
All Things Sales: Mini-lessons for startup founders - dpeck
https://a16z.com/2018/09/02/sales-startups-technical-founders/
======
tsenkov
I just watched the series and posted my notes here:
[https://tsenkov.net/2018/09/03/a16z-crash-course-on-
sales](https://tsenkov.net/2018/09/03/a16z-crash-course-on-sales)

Thanks to a16z and Peter Levine for this course.

~~~
wungsten
Awesome work. I'll always take print over video.

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RobertRoberts
Usually I do to, but these videos are like 1-3 minutes, and there is vital
information and explanations of what the graphics mean that would literally
take as long to read yourself. :P

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tsenkov
I agree, but I make notes not to speed up consumption of content - just search
gets faster this way. Text search or even scrolling a few pages, is definitely
faster than FF through 40-50m of content split into 16 episodes.

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RobertRoberts
Oh sure, I agree it's useful for review, but not for initial learning. I read
through your notes before I watched the videos because I thought I could
really glean something from it, but it didn't help me at all (it was actually
confusing) until I watched the videos...

~~~
tsenkov
Thanks for the feedback. Useful stuff.

Is there any chance I can get a contact of yours? (I am always in the middle
of a project that can benefit from the constructive criticism of smart people,
so I will be happy to stay in touch)

You can use the contacts in my profile if you don't want to post yours' here.

Cheers!

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deepGem
Loved the 6th video - How, when and who of sales. I was pleasantly surprised
how the generic advice to find a corporate sales guy to lead your early stage
startup sales is so ineffective.

A similar analogy to engineering also applies I guess. One who functions well
in a corporate engineering department - with a ton of support might not do
well in an early stage startup and vice versa.

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curo
Super grateful to a16z and YC for these. I wonder as a founder doing their own
sales, if there are resources about actual tactics, how to make calls, handle
objections, etc.

These strategy videos are great. Does anyone have a recommendation on an
equivalent for the day-to-day of working a pipeline?

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jkuria
My favorite book on sales tactics is Chet Holmes, the Ultimate Sales Machine.
Here is a summary:

[https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/893/book-summary-
the-u...](https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/893/book-summary-the-ultimate-
sales-machine.html)

~~~
mindcrime
I'm a big fan of Chet Holmes and _The Ultimate Sales Machine_ as well. He did
a series of videos as part of some conference thing with Tony Robbins, and
those videos have some really good stuff in them. I'm not necessarily a huge
Tony Robbins fan per-se, but the stuff he did with Chet was solid.

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r_singh
It's awesome to a series on Sales from another top venture firm.

For anyone that's looking for similar resources. Here's another awesome series
I came across (while searching for YC resources on this topic):
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb1c0oEEXWIZiWzdtUOUh...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb1c0oEEXWIZiWzdtUOUhlirJr2fXfbxX)

It was apparently a 'Sales School' for one of the YC batches in 2014. Hadn't
heard of Steli before, his videos really give me a lot of energy. He also
reinforced my belief that founders have to be great at selling their creation
and gave me insights on what it takes to be great at sales.

~~~
fermienrico
Watching these videos made me realize how much I hate sales people. Every time
I sign up for a trial or act remotely interested in something, I get inundated
by assholes like the lecturer in these videos. Loud, aggressive and as he said
"Hustlers". I immediately don't want to use that product or service and I look
for alternatives if there are.

I feel like there is no better way to penetrate through the noise of the
internet and products/services out there that Sales has to become aggressive.
I don't think there is a solution to this? Is there?

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r_singh
It's easy to get annoyed by the aggression and the overall tone of the
speaker, this happened to me as well.

However, when I look at what he is saying objectively, he is suggesting quite
the opposite from what the tone implies. A good sales person is a great
listener, one that doesn't make you feel like the way you described. Overall,
I love the series because of what I learnt from it, on viewing it objectively.

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DeanWormer
I'm a big fan of Fog Creek's "The Most Basic Things Your Company Needs to Know
About Sales" ([https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-
co...](https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-company-
needs-to-know-about-sales.pdf)) It's roughly 25 pages about high level sales
strategies. The PDF mentions the book "How You Make the Sale" by Frank McNair
([https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-
McNair/dp/1402204...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-
McNair/dp/1402204353\)which) was a great 101 level book on sales. It's high
level so it could be applied to everything from selling cars and real estate
to software.

I found these helpful because it was less "here's 10 closing tips and tricks!"
and more about the sales process.

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lapnitnelav
Great stuff, there's always more than meet the eyes and that's true even for
sales ;)

This being said, slight nitpick on #11 and #12. Include clawbacks, especially
if you're fairly dependent on sales / more geared towards high touch deals.

This obviously goes on hand in hand with reasonable targets.

Otherwise you create an incentive for sales people to make their number in any
way they can to meet their ridiculous target / driven by the usual greed.

The hidden cost of that can potentially be huge, especially if your pool of
potential customers is -relatively- small.

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ninja10
This lessons were very informative and nicely structured. Having these type of
short, concept focused lessons are perfect for serving as introductory
material.

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Kagerjay
I think its worth mentioning that this is for mostly B2B type startups /
enterprise applications / companys that rely on VC funding, not necessarily
B2C, where sales is not technically necessary.

A good readup on B2C from a mostly 1 man successful startup is from peter
levels here. [https://makebook.io/](https://makebook.io/).

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razin
Does anyone have the syllabus for the Stanford MBA course that these videos
are based on
[http://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=STRAMGT%2B351&ac...](http://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=STRAMGT%2B351&academicYear=20182019)?

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avinium
Great stuff - like many things in the business world, fairly simple and
common-sense but it’s highly valuable to run through.

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j45
That was handy - if you are a Startup "Renaissance" sales rep interested in
turbo boosting initiation sales currently happening in the enterprise +
academic education space, please get in touch, I'd love to learn more about
you and see if I can learn from you or we can work together. :)

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braindead_in
Great series. It mentioned salesforce.com a couple of times. Any other tools
that we can use?

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r_singh
[https://close.io/](https://close.io/) (YC W11)

Close is much simpler and BS free than Salesforce. Most sales teams I know
dislike using salesforce as it is almost always configured to be more
complicated than necessary.

~~~
gk1
If you’re hoping to become a >100-person company I would recommend against
Close.io. The reality is that Salesforce is what is what everyone is familiar
with, and sooner or later you’ll be glad it’s as extensible as it is.

I’ve worked with two startups that started with Close.io and pretty much
outgrew it by the time they had 3 salespeople. It’s made for very small and
simple sales operations.

I ended up migrating them to Salesforce. The migration is a mess because of
Close.io’s unconventional way of handling account and lead records, which is
unlike any other CMS.

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zeroxfe
These are fantastic. Anyone know of similar resources for marketing or
customer acquisition?

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aidos
I haven't had the chance to watch the videos yet (though I will) but I'm
curious about the compensation aspect.

Why is it that sales teams are often paid via some sort of commission
structure?

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r_singh
There's many reasons for this, one that's simpler to explain is relative
performance.

If sales person A is working a lot harder/smarter/adaptive to get more clients
that sales person B. It may lower his morale to see B get the same
compensation as him. This affects sales people more than other functions
because the output of a sales person is more or less quantified by the revenue
they are responsible for generating (exact metric would be different of
course).

~~~
undreren
As always, you get exactly what you are measuring.

I've experienced sales people who oversold more or less everything. They
weren't measured on whether or not what they sold could be delivered.

Instead, product teams had to run around as if they were on fire, because
suddenly the CEO got involved and made it a "company wide priority".

I hate KPI's / commission structures, and I have never seen it working. Not
where the work required more than half a brain cell.

I guess my great hatred for KPI's is that they are often vanity metrics. What
you want to measure is net contribution to the bottom line, and that is near
well impossible. So we end up measuring what we _can_ , and Goodheart's law
[0] being what it is, get absolutely no value out of it

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

Bonus info: I've had work, where I did not have KPI's, but where I could
destroy the KPI's for other teams, and sometimes involuntarily did.

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taherchhabra
Are all these things applicable before finding the product market fit ?

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r_singh
Haven't gone through the series yet so I can't confirm whether the things
discussed are applicable or not.

However, I can confidently say that founder driven sales efforts are important
even before 'finding' the product market fit and will most likely even help a
startup reach product market fit.

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jgh
Wow this looks great, time to dig in!

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computator
Command to download all 16 videos for offline viewing into a separate
directory indexed by video order:

youtube-dl -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s'
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4u6XbiXf5rtyzi7g-5O...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4u6XbiXf5rtyzi7g-5ObKubmZFiTIlD)

On Windows, the single quotes might need to be double quotes. The above uses
youtube-dl (YouTube downloader) which is a multi-platform public-domain Python
program available here: [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/).

~~~
kalehrishi
This is neat!

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anoncoward111
You know we've reached Peak Valley when VCs are advising to spend more time
selling than iterating.

Outbound sales is short-term begging for money, period.

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everythingswan
I watched a few of these videos and I didn't hear outbound mentioned once. Did
he cover this in a video? I may have missed it since I skipped around.

I was watching/listening to it from the perspective that the company is
generating inbound leads from a marketing team/channel.

~~~
anoncoward111
I read a similar post from Peter Levine earlie this week too. And in this of
videos, I think it is a bit more inbound focused.

However, I will say. The moment you start hiring sales reps and marketing
reps, here is what starts to happen:

1) Any leads generated from Youtube or inbound email inquiries or etc are
treated as "golden leads" and are typically given to the most politically
connected reps

2) These inbound leads happen so infrequently that reps often just sit around
waiting with "nothing to do"

3) So then marketing starts thinking about outbound massive email blasts to
send out

4) and sales reps start thinking about outbound cold calling campaigns to
"follow up on the email we sent you"

5) anddd now you've got 500k of payroll per year engaged in the least
productive, most intrustive form of prospecting in the world

6) when you should probably just focus that on making your product and youtube
presence so wicked that people bang down your door to buy

