The Macro: Y Combinator Resident Corporate Sales Guide

Original author: Ryan Junee
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Original - Enterprise Sales for Hackers (Ryan Junee, TheMacro.com)
For the translation, thanks to Eugenia Filimonova and Edison (which develops electronic sales systems and a federal catalog of goods and services ).

Many hackers who have set up their company understand that selling is an important and valuable skill, but they shy away from it because of fear and insecurity.

And if I say that in order to be an excellent brave seller you need the same set of skills as a good hacker? You just need to look at sales from a different angle.

Before starting, I want to note that this article is relevant for start-up companies, for those who are still at the Wild West stage and who do not yet have an established sales process and structure. Nevertheless, I assume that you have found the product you need for the market, or are close to it. [1]

Hackers are experts in understanding complex systems and subjecting them to their will. [2] Large corporate sales require the same skill set, but for a different kind of system. [3] If a computer system is a complex network of hardware and software , then a large company is a complex network of people and processes- and it can be understood and controlled in the same way as computer systems. The unpredictable behavior of a corporation is the result of the interaction of the motives of its members and their relationships, which are built according to certain rules, just as the work of a computer system is the result of the interaction between data flows in the code in accordance with structured rules.

To manage the sales of the enterprise, in addition, you need to understand and influence the components of the system (people) in order to obtain the desired behavior (buying your product). Each system (company) is different, and therefore you need to develop a systematic approach to hacking it (selling your product).

This is especially true (relevant) in the early stages of startup development. The mature company as a whole already knows how to crack most of the possible systems in its target market, and has created scripted processes to secure repeat sales. To continue the analogy, the sales manager in a mature company is more like coin machines, he is more likely a script kiddie than a hacker.

As a rule, the more complex the system, the more satisfaction the hacker gets when he (or she) breaks it. Great News: Selling to corporate customers is a real challenge, and hacking this system can be much more difficult than hacking a computer system. This is because components do not always work in accordance with structured rational rules. People work in companies, and each person has his own emotions. This means that you must understand their motives, hopes and fears. If this additional chaos is not enough for you, keep in mind that the feedback loop when hacking this system is much slower: hacking a company against hacking a computer system. This means that you have to be much more methodical in your approach - brute force, as a rule,

Below I will give some tips on how to hack a company. Firstly, I want to draw your attention to some typical objects (people) that can occur in the system, and also consider the main motives and problems:

Champion


The champion is your ally in the target company. He or she should be familiar with the pain that your product solves, and hopefully this is true. When you present your product, you will find that there is a person in the room who nods according to your words and finishes the sentences that you say instead of you. This is the champion.

The champion will do everything in his power or so that his company purchases your product. But the champion’s influence is limited by the official scope and authority that he possesses. Despite the fact that line-level champions are excellent, it is advisable for you to find champions at the level of department heads and above. Champions can be so enthusiastic about your product that they want to quit and start working in your company (this happened to me several times), and, in any case, the champion often acts as if he is one of your employees - this is his guy / girl inside the company of the client.

These people are gold. Find them as early as possible and quickly start building strong friendships.

Slanderer


The opposite of a champion is a slanderer. For some reason, these people really do not want to see your decision in the enterprise. Maybe this jeopardizes their work. Maybe they have already invested in a competing product. Perhaps they built the solution that is currently being used. Your task is to find out who these people are as early as possible and, if possible, stay away from them. Try to secure enough support for the champions and other members of the company to defeat any slanderer.

ITishnik


There are two types of IT departments that you may encounter: risk-avoiding organizations that perceive any changes as a threat and risk to the business, and therefore shy away from them, and far-sighted IT structures that are programmed to accept risks and related changes. Unfortunately, in large companies, the former are much more common than the latter. Therefore, the best strategy is to avoid talking to IT (unless they are direct consumers of your product). As a rule, making an appointment with representatives of IT departments is much easier than with employees of business departments, but keep in mind that these meetings can ultimately lead you to a dead end. Some IT departments do not really understand the true needs of the business - I burned on this more than once in the past: we prescribed software components,

Your main strategy should be to avoid communicating with IT employees until you need to go through security checks and other approvals. By this time, you should get serious support from representatives of the business department so that they “pull you out” and that IT employees are not able to slow down the course of events too much. Of course, there are exceptions to each rule. In the past, I worked with several phenomenal IT employees who, in the end, turned out to be real champions, and helped us to launch our product in several areas of business at once.

Purchaser


If you are lucky and you were able to convince the decision maker (the one who manages the budget funds) to buy your product, you will most likely be handed over to the buyer to discuss the further details of the transaction. Get ready for pain, because usually these people tend to get the lowest possible price (although there are always exceptions). Just understand for yourself what you are ready to give to them - as soon as they receive their pound of flesh, they will free you of roads. This is one of the reasons why most of the corporate software has such a ridiculously high price list, but also a discount of up to 80% on its sale is standard practice.

Lawyer


When you have overcome all of the above challenges, the next person you come across will probably be the legal service. Their choice of weapons is often limited - this is returning to you an agreement with endless notes under each item, which in fact will not be able to significantly affect anything.

Here, your best strategy will be to determine in advance what is really important for you and what you are ready to give up.

After you have withstood one or two rounds of corrections in the contract, a good strategy is to openly discuss and list those things that are important to you and make concessions in those points that do not really matter to you. This, combined with the active support of your champion (who must stand by the lawyers and rush them to quickly make a deal), will help you complete the negotiations and get a signature.

Financier


You do not need to interact with the financial department directly, as they can just talk with employees from the procurement department, however, it is important for you to know what the team of financiers is guided by. The main thing they care about is the budget and the budget cycle. For example, you may find that the finance department prefers to pay most of the contract in advance to spend part of the current quarterly budget than to pay in installments over a long period.

It is also important to know how they are going to make your payment: as capital costs or as operating expenses. This will affect whether the company prefers to purchase software or pay monthly license fees. All this will affect your pricing model, as well as the structure of your sales team.



Now that you have some idea of ​​what the various elements of the “company” system are like, here are some tips on how to crack it:

Reveal the motives of each player


First you must devote a lot of time to listening and studying. Create a map of people of the company you are interested in, draw a diagram. Just as a good hacker spends a lot of time poking around, researching and trying to understand how the system works, before trying to influence it, you need to spend a lot of time understanding the organization, motivation and interactions within the client company.

Build a strong relationship with your champion (s)


When you conclude a major transaction with a company, then before you complete it, you will have to overcome more than one barrier. To move on, seek support from your champions. You must turn them into your friends - you need to be able to write to them at any time of the day or night and ask for help. Your champions are your entry point to the system you want to influence.

Hire the Right Sales Managers


Now that you know what sales are in the company, make sure that you hire the right people, taking into account the stage of development of your company. Personally, I give preference to skills and individual abilities than experience. A particularly common hiring problem is that you hire people who are not suitable for the current stage of development of the company, for example, if you hire the sales manager of a scriptwriter who previously worked for a large company, while in fact you need to hire a hacker.
You need people who feel comfortable in a situation of uncertainty, who learn quickly and have strong intuition and good intelligence, who are capable of understanding the system so well as to act on it.


Our sales and customer development team at Parsable.

Keep the card in front of your eyes


You have already taken the time to draw up a scheme of the company you are interested in. Now you should always keep it in your head, especially when it seems to you that strange things are happening. Go back to this pattern and evaluate the different people in it, their motives and interactions. Understand how to operate in this system with maximum benefit for yourself and enter the right messages in the right places. Present your product to the right people at the right time. This is the art of sales, and here I can not give specific tactical advice. I can only draw your attention to the fact that this is exactly the moment when the magic of sales occurs.

Act in several directions


It is good practice to build partnerships. For example, the heads of departments of your company and the heads of departments of a client’s company can make up a good team, as well as your engineers and their IT employees and security people, your product managers and their business leaders, etc. However, make sure that one person (usually the clerk) coordinates and controls all these interactions.

Customize the process


It is very important to set up the sales process (data collection and report generation) in the same way as you choose whether to use a traffic analyzer or a debugger for hacking. You need to set up a sales process to improve it.

Do not forget that companies are people too


It may seem that one company is selling something to another company. But in fact, decisions are made by people, and people do not always act rationally. You can use this to your advantage by creating the right relationship, as described above. Otherwise, if you do not have the correct understanding of the people involved in the system, this could become your Achilles heel and the reason that the deal fell through. Remember that friendship leads to partnership.

If you invest in these relationships, then they will pay off many times.

I hope this corporate sales guide will inspire more hacker company owners to get out of the underground and sell their products more efficiently.

Ryan Junie is an entrepreneur, startup adviser, and investor. He is currently the founder and CEO of the company promoting the ParsableApp application, designed to improve the efficiency of industrial enterprises. He previously founded Inporia (W11) and Omnisio (W08), which were acquired by Google. Junie teaches a course in Business Entrepreneurship in Computer Engineering at the University of Sydney and holds a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Notes


[1] In this article, I’m talking about a very specific phase of the enterprise’s sales cycle - from the moment a prospective client is found to the moment the transaction is concluded. I suppose you already have a good product and it matches the market (or you are close to that). If this is not so, then a lot has already been written on the Internet about finding a suitable market. I recommend starting with this one. This article is also not about finding and recognizing the right customers, for which you really have to make a lot of effort so as not to waste time on dead-end options.

[2] “Programmers imagine the skill of a hacker in the most literal sense: a person who can make a computer do what he wants - regardless of whether the computer wants it." - Paul Graham.

[3] In this article, I’m actually talking about sales to large corporate clients: we are talking about sales to Fortune 500 companies, complex customer-oriented sales involving a large number of people; and where the transaction amount is more than $ 1 million. Such sales are often called "elephant hunting."

Thanks to Eugene Levitsky, Ab Belani, and Harish Srinivasan for reading a draft of this article.

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