
You Can Have a Sales Team and Still Do Inbound Marketing - rgrieselhuber
http://www.ginzametrics.com/blog/you-can-have-a-sales-team-and-still-do-inbound-marketing
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ScottWhigham
I don't know - there's a lot missing from this article/post. No offense but
you can't have a "sales team" if you have to read this article to determine
whether or not it's right for you. I'm not trying to be flippant so I hope my
writing isn't making this come off in a negative way. What I'm trying to
express is just how difficult it is to build a sales model from the start, and
then to execute that model. It's just not easy for a first-timer and, let's be
frank: that's who is reading this article.

Can your business support a sales team? It depends. Hell, it depends on so
many factors that I don't even know where to begin.

I started writing out examples/questions but it's just too much - there is so
much missing info that it's just not time/cost effective to write it out. As
rpwilcox says, this is business 101 and, IMO, if you are still at business 101
stage, you don't have the experience to build a sales team.

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rgrieselhuber
Hey Scott - don't worry, it didn't come across as too negative and I
appreciate your feedback. :-)

There is definitely a lot missing as my main goal was just to help people
realize that it's not an either / or thing when it comes to sales vs. inbound
marketing. Granted, this is business 101 but in the startup community, because
of the speed at which companies move, you have first time entrepreneurs
without that business 101 experience trying to move the needle in a meaningful
way in a very short time. It's because of this that answering these sorts of
fundamental questions is ideally done sooner than later.

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czbond
Absolutely agreed. The sales team is for outwardly following up and helping
get people into that top of the funnel - and educating them to pull them
further into that funnel. I wouldn't ever have a business without them.

Inbound is a great harvester of existing interest, but not 100% reliable.

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rgrieselhuber
This is something that both myself and a lot of other entrepreneurs have tried
to figure out so I thought I'd share. Comments / thoughts appreciated!

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dirtyaura
Good article, ordered Predictable Revenue immediately. I'd like to read much
more about sales in Hacker News. We hackers often forget that many Internet
giants, like Google, rely a lot on large sales teams to generate their
revenue.

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rdl
I also ordered it. From what I've read so far, it will go alongside SPIN
Selling and Crossing the Chasm as my favorite sales/marketing books.

