
Bullets to Dodge When Scaling Your Sales - relaunched
http://firstround.com/article/Looking-to-Scale-Your-Sales-Seven-Bullets-to-Dodge
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Terr_
I can't remember the company-name, but wasn't there a story about how their
sales/marketing folks hyped the improvements in upcoming Product 2.0 so much
that all their long-term-focused customers decided to skip buying Product 1.0,
and they went out of business?

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baudehlo
Yes, Osborne Computers:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)

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PeterWhittaker
The "hire a sales architect instead of a sales builder" point may be the best
one in there: A good sales architect will so do things that several (all?) of
the other points are subsumed in their work.

This [1] article from Harvard Business Review provides an excellent overview
of the different types of sales staff needed at different stages. Too many
companies go for "coin operated sales" too soon, instead of getting "agents"
who will work with product management to develop and refine the sales process.

[1] [https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-
curve](https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-curve)

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lanstein
If anyone has questions about building a sales team, I'm happy to discuss over
coffee if you're in SF. I was the first sales hire at PagerDuty. Email is in
profile.

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relaunched
That's a really great offer. I'm no longer in the bay area, but make it back a
few times a year. I'll be sure to reach out when I'm around.

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notahacker
The first two suggestions are very easy to argue against:

(1) Focusing on more than one segment costs a lot less than focusing on the
_wrong_ segment. Especially when you're relying on anecdata to support your
hunch that Customer Group X will actually be the easiest to sell to. It also
means that even if your hunch that big enterprises are the companies that most
desperately need your service is completely correct, the length of their sales
cycle can still kill your startup stone dead. If they're not thrusting
extremely divergent development and marketing-spend requirements on you, a
diverse pipeline and customer base is a good thing.

(2) A good "builder" is much easier to identify than the more elusive
"architect" and will get your company revenue positive faster. Better CRM
practices might salvage a handful of sales and fraction of your renewal rate
in the long run, but they don't drive growth. And if your salespeople can't
devise, adapt and share their own "scripts" your "architect" is wasting your
money by hiring bad salespeople. Plus the salesperson that stresses their
ability to make you five sales a week is _much_ easier to hire and fire than
the enigmatic architect with their flair for bike shedding, premature
optimisation and effortless grasp of _which stats prove the success of their
process and which prove the failings of individual salespeople_. Plus the
builder, if they're still landing and collaborating on big deals, probably
won't mind having to report figures into a newly created SVP Sales Ops at some
stage. Before then, a software startup probably has plenty of analytical and
process-automation skill on the rest of their team...

I'll throw in a couple of others though

(i) Don't hire salespeople and especially sales leaders specialising in the
wrong type of market. Some companies succeed by soaking the market with sheer
volume of calls. Some succeed through impressing the customer with
sophisticated insight (even if the product itself is quite simple the sale can
be highly conceptual and vice versa). Some depend on knowing how and when to
pitch against the competition, and being very aggressive (up or down,
depending on situation) on pricing. A small sales team can't specialise in all
three, and a sales leader focusing on one in optimizing for one will, for
better or worse, tend to drive salespeople specialising in the others away.

(ii) Don't assume it's of sufficiently low importance to be left to interns to
do it (unless "sales" means handing out flyers, or sales admin). Fresh
graduates with the focus and drive to actually succeed in sales will be
willing and able to find jobs that pay real money. There are a lot of entry-
level positions out there for them and your no-name startup is an obstacle
rather than a stepping stone to getting them. You want the primary point of
contact with prospective customers and main revenue driver to be someone
that's good enough to deserve more than lunch money (or if you're pre-funding,
at least capable of negotiating themselves an extremely large chunk of
commission and/or a founder-level equity). Even if most of your sales are
driven by inbound marketing: you wouldn't let a developer of well-below-
average ability commit straight to your production server; don't give the
bottom percentile of entry level salespeople commit privileges to your
customer base

