Where do you get your advice about Sales?
I listen to fair, friendly, progressive, people that have sold a lot.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is an investment advisor group that is all that... while raising $15 billion with an extraordinary eye for winners like Skype, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and current hot riser Clubhouse.
One not-so-secret to their success? They invite Sales to every meeting... since Sales is closest to the client, competitors, and the market shifts to sell with.
You can call this practical strategy... OR ... a holistic culture of management across the necessary diversity of the village (because it takes one to raise anything well).
THE LESSON - respect, support, leverage, and hire Sales for the right reasons.
1)
The biggest mistake people make is they’ll try to use their own logical way of thinking, and the way they are constructed, in analyzing how this salesperson thinks. And then there’s a clash of cultures. And then usually they arrive at, I don’t think that was truthful, what he said here, or this thing that he said didn’t logically follow from the other statement, and so on. I don’t think we should hire this person. I’m a no.
So, then they pass on all these people, and then they say, you know, I finally found the salesperson that’s really awesome. And then it’s an engineer type, who’s like them, super cerebral, maybe even introverted. But guess what, they’ll probably suck at sales. Because you basically hired yourself in a role where you actually need a different culture to succeed.
2)
I find with engineers trying to hire salespeople is, if you ask an engineer a question, the engineer will always ask himself, “okay, what’s the answer?” Salespeople never do that. “Why are you asking this?” That’s what they want to know. And they’re kind of suspicious by nature, if they’re good. You roll an engineer into an account, and they say, “Hey, do you have this feature?” And the engineer will go, yes or no. But the sales guy will go, “Why is he asking me about that feature? Which competitors have that feature? I need to know that before I say anything.”
3)
you have to learn to manage diversity. And there are different kinds of diversity. And probably in an enterprise software company, the sales person is going to be the first person who gets hired coming from a really different way…
Watch short videos for startup founders (and anyone going to market with new products and services) ... here are two screenshots:
Gotta Love Those That Love Sales.
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