from Hacker News

How to Sell – a guide for SaaS startups

by jhchen on 5/30/18, 3:04 PM with 44 comments

• by vincentmarle on 5/30/18, 7:04 PM

  > Common mistakes made by salespeople and founders:

  > - Thinking their goal is to close a prospect on the first call

  > - Giving a full demo and presenting pricing on the first call

  > - Prematurely trying to shorten the sales process

  These are mistakes? Having been on the receiving end of many "sales processes" I would say the shorter the sales process, the better. I often feel like companies who are too deep into doing high touch sales don't really respect my time and are shocked when I tell them to cut to the chase and yes, I do expect to hear about pricing on the first call, otherwise there won't be another call.

  Disclaimer: I have zero patience for abundant sales processes.

• by DeanWormer on 5/31/18, 10:39 AM

  I found this ~20 page guide Fog Creek put out a few years ago and it got me excited about switching from a technical role into sales. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a high level understanding of Enterprise sales.

  https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...

• by Bromskloss on 5/31/18, 2:14 AM

  Direct link: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...

• by rohamg on 5/30/18, 9:00 PM

  i've worked with Tyler and Entrepid across multiple of our portfolio companies at Axiom Zen and been super impressed every time

  ZenHub wouldnt be where it is today without Tyler (we have dozens of Fortune 500 companies as customers)

  Tyler is a close friend so at this point i am biased, but Entrepid has built a team of humble, holistic thinkers with deep expertise in sales and high-touch growth strategy

• by sparrish on 5/30/18, 5:57 PM

  Nice guide for high-touch sales.

  I'd love to see something similar for low-touch/no-touch sales SaaS.

• by akulbe on 5/31/18, 1:29 AM

  I do Chef and Ansible development. I'd love to know how to sell and find more good customers. I have a long-term customer who's had me on what amounts to a staff augmentation project for 3 years. I know it won't last forever. How would you go about finding more projects like this?

• by goatherders on 5/30/18, 10:27 PM

  Kudos to you guys. Please report back in a few weeks with the metrics on the number of leads this created for you. I'm in the same space and this content marketing is golden.

• by throwawayosiu1 on 5/30/18, 11:47 PM

  This actually scares me.

  I want to bootstrap an SaaS company focused on enterprise / b2b soon and being bootstraped I can't afford to hire an sales rep/ account manager (or be one myself while working on the product) for what looks like a long process.

  This is definitely a scary thought in my opinion.

  Fingers crossed, I hope that's a good problem to have.

• by vinceguidry on 5/31/18, 11:57 AM

  Is there an awesome list for business that this can be added to?

  --edit nevermind, here it is:

  https://github.com/cameronroe/awesome-marketing

  it's not added to the main awesome list, so I'm making a pull req for that too.

• by not_that_noob on 5/30/18, 5:59 PM

  Excellent guide - rings true.

• by gurglz on 5/31/18, 12:22 AM

  This is super helpful!

• by ministrator on 5/30/18, 11:05 PM

  I'd recommend also reading this: https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/b2b-growth-strategies-by-in...

  It's an analysis of successful growth strategies used by B2B SaaS Startups that are listed on Indiehackers.com

  As well as the Saastr podcast. Full of gems on how to sell.