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by McCann, Erin Does sales management really come down to pushing back on excuses? Several founders have asked me this question in response to Mark Suster’s sales management advice . As a former tech sales executive, I agree with many of his lessons -- when applied to later-stage, post-traction point startups [1]. However, I advocate a more nuanced approach for early-stage startup teams, and suggest the following exceptions when managing your earliest sales hires. Feedback isn’t always an excuse Early sales hires understand your clients best. While product managers often obtain direct client feedback [2], your salespeople touch far more accounts at a higher frequency, and thus frequently receive the most candid feedback. While I support Suster’s claim that clients don’t buy features, they can provide valuable information, as we saw with RentJuice’s pricing model [3]. I’m not suggesting accepting justification for missing targets – just disaggregate the feedback from the sale. Salesp...

by Rosemary Kendrick & Aleem Mawani It’s been, well, a very rewarding semester working on Rewardly.  As we reflect on the main tools we employed this semester—merchant interviews, business model generation, generating mockups, and developing a prototype—we have a few takeaways we’d like to share. First off, when it comes to interviewing local businesses , be prepared to throw enough darts .  Local business managers are tough to pin down with understandably ever-shifting schedules, so we found ourselves juggling a bunch of cancellations and rescheduling.  It’s helpful to remember that the customer discovery process is a sales process: you start with a lot of cold leads, eventually secure enough interviews, and then ultimately score a few letters of intent.  A corollary to the throw-enough-darts mantra is the realization that you don’t know what you don’t know.   It’s hard to predict which local businesses will be the most helpful to talk to, and it’s e...

by Iris Guerra and Lorin Pace We’d all love to employ a salesman who could sell ice to Eskimos, but unless Steve Jobs starts offering a webinar called “Jedi Mind Tricks: How to distort reality until the payment clears,” I doubt most of us will ever have this luxury. In the meantime, here are some of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned in developing a sales pitch for early adopters: Make sure you are speaking the same language as the customer. It varies more than you might expect. With early adopters, the lines are blurred between the sales pitch, customer discovery interviews, and usability testing. If you take a siloed perspective to these tasks, you will miss out on key insights and sales opportunities. In established companies, time to devote to a trial is the greatest hurdle. In newer companies, the budget is the greatest hurdle. Providing a free trial and eventually upselling to a paid service is one way to address these challenges. Also, service expectations are much lower s...

by Brett Gibson  “This is the most useful class at Harvard Business School.” As I sat back during David Skok’s remarks during #hbsltv, I turned to my neighbor and said, “this is the most useful class at Harvard Business School.”  Skok laid out a helpful description of the customer acquisition process and outlined each step of the sales funnel.  He shared tips on measuring and testing marketing strategies and driving the effectiveness of sales.  He gave us practical advice and recommendations for useful websites (Hubspot, Sysomos and Posterous) and shared best practices for bridging the relationship between marketing and sales teams.  What stood out most to me was his conviction that to win a customer, you need to know what the customer wants, and more importantly, break through their “concern barrier.” “You want your customers to do something they didn’t think they wanted to do.” As humans, we resist “being sold”.  We like to feel in charge, act on our ow...

by Private It can be dangerous to take an overly simple view of salespeople. The simple view goes something like this: All sales people are coin operated, put the right number of coins in and push the appropriate buttons, and soon you'll have what you want come out the other end.  When extended to the decision of whether or not to bring on a salesperson, this view oftentimes results in a focus primarily on whether the company has enough coins to hire a salesperson, with cursory thought given to the type of salesperson being hired.  As obvious as it may sound, hiring someone experienced in selling a product with a similar sales cycle as your product is key. There are two broad types of salespeople, hunters, who seek the quick catch, and, farmers, who have the aptitude and patience to nurture a raw seed over time.  Hiring a hunter to do a farmer's job has the potential to not only frustrate the salesperson seeking a quick hit but to alienate customers seeking a consultativ...