Coudln't agree more. Some comments as a biz dev guy (and very ordinary coder): 1. Don't feel you need to hire a sales gun with a network. A sales person with

Coudln't agree more. Some comments as a biz dev guy (and very ordinary coder): 1. Don't feel you need to hire a sales gun with a network. A sales person with an awesome attitude and belief in your product is quite sufficient. I sell to mid-market companies (100-500 employees), that is a pretty huge segment of the AU market and I expect is the same in many other countries. It's literally impossible to expect to hire salespeople who have great connections across such a broad space. The best you will find is they can line up a few "first meetings" in one vertical. Maybe good connections at 1 company, maybe 5, but realistically 15+? Forget it. Any salesperson who tells you differently is talking themselves up more than they should. The job is about cold calling, running events, lots of demo's and lots and lots of discovery, to find real solutions that work for rational business buyers who won't sign off on something until they see its benefits. 2. Have a look at some of the faster growing software firms. They are moving up to enterprise, but often started in SME and the mid market. Start in the middle rungs and you'll find a big hole - comments on some of these threads seems to suggest the decision is binary - either small SME's or large enterprises. The gap in the middle area is huge. You can also generally skip the complications big consultancies bring with them too, most customers budgets and corresponding demands are too small for them to get interested in. 3. B2B buyers care more about fixing their problem than the underlying technology. IT buyers always prefer to find a "platform", and take bite size chunks out of the real business problems in a phase 1,2,3,x over months/years. I know big companies using Mailchimp, because it was initially purchased with a credit card by a marketer. A good demo targeted to meet the customers needs (which you have explored previously) gets you much further than trying to build the perfect solution for IT (unless you are Oracle, SAP, salesforce etc). 4. If you're selling SaaS, it's not about a shiny demo with no product substance underneath. Perhaps if you're asking for $50 per month you can get away with it, but after a month or two you'll lose your renewal. If you're asking for $10k per month at least one person's job will be on the line internally, they will do their research to make sure there is substance to your claims. Same goes for $1k in a smaller business, it is all relative, especially in this post-GFC age. One final comment. Sales people aren't expensive if you structure their plans right. Their bases should be low, their bonuses should be high. Make it so if they sell $1M they earn about $250k, you can get away with a sub 100k base. Sales people are expensive if you pay high bases to unmotivated, un-passionate people who are just good talkers. Knowing this, either make a call that you will build a successful business without salespeople (aka Mailchimp, Atlassian), or ensure your value proposition and price points are tested enough to support a full timer. Elastic which might work as a nice "middle" option as well (I'm not affiliated). https://elasticsales.com/ https://elasticsales.com/