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I think this is a bit roundabout but mostly true. Here's what I see and the right conclusion, in my experience / my humble opinion. trend: startup founders wh

I think this is a bit roundabout but mostly true. Here's what I see and the right conclusion, in my experience / my humble opinion. trend: startup founders who have never done sales want to hire a sales expert problem: there is no sales script, the product is too infant to sell for a seasoned sales person. the sales person doesn't know what they can and can't promise to dictate the roadmap and vision of the company as a whole. solution: as painful as it is, founders need to do all the selling until the product is mature enough and there is a repeatable sales process that doesn't require a crazy amount of dev work for each new customer

mountaineer22 10y ago
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds like there really was no MVP that solved the pain point of multiple potential customers (that the startup has identified)?
- kristianc 10y ago
  For any sale of a reasonable size, it will go beyond (or not even involve) selling to the end user of the potential customer, but selling into enterprise stakeholders at various levels. Each of these needs their own messaging crafted for them, and these messages will need to be aligned with the product roadmap. Important to align with the product roadmap as particularly if the sales cycle is long, companies will typically sell ahead of what the product is currently capable of, with the intention of the product being able to do that by the time the deal is completed.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  We sell a business management SaaS that aims to cover 80% of business operations in a niche space. After building a MVP with a handful of businesses and people with industry experience we learned through the sales process that there was a vast amount of differences between each individual business. We (the founders) had to be the initial salespeople to gain knowledge from several hundred businesses to identify the commonalities and weed out the crazies and formulate a dev plan on how to cover these differences. I guess my point is that you don't know what you don't know until you do something. Having this knowledge funnel down through a non technical salesperson would have been detrimental. It gets better! 18 months in and we are successful with having a dedicated salesperson with limited product knowledge backed by a technical onboarding team.

mountaineer22 10y ago

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds like there really was no MVP that solved the pain point of multiple potential customers (that the startup has identified)?

kristianc 10y ago
For any sale of a reasonable size, it will go beyond (or not even involve) selling to the end user of the potential customer, but selling into enterprise stakeholders at various levels. Each of these needs their own messaging crafted for them, and these messages will need to be aligned with the product roadmap. Important to align with the product roadmap as particularly if the sales cycle is long, companies will typically sell ahead of what the product is currently capable of, with the intention of the product being able to do that by the time the deal is completed.
leesalminen 10y ago
We sell a business management SaaS that aims to cover 80% of business operations in a niche space. After building a MVP with a handful of businesses and people with industry experience we learned through the sales process that there was a vast amount of differences between each individual business. We (the founders) had to be the initial salespeople to gain knowledge from several hundred businesses to identify the commonalities and weed out the crazies and formulate a dev plan on how to cover these differences. I guess my point is that you don't know what you don't know until you do something. Having this knowledge funnel down through a non technical salesperson would have been detrimental. It gets better! 18 months in and we are successful with having a dedicated salesperson with limited product knowledge backed by a technical onboarding team.