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While this is broadly true, how you sell also depends on the buying persona you are selling to. If you are selling to IT you absolutely need to have a deep relationship. IT people are generally risk-averse and hence relationships matter a lot. On the other hand, if you are selling to some business units like marketing, you can actually pull off a sale by just marketing (not surprising) to them. A lot of marketing folks are young, have budgets and are used to buying things online with CC. And if you are lucky, they might be owning the website and can get things deployed without ever talking to IT. This is the exercise you need to do. Understand your buyer persona very well. Accordingly, you need to decide to invest in hiring a traditional enterprise sales guy (high touch wine-dine selling) vs a marketing-driven sales process (emails, ads, inside-sales calling etc)



Interesting, this is also my experience. I would add that in addition to marketing teams what also worked for us is selling directly to innovation/digital teams, or even core business ones, because like you said young folks are used to buy SaaS online. The key is bypassing IT, because as soon as it goes through them you are in for that big sale process greatly described by the GP post.




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