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Ask HN: What's the hardest part of doing biz dev to generate direct sales?
Would love to hear thoughts from HNers who hack AND sell.
For those who had to jump in on the sales/biz dev efforts at your startup, what are the biggest challenges you face?
Is it lead generation? Is it identifying the decision maker and figuring out how to get in front of them? Is it closing deals?
- tstegart 15y agoI find it the first two. Identifying prospects and finding who to contact. Especially when we don't yet have a mentor. I think if we had a mentor who knew the right people, how the industry works and what works, it would be invaluable. Building something was the easy part for us (well, not easy) but making a profit is the hard part.
- ahmadss 15y agoso in the case of ONP (I assume this is the business you're referring to), is the challenge for you is finding folks who'll buy ad space in your magazine? where are you currently getting leads from right now?
- tstegart 15y agoONB, yeah, the challenge is finding advertisers. The smaller companies often have no contact information, and the larger companies mostly use ad agencies. So then you have to find who is representing whom, and then additionally find a way to reach the media buyers within that agency. We haven't fully launched our effort, but we're planning on getting leads through our contacts in the advertising agency market, through our app itself (which will invite people to advertise) and through cold calling smaller companies (or cold emailing in this day and age). We're also putting together a press kit to encourage media buyers at agencies to try us out. To a car company or a major advertiser, the prices we'll be charging will be tiny compared to a tv media buy.
- debacle 15y agoTiming. You need to know when you're selling yourself, and you need to know when you're selling your product. You can't sell your product until you sell yourself; if you try to, especially in B2B and smaller markets, you might lose your sale.