After spending 12 years in the HN community, absorbing wisdom, and continuously learning from the collective discussions, I am thrilled to introduce my startup. The comments, insights, and diverse perspectives I've encountered have reshaped my view of startups and played a foundational role in what I've built. Today, I present my startup and prototype of our soon-to-be-launched SDK utilizing LLMs and diffusion models: our AI copilot for 3D games. When we started this journey two years ago, many deemed our idea far-fetched. Today, we stand in an up-and-coming sector. You can download and play with the “prototype for world-building” behind the link. Feel free to share your suggestions and comments on improving the tool. We are releasing an SDK mod in October.
What are you exactly looking for? a) Someone to scale your current business by building a sales team? b) a hunter that will hunt and close deals? c) an account manager that will expand your business with your excisting clients? d) all of the above? In any case the best way to test a sales rep 1) is to check his or her direct and indirect references. 2)Check his or her understanding of complex sales cycles and multilevel selling. 3)Discuss the deals they have won and lost. 4) Check how they have won back deals. 5) Ask what the most difficult deal was they have worked on and what they have done to bring the deal in the companys favor. 6) Let him or her create a presentation as a sales rep for your company and present it back to you. Final toughts: If you want the best you have to pay the bes. If you can’t afford the best offer maximum freedom (with prerequisites and KPI’s)
A book won't help you making the actual sale. It can provide you some guidelines (SPIN, Miller Heimann, Sales 2.0, DISC, Challenger Sale and many more) and confidence to actually start, but eventually the complexity of the actual sale can be mapped to the weather. However if you have identified the clients budget, mapped their stakeholders, communicate with the decision makers and you have created the need and urgency for your solution, you can increase the likelyhood of coming to a sale. Even tough things will happen outside of your control.....
As an electrical engineer with 15+ years in global enterprise software sales, a track record of 100MIO$+ sales in the past ten years and 2 failed software startups as an experience i can share following:
- A company only has excistence with paying customers.
- The global economy excists because of supply and DEMAND. So start preaching the benefits of your products or services, because there is a very high likelyhood there is potential client in the 70 Trillion dollar economy.
- Sales has evolved to being the trusted advisor and filling the blind spots for your clients with facts, value and business cases.
- Don't sell a drill, sell the hole. Clients are not looking for the specs of the drill, but the size of a hole.
- Before you start building your MVP, sell the value proposition. If you are not able to sell and validate your value proposition, you will struggle selling your MVP.
- Selling can't always be expressed in metrics. It's like sex. You have to do it, to get better in it. So stop talking about how to do it, just do it...
- You think you can't do sales? Have you ever applied for a job, sold yourself to your current girlfriend, husband or wife, challenge a friend with fact or a value creation discussion? You have done sales...
- The conversion rate of off-line sales is higher then on-line sales (for B2B complex sales cycles). So start engaging with your clients face 2 face.
- There is an absolute relation between your activities and your (revenue) results.
P.s. If you are in 1MIO$+(global) B2B (SaaS) enterprise software sales: Complex sales for global matrix organisations with multi-level stakeholders can't be achieved trough reading a book.
I think you can find them at your competitor, but it won't be easy to convince the loyal ones. Give them more freedom, full trust, a good base salary, vesting and on OTE a LOG multiplier on their base salary. Hunters like freedom and appreciation for the business (intelligence) they gather.
You are basically looking for a hunter and not a BD or Sales Manager. This is why: The sales hunter will dive in to your current client base for a certain profile and will search a similar client profile in the US to sell the solution and co- create a product - market fit in a joint effort. An experienced hunter understands complex stakeholder landscapes, long sales cycles and how to create early adaptors for the solution. The hunter will try to shorten sales cycles and close deals quicker, since it's their driving motivator. After closing the first deals a BD further mature a value proposition and a sales manager will sell the mature value prop in a repetitive way.
I think your thinking is in the right direction, since gamification hasnt been applied much to sales yet. I have introduced a loyalty/ gamified program to endorse every activity (call, meeting, proposal)and showcase how active people are correlated to their revenue/ target. Awarding activities, besides actual revenue in a loyalty dashboard, can activate the intrinsical motivation of your sales team. P.s. ping me if you have any additional questions!
I have tried to build a similar app 3 years ago. I used twitter bootstrap, but unfortunately failed. Bootstrap was the most flexible since the average (open source) CRM solutions have too many features to build an app that meets your requirements for a MVP. You could consider the Appexhange framework from SalesForce to directly push it to a broader audience, but then you have the dependancy of building on an external API. Good luck i truly believe you are on something valuable!
I use cactusformac.com and as a non- technical guy i was stil able to upload my project (http://kabaal.co) on the Amazon infrastructure. Cactus even connected the DNS from AWS with my hosting service. I see realtime changes in my browser when i code and i can deploy it with just one button.