amazon AWS for Sales."

Have anyone ever seen a message on the aws.amazon.com website saying "Sorry,
AWS had sold all available computing resources and would not be able to buy
more servers till the end of the year"?

Don't get me wrong, I like what you did and I like close.io (and I may use it
soon), but the page you're now showing on elasticsales.com has the word
"Failed" written all over it. Well, at least that's how I see it, I might
easily be a minority (and I usually am).

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joshmlewis
For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently
have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers?
No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large
international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.

~~~
ryanbrunner
If your company has extraordinarily complex deals like that, I can't see why
you'd even consider outsourcing them to a generic sales service like this.
Being able to close those sorts of deals is going to be an essential core
competency for your company, and even if Sales Invaders was successful in
deals like these, you're essentially throwing away an opportunity to learn how
to do these sorts of deals in the future.

It's like demanding that Heroku focus on servicing billion dollar companies -
there's really no benefit in using an "easy to get started and scale"-type
service in large, complex scenarios.

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talles
How lovely, a pixel guy greeting :)

A tip: due the nature of the service, an "about us" page might help earn an
initial trust

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gregpilling
From your site: How much does it cost?

We have packages starting at $1000, depending on your needs, we can pitch up
to 100 customers in your vertical. \---------------------------

So you are going to visit 100 customers for me, for the price of $1000? This
seems to be quite low. From my experience (10 years, outside sales B2B, full
commission) a sales person can only visit about 10 locations a day if they are
actually talking and not just pitching something for 30 seconds. If you get
any traction with the customers, that will drop to 5 per day.

By my numbers you would work for 10 days for $1000 and have the traveling
expenses as well. Sounds good for me, and bad for you. I am also curious about
performance. How will I know that your sales person did cold calls? How will I
know if they are any good, or if your guy is out there damaging my companies
reputation?

We currently use manufacturer reps, about 16 of them. It is a continuous
challenge to understand the actions that they are actually taking (not what
they tell me they are taking) and hard to track direct results because many of
our products are sold through multiple tiers of distribution. These reps are
old school, with companies that have been in business for 20+ years.

I hope it works, it would be a great service to use. Feet on the street are
hard to manage. Good luck.

~~~
abcd_f
Can I ask a noob-ish question?

For the outside B2B sales you mentioned, what the compensation structure is
like? Purely commission or with a fixed part / retainer? If it's a high-tech
software sales, do you have an idea of what's the going commission rate is?

The only experience I have is with salaried sales with tiered commission, so I
just want to understand how the alternatives work.

~~~
gregpilling
I made between 5% and 15% on the sale. Sales were typically $10,000 - $50,000,
and I was selling capital equipment. I sold about 1.2M per year, at an average
of 12.5% commission (in the 90's). There was a $600 per week draw against
commissions, and health care. All the other expenses I had to cover - fuel,
vehicle, etc.

Top sellers liked the program, because they made a lot of money. Lower sellers
would complain and want to be put on salary (so they would earn more). I
preferred the full commission, but I was always #1 or #2 in sales so I earned
on the high side.

It was nice, only worked 4 days a week (Monday morning and Friday afternoon
off).

~~~
abcd_f
Thank you, this is helpful.

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kullee
First off, I want to say this is a great concept. All startups either hate
sales or need more sales, so it sounds like your business fits for both
categories. I have some experience with door-to-door sales teams and cold
calling for 2 different startups. The few comments I have are similar to other
discussions but still need to be addressed:

1) Sales Team - Who is your sales team? What is their background? When I was
on the door-to-door sales team I was working along side a lot of college
students that were not motivated. This was a huge let down to the owners who
paid for the sales team. Be upfront with your customers on who will be
contacting their potential customers. As a startup founder I do not want my
name/brand to be tainted in the industry as a company forcing outsourced sales
team to pressure my customers into buying my product (this is an extreme case
but does happen).

2) Channel - It sounds like you are cold-calling only, if this is the case
then do not include "door to door" and "feet on the street" in your title if
you are not going to be talking to potential customers in person. My
recommendation would to have packages for cold-calling and a separate package
for door-to-door sales. This may be beneficial for businesses to have the
option and would be a great upsell for SalesInvaders!

3) Customers - It sounds like you are trying to cover most small business as a
target customer. My recommendation is to specialize in one industry. This will
allow your team to get better at coming up with pitches for the same industry
while understanding your target customer. Also, your chances for getting other
clients in the industry will increase when you can tell them that you got X
amount of sales for another company in that same industry. This is a crucial
selling point, as you would know since your in the business of sales.

Good luck with the idea!

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7Figures2Commas
Local businesses, particularly restaurants, bars and nightclubs, are extremely
difficult to sell to these days, particularly in major cities like San
Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, etc.

These folks are pitched on new "apps" all the time and unless you have a
really compelling proposition, standing out from the last 10 people who walked
in trying to sell a new technology-based service is tough. In fact, one of the
first things you're likely to be asked selling to restaurants, bars and
nightclubs is the size of your audience. If you don't have a meaningful enough
number, drumming up interest is all but impossible for most.

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codva
As one of the few full-time sales people that hang out on HN...

Business to business sales (which is the usual code for high volume cold
calling jobs) is a slog. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. I've done
it, but never really liked it. I'm more of an enterprise sales guy for start
ups. Maybe the variety of different pitches every week is a selling point for
potential staff? I really don't know. I do now that you couldn't pay me enough
to do the job :)

Outsourced cold calling (phone) is a pretty major industry in the enterprise
space. It'll be interesting to see if this scales down to a feet on the street
model.

~~~
sharemywin
There's only a few markets that can cover the sales overhead of feet on the
street.

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dang
We took "Show HN" out of the title because Show HN implies something you've
made that users can play with. Things like landing pages, fundraisers, and
email signups don't meet this criterion.

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doczoidberg
In general it is a good idea but there is to little information on the
homepage. Do you also work for provision? Do you work with more technical saas
products such as CAD/CAM?

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iwaffles
Seems like a cool service, but I don't understand the quality of the sales
people. What experience do they have? What have they sold before?

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silverbax88
I think this might work for my latest startup. I have a market, automation and
a clear funnel. I'll be chatting with you guys very soon.

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santa_boy
This is a good idea and I can see why a lot of small business could have a
reason to use it. Just wondering, you may come up with lots of "what people
want" ideas as part of your discussions (not necessarily connected to your
"client"). You could perhaps try to do something out of those ideas to serve
as "leads" for others.

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cm2012
How do you do in person meetings? Are you only available in SF, or do you have
a system to train people locally anywhere?

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mrfusion
This is really cool. Maybe brand it "Sales as a service"?

Are you offering 100 customers for $1000? Or did I misread?

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MattBearman
I read it as for $1000 they will pitch to 100 potential customers. They say on
their site that they provide value if the lifetime value of your customers is
over $100, which implies they expect a success rate of at least 1/10.

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MichaelApproved
Site is down. Here's a cached version
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LtRGkef...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LtRGkefTOCIJ:salesinvaders.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

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spitfire
Cool. You mention restraunts/salons/dog groomers. Any plans to move higher up
the chain to SaaS enterprise type sales? I haven't formalized my process
enough to hand off sales to someone else, but I am champing at the bit to try
something like this once I get there.

~~~
sharemywin
I think enterprise sales would be difficult to do other than salaried employee
with commission. The sales cycle is too long.

~~~
spitfire
I think there is a sort of "enterprise light" market where this could work.
Let the outsourced staff handle most sales, and hand off to the company for
the more complex sales.

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kika
This.

I'm also looking (as in 'ready to pay') for a similar service for enterprise
IT SaaS with a very light entry level offering to boot from.

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markbnj
This model has had some success in the pharma business, but that business is
uniquely about just getting to the doctor and passing out info. I'm somewhat
skeptical of this idea in any business that requires real, motivated
salesmanship.

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mp99e99
I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding with how business works
unless you have a new angle or technology to accomplish this. Is there a
physical business that doesn't have a $100 Lifetime value per customer?

~~~
sharemywin
smart phone games.

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johnnyg
This is short on details but nothing like this exists today that I'm aware of.
I read HN for stuff like this!

I've emailed our team internally and said "this exists...how do we plug in?"

We shall see.

~~~
salesinvaders
Awesome, I'd love to see how I can help out. If I can answer any questions,
feel free to shoot them to anthony@salesinvaders.com.

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pkfrank
Is this for cold-calling, or an actual salesperson that is on the ground? It's
a little unclear.

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salesinvaders
Both. Cold-calling to me, as I am using it on the site, is contacting a
business who is not expecting it. Rather than use the phone, or email etc, we
are sending someone into the restaurant/bar/dog groomer etc for an in-person
interaction, pitching your product/service/app etc.

~~~
gk1
To add to the feedback of others, this was confusing to me as well. I saw
repeated use of "call" and "calling," and understood that to mean using the
phone, which was inconsistent with "feet on the ground."

Doesn't matter what you think it means - if it confuses everyone, just change
it.

~~~
robert_tweed
To be fair, it's actually quite correct, as in "to call on someone at their
doorstep". That usage is a bit archaic, but the terminology is pretty standard
in sales. I'd suggest rather than change it to something nonstandard, just
clarify what packages may include with a bit more copy.

~~~
bradleysmith
I second this.

It may seem archaic here, but it is standard terminology in sales to refer to
a physical stop-in as a 'call'.

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mrfusion
I have ideas for products for small businesses and I'm looking for ways to
test the waters. Is that something your service would be useful for? Or do you
think I already need something built?

By the way, I'm feeling like using your service would be "cheating" since I'm
terrified of making cold calls or showing up places myself :-(

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nsher
So, anything else to add? The 1 page site is short on details.

~~~
deathhand
The call us button shouldn't be a hard link. Not everyone has VoIP integration
yet...

