Death of a Salesman

"Death of a Salesman" is a play written by the American playwright Arthur Miller. This edition of the Sunday Scaries has nothing to do with it.

I feel like the death of sales as a function started earliest in retail. Companies like Carmax started hiring associates that were not on commission and focused on guiding customers. With the advent of the internet (and probably Consumer Reports magazine before that), consumers started to show up with a deep understanding of what they wanted and what things cost. In most cases they showed up with more product knowledge than the salesperson.
In my early career as a Civil Engineer, we had no sales function. Honestly, we didn’t have a marketing function. I mean, if you call creating bios, project profiles and responding to commodity RFPs as marketing, sure. But that was a marketing administrative function more than anything.
The people that were in Business Development were neither salespeople nor business development executives.
The sales function doesn’t really exist in the AEC space, legal, accounting and several more. Medical practices don’t have sales people, unless it’s elective procedures. Their sales people are trained by the pharma folks on the feature benefits of BoTox, etc.
When I went into the Technology and Telecommunications industry in the min 90’s, I had never seen anything like it. It was all about salespeople and the sales function. It was something out of Glengarry, Glen Ross (funny enough, another Arthur Miller play). These folks rang bells when they won a deal, bragged about their cars and made a lot of money. They all went to the Xerox school of sales training. In technology, the products were very complex. Sales people were product knowledgeable but their main job was to get the right resources together at their company to develop a solution. I was an IBM partner and every sales pitch had 6 people. Out average deal sizes were 7 figures and we jumped on a plane whenever a salesperson smelled blood in the water.

Fast forward to cloud/SaaS and Product Led Growth (PLG). The products became self service and the customers knew what they needed to do. Did you ever get a phone call from a rep when you setup Google Apps? Or Dropbox. The uses cases became simple and the customers could research the players easily. Even more, with PLG they mostly signed up for new products because they were invited to a platform (say Dropbox) and they just signed up, they had a great experience and loaded up their credit card.

That was a swell walk down memory lane and now I feel really old. So, let’s talk about today. In technology, especially AEC and CRE tech, the sales function maybe dead or at least dying. Now before all my portco VP of Sales block me from LinkedIn and Slack their founder calling me crazy, pause breathe and listen on.
We hate getting cold calls, why do we think our clients love getting them. Sales is no longer a boiler room and in many cases sales is a skill that everyone in your organization should have, much like using AI. It’s a skill, not a job. When I talk to founders, the biggest Sunday Scary is being behind on sales. The second is fundraising. Which, if you execute the first, you are ok with the second.
I love when a founder tells me that they need to hire more salespeople to increase their sales velocity.
Then I ask them-
1. How do you define a Sales Qualified Lead?
2. How many are being generated per month?
And finally, how many of these “Glengarry Glen Ross” leads are falling through the cracks.

Then I look at their marketing strategy and activities. Let’s just say disappointment is a kind word.

Thanks KP…the benefits of me being an investor in you startup outweigh the occasional sarcasm. So what should I do?!

The world has changed, the CFO is the decision maker at your prospect. Mid level managers are no longer signing up for a trial, getting hit with a BDR, SDR
whatever to be bullied into moving to a paid subscription.

How do you “sell” a CFO? You don’t. You market to them. Messaging that resonates, a process that is not time consuming and a predictable ROI for your product. That great email you sent the CFO is now number 308 to be deleted today.
“But I thought sending emails was marketing?”
It is an about marketing STRATEGY. How do you know whether you have a sound marketing strategy? Take all the hours that went into your product development. Divide that by 3. Did you spend that many hours on your strategy? (Not tactics..)
Do you know who customer do want to talk to? Product and industry experts. This is where you bolster Customer Success.

The customer “buys” from you, you don’t sell them and customer success does not hate their title entails.

If your sales process isn’t working, why keep investing in it.
Oh, and before you have your sales people do marketing strategy, don’t. It may be time for a bold move, FIRE your whole sales team and hire a killer marketing and customer success team.  Move all your existing business to CS, and revamp your GTM.
If you are not hitting your sales numbers, spending more money on a flawed system is irresponsible.

It’s Sunday. Take a breath.
Take Monday off and dig into your marketing.