Notes:
Startup Founders act as Salespeople, sales engineers, product managers, and many other roles. There lies the problem because some who have no sales experience make many mistakes in the sales process, and those without presales experience make more mistakes in the presales process
Key Takeaways:
- Hiring Salespeople without SEs.
- Jump straight into the demo
- In love with the product, forgot about the problem
- Jump on every call
- Demoing the product themselves
- Bringing in engineers to do the demo
- Demo to the wrong audience
- Not sharing stories
- No relationship building
- Not ask for referrals
- Not setting up current state vs. future state.
Quotes:
“Enough founders have left me with the impression that they’re not familiar with the sales cycle” – Ramzi Marjaba
“When they hire salespeople, especially salespeople who’ve never done pre-sales, no one thinks about the pre-sales process.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“Salespeople see sales engineers as sales support, someone there to answer the technical questions. Sales Engineers see themselves as partners or equals to salespeople in solving a business problem.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“The salespeople solve it from a commercial perspective. The SEs solve it from a technical perspective. Between the two of them, they have one complete solution.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“[Sales] in love with the product, not the problem.” – Ramzi Marjaba
