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"The true purpose of sales is to create new value for customers." Yes. If you're just parroting talking points, you can be replaced by a website. Plus, it's mo

"The true purpose of sales is to create new value for customers." Yes. If you're just parroting talking points, you can be replaced by a website. Plus, it's more fun to really help people. "your biggest competition isn’t just other startups, perpetually licensed on-premise packages, homegrown solutions, or incumbent vendors. It’s inertia. Enterprise/SaaS salespeople find themselves in a constant battle against the target company’s urge to do nothing." Yes, again. This isn't just a sales problem-- this is a human nature problem. It's just that selling to big companies involves lots of humans, almost all of whom are deeply resistant to change.

jusben1369 12y ago
"Do nothing" understates the challenge here. Every change introduces risk and costs. The process today might be less than optimal but changing it will require hard and soft investment costs and take time and comes at an opportunity cost of doing something else. 1 in 4 projects runs terribly over budget/time etc. So the urge to do nothing is actually "The barrier to implementing change is much higher than simply "hey once implemented this will save you x per year or generate Y per year" How tangible and achievable and risky are those goals. A good rule of thumb is that as a sales person you want to feel like there is a 4x minimum change vs the cost of your solution. So if your solution is $250,000 a year as a SaaS offering you want the company to believe it will save or generate $1 million a year. Anything under 3x and they'll probably punt because of the risks and opportunity cost of all things change.
- reubenswartz 12y ago
  These are good points. The game theory in enterprise sales is pretty perverse. Buyers want to guard against risk (including lying sales people), so they create more hoops for the vendors to jump through, which increases the cost of sales and makes the project more expensive, which drives the creation of more hoops... I've seen RFP processes from both sides where buyers asked hundreds of questions, vendors responded "optimistically", because that was the only way to get into the next round, and most of the energy on both sides was spent dealing with the buying process instead of the actual problem.

jusben1369 12y ago

"Do nothing" understates the challenge here. Every change introduces risk and costs. The process today might be less than optimal but changing it will require hard and soft investment costs and take time and comes at an opportunity cost of doing something else. 1 in 4 projects runs terribly over budget/time etc. So the urge to do nothing is actually "The barrier to implementing change is much higher than simply "hey once implemented this will save you x per year or generate Y per year" How tangible and achievable and risky are those goals. A good rule of thumb is that as a sales person you want to feel like there is a 4x minimum change vs the cost of your solution. So if your solution is $250,000 a year as a SaaS offering you want the company to believe it will save or generate $1 million a year. Anything under 3x and they'll probably punt because of the risks and opportunity cost of all things change.

reubenswartz 12y ago
These are good points. The game theory in enterprise sales is pretty perverse. Buyers want to guard against risk (including lying sales people), so they create more hoops for the vendors to jump through, which increases the cost of sales and makes the project more expensive, which drives the creation of more hoops... I've seen RFP processes from both sides where buyers asked hundreds of questions, vendors responded "optimistically", because that was the only way to get into the next round, and most of the energy on both sides was spent dealing with the buying process instead of the actual problem.