you can consider the typical “coin operated” sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.
The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:
The “coin operated idiots” mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It’s why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.
But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you “slot onto” your organization when you need to...
Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.
To touch upon and dive deeper into your comment about how the author lacks expertise when selling into enterprise accounts. In enterprise I've found that most of the time when prospecting the equation for selling is 95% TRUST & 5% VALUE. Enterprise customers have a lot to lose if your offering goes south on them, so they need to trust their vendors.
That said it takes time to build trust. You can establish it over time by building authority and offering social proof in any industry.
Going direct to customers is a good way to start revenue but it's tough to scale. HP sells 80% of its revenue through partners. Instead of going direct to customers you should build a channel sales program and build up partner relationships.
Partners you work with should have clients already, clients you want. Clients that trust these partners because they do a good job.
That's how you get into enterprise quickly and scale.
I have built and sold five companies in the last 7 years. I was CIO at a $50M/year sales organization by age 24, now I am going to be taking over 170 (as of writing this) startups through a probono training on how to do sales for enterprise. I'd like to extend an invite to everyone on here if anyone is interested in joining our session. No cost to anyone for as long as I enjoy hosting it. It's going to be hosted over a webinar on May 26th. Email me hn (at) strapr (dot) com to get on the list.
Historically there was a school of thought in business where sales is everything and every other role is interchangeable and secondary. It's still very common on the east coast. All you need is a couple extroverted dominant personalities and everything else will just take care of itself.
It doesn't work very well, and it tends to result in a very toxic culture. You get a restaurant that's packed on opening day but the food sucks, or there's no food and the sales guys run across the street to McDonald's in desperation and try to pass it off as high cuisine. Then they blame everyone else.
Now that tech types often found and run companies I think we have an opposing and probably retaliatory mindset emerging. Now all you need is a few super genius engineers and the rest... well...
Unfortunately this doesn't work well either and also tends to result in a toxic culture. You get a restaurant with five star food and a lot of empty seats. Everyone else tends to get blamed here too.
In a healthy company you have a culture that respects the need for a wide variety of skills.
I think a more accurate thing to say would be that California seems like the only place you find anything other than the Dale Carnegie school of business... at least to any significant degree. You do find that in California too, but that's not all there is.
I do a lot of sales now, and I've watched a lot of enterprise salespeople do their work.
As in any other human endeavor, some of them are phenomenal. I routinely sat in on one friend's sales meetings and calls. After being raised watching Gil, the hapless salesman from the Simpsons, this was like watching Billy Joel play the piano or Roger Federer play tennis. It was obvious he was a master craftsman. He was so expert at getting people to act in their own best interest, while making it look pleasant and effortless, it was - seriously - beautiful to watch.
Other salespeople... not so much. I've seen them too. They don't have the intellectual horsepower, they don't prepare, they... I mean, frankly there are a million reasons they're mediocre. Their mediocrity is overdetermined.
I think that's all the author meant by coin-operated salesperson or "script kiddie" salesperson: a mediocre one.
“coin operated” sales person at a mature company ... more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.
It's sometimes unfairly used as a slur on the whole profession. Here he seems to be talking about that class of poorer salespeople who need to be told exactly what to do, given precise scripts, can't leap hurdles themselves, etc.
Yeah when I read that I realized why a lot of these startups are kicking incumbent ass. They focus on value. Who needs trust when you can contractually obligate something?
interestingly, as an IT person, I'd say the same thing for dev's when talking to sales : put a dev, in the leadership, a dev. is a bullshit meter for the sales, etc.
> Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.
I've also seen the opposite even more - bringing in (average or lower) salespeople usually adds to the bullshit.
Long term, your customer still doesn't give a shit that your product is built on a bleeding edge javascript framework (except if it has more bugs as a result). And salespeople are perfectly capable of grasping "if we don't fix this technical debt, it'll be really difficult to do anything very much with the product in future". They're just immune to "look, open source, new architecture, shiny!"
The salesperson is the one that says "you're not going replace horses with automobiles, unless they're faster or more reliable than a horse".
As well as the one that says "don't make a faster aeroplane, make one with lower fuel burn instead"
Building on a bleeding-edge JS framework for the sake of bleeding-edge is poor practise. If there is some advantage to using that framework, though, the customer may well care. What development monkeys, attracted to whatever shiny thing comes along, are you describing?
You're not gonna get much enthusiasm here for negative dev stereotypes, especially if you're gonna cast sales as noble protectors of the business in contrast. Many devs (especially in "enterprise") are quite conservative. In fact, I've seen sales/management sometimes care more about the latest buzzword shiny than development.
> salespeople are perfectly capable of grasping
Doesn't mean they'll care, especially if they'll be out, commission in hand, by the time the debt hits.
> The salesperson is the one that says "you're not going replace horses with automobiles, unless they're faster or more reliable than a horse".
I'm not sure cars were either of these.
And the point is, how do sales know what the customer wants, if the customer doesn't know what they want?
Great article, Ryan. You characterize large enterprise sales as being on the order of "$1M+ deals"[1]. This seems a bit high for a startup with a newish product, but it's certainly achievable.
Do you have any insights into how startups can achieve $1M+ in annual contract value (ACV)? What differentiates their product and pricing strategy from a startup that sells software for say $100K a year?
The product(s) are mostly differentiated by the enterprise salesperson being able to convince the company they will generate a much larger multiple of $1M in revenue or cost savings for the enterprise, and from being able to convince them that any competitive alternative in the 100K price bracket won't yield comparable results.
The ways that can work are quite varied: it could be very expensive software that's necessary to control a certain business process, or a standard app that is going to make small (but by an enterprise salesperson, quantifiable) improvements to the productivity of 40,000 staff, or something that's sold with metered usage that the enterprise wants to use a lot.
But ultimately to sell at that scale you're almost certainly using "value based pricing" where you start by trying to identify how much the enterprise customer will make/save from your product compared with their next best option, and negotiate down from there.
> Usually the more complex the system, the more satisfaction the hacker feels when he or she pwns it.
Equating "selling" to "pwning" is not a good way to think about any kind of sales. Talking about "hacking" a customer suggests that they are somehow inferior and that the goal is to somehow beat or triumph over them, to trick them or exploit a vulnerability. No company should think of their potential customers in that way.
In fact, you should guard for the opposite; I've seen plenty of clients trying to "hack" their software providers by exploiting unclear contract clauses, minor slip-ups, communication problems, etc. A decent sale might turn into loss if you're not careful.
One more important thing you need to know about the enterprise you're selling into: what spending approval levels does the champion and his/her management chain have? Often they'll have discretion over anything under 10K, and will have to seek higher approval for larger sums. This is one of the factors that has driven SaaS monthly charges as opposed to traditional perpetual licenses with six or seven figure tags.
Pretty good write up. The author glosses over the finance part at their own peril. I'm noticing enterprises with longer and longer payment terms.. As in they mandate their vendors provide net-90, which seems insane to me. It used to be net-60, and even that seemed odd. So be prepared to be flexible to close that sale.
Once they have made their mind up you can usually push back on that. The purchasing department has been told to buy and if you have been selected as the preferred solution where else are they going to go?
I'm pretty sure this is about controlling quarterly results for public companies. They play around with numbers a lot to make estimates. They can push payables out to the next quarter with net 90.
The point about finance is interesting and probably the one I thought about the least. I think I'll think about it like NFL contracts in the future (front or back loading contracts might be good for their "salary cap" aka budget).
Brilliant article. Agree to every bit. This is kind of enterprise sales 101 of point solutions. However if you talk about infratstructure solutions (say mBaaS, etc) - things Become far more complex as many a times you may not have any business end point as your champion.
you can consider the typical “coin operated” sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.
The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:
The “coin operated idiots” mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It’s why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.
But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you “slot onto” your organization when you need to...
Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.
[1] http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-...