Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

This is a clash of cultures: hacker culture and sales culture. patio11 has it exactly right.

The next time you find yourself in the situation of wanting a quick number, try it this way and you might get better results. When you make contact with the sales organization, communicate:

1. You have no idea what these things really cost.

2. You need just a non-binding, ballpark budgetary figure to the nearest $10K (or nearest $1K, or nearest $100) to find out if you can put it up for the budget.

3. You are not the purchasing decision maker, but do have influence (see below for variations).

4. A general idea of scope: how many users, seats, whether you are a DIY shop or you want to retain professional services for those things that need to be deployed, or whatever else you think will help the sales rep give you a rough sizing.

The vast majority of participants at HN do not have budgetary signing authority in the $50K+ USD range for a single purchase, and are not familiar with how the sales process works at this level. Indeed, many simply have no purchasing authority whatsoever, but do have influence ("my boss generally buys whatever I tell him to buy"). No offense, but the sales people don't want to really deal with you; they want to work with the people who can make a purchase decision. If you really do have purchasing authority, spell it out ("I can sign for the purchase", or "I sign for departmental purchases but it has to be approved by my division manager if it is above $X thousand", etc.).

Please don't lie about it if you don't have purchasing decision making power. In these days of ever-improving CRM systems, that simply hurts your co-workers when/if they contact the vendor again. The sales teams everywhere are getting increasingly better at remembering (with the help of CRM) companies who pull this stunt, and some are even remembering who told them; they might not drag their feet helping you, but you can be damn sure they're not going to bust their nuts digging through announcement lists and databases to find promotions or push special consideration to give you the best discount possible.

It sounded like Patrick's point was that vendors who force you onto the phone are vendors who will win, if you measure "win" as "more sales that close, with a higher price."

But it depends on the business and the product, of course.

"A call at this point is probably wasting my time and theirs."

Most salespeople spend countless hours of time with potential customers who don't purchase - it is certainly worth their time if there is even a slight chance that you will consider the product in the distant future. You are definitely NOT wasting their time.

Customers often have no idea whether they want special requirements before they use it (or, of course, someone who knows what questions to ask can drill down on particulars). There's simply no way to have copy detailed enough to trigger a simulation of their business in their mind perfect enough for them to find every problem they are willing to pay to solve.

Your mileage may vary though, my brain may be addled by too much extremely high touch B2B work. :)

And nearly every "high touch" interaction with Microsoft and an enterprise using Confluence ends up converting to SharePoint.

Full disclosure: I make my living on SharePoint, and (perhaps ironically in some reader's view) use Confluence and other Atlassian products to manage my business.

I think it depends on the target customer/client. I as a technical person hate when things are not up front like pricing etc.

But then most people are not me, and there must be a reason why businesses continue to do this (better results I would guess).

There are, indeed, hospital systems that big, and bigger besides.

There is certainly some bracketing going on. When we're doing dogfights for true Enterprise accounts, we're doing them against publicly traded companies whose annual reports filed with the SEC says that > 60% of their annual revenue comes from less than 100 firms. Do the math on what that means their average account size must be for those 100 firms. It's nuts.

There are things you can say to me which will, quickly, get me to say "Look, I'll be honest: we'd love to have your business, but we're not the right fit for your organization. Can I give you the phone number of our #1 competitor? They're widely regarded as pretty trustworthy in the industry, and they're focused on helping customers who, broadly speaking, look like your organization." (Here's an example: "Does it integrate with SAP? Because we would need that." Ack, that will never happen, nope nope nope.)

That said, how can e.g. St. Jude Hospital (not a client, but representative of a few clients we have) use AR at the same time that Bugs Be Gone Exterminators (a 2 man firm) uses AR? Well, both of them also use Excel, right? Very different use cases, but same core need, and the sales model for Excel lets Microsoft offer it to both companies for an amount which is, for the exterminators, a trivial amount of money and for an amount which is, for St. Jude, so far below the noise floor it barely registers.

AR sells the same way, except it is a much narrower product than Excel is. To the extent that "It sure would be great if someone got a call from me" is the same problem for those two firms, we're equally capable of servicing it. (They have different needs, particularly with regards to privacy and compliance, which is why the hospital pays "rather more money than any of my published pricing suggests", but at the end of the day it is the same for loops executing the same state machine talking to the same Twilio APIs from the same hardware overseen by the same geek.)

Sometimes you can service both. GitHub, Heroku, New Relic, CircleCI, are all examples that serve 6 and 7 figure contracts while also supporting tiny 1-person contracts too.

No, he thinks he has zero special requirements. Outside the geekosphere, there are lots of people who think they have no special requirements, but actually want something that's physically impossible.

(I'm pretty sure there are people who look at (say) a satnav device and think "It should be able to find me the quickest route between all these 50 points in the city" is not a special requirement.)

No. No. No. Successful salespeople get something in return for information they give up. Timeline, budget, application, preferences, payment method, etc. without data a salesperson cannit determine where her time should be spent. Time is her most important commodity.