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It’s a very unfamiliar world for sure. All of a sudden, you find yourself having to have discussions with financial people and management people who have no dir
by ttul 6y ago
It’s a very unfamiliar world for sure. All of a sudden, you find yourself having to have discussions with financial people and management people who have no direct personal interest in your product. You then have to figure out what its indirect value proposition is to them.
- thrav 6y agoIf you own any amount of Salesforce licenses, you can request a Salesforce Innovation Center (SIC) meeting, and ask them to teach you how they do it. They won’t hesitate to pull in a VP who has been doing it for a decade and they’ll open the kimono and tell you everything you could possibly want to know about their approach. You have to sit through some pitches for this access, and it will include lots of talk about how Salesforce helps, but there is a ton of value in the exercise. The exercise itself is its own lesson in enterprise selling.
- icebergwarrior 6y agoI would not recommend this. This will not help a founder with 2-5m in revenue and a team of 20-40 sell. This will be a waste of time. If you want mentorship and you are a founder, I would directly message early VP's of sales and ask for help. Also, read the great Saastr blog by Jason Lemkin.
- wikibob 6y agoPlease don’t use that colloquialism. It is vulgar and offensive. If you mean “show the inner workings” then just say that.
- gumby 6y agoI would take a class like the Dale Carnegie sales class. Really excellent fr enterprise sales, but when I took it the students included two guys opening a T shirt stand on Cape Cod (sales cycle less than 2 minutes) and a saleswoman from KLA-Tencor (sales cycle between 18 and 36 months), a salesperson for ADT, etc. One of the most useful courses I've ever taken. And for enterprise sales there's a whole vocabulary and model to learn: your coach, understanding who has the signoff, when you're talking to someone who will waste your time -- and when someone who seems insignificant but is actually the decision maker, how to structure the deals. And how to hire, manage, and incent (mostly but not exclusively financially) them.