<story><title>Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders</title><url>http://blog.close.io/sales-hiring-101-for-startups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex_Jiang</author><text>Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... &amp;quot;So uh yeah, I&amp;#x27;ll email you I guess.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We  made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:&lt;p&gt;1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It&amp;#x27;s almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.&lt;p&gt;2) We rate each call with &amp;quot;likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we&amp;#x27;re consistently improving our pitch.&lt;p&gt;3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There&amp;#x27;s many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It&amp;#x27;s like when you solve yourself out of a cluster-fuck in 2048 :)&lt;p&gt;4) I&amp;#x27;m not a very extroverted person, I don&amp;#x27;t have a marketing background. But I&amp;#x27;ve actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it&amp;#x27;s part of the daily work schedule.&lt;p&gt;5) Ask for the close, just let them say &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;. Don&amp;#x27;t dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It&amp;#x27;s fun.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders</title><url>http://blog.close.io/sales-hiring-101-for-startups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btrautsc</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t upvote this plan enough. Well done, Steli.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re transitioning into stage 2 right now which has been an exciting ride, this is basically exactly the playbook we&amp;#x27;re running.&lt;p&gt;Our biggest challenge has been finding the right combination of hunger, fearlessness, &amp;amp; cunning people to bring on as the core of our sales team (if you&amp;#x27;re out there, shoot me an email, we&amp;#x27;d &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to meet you)</text></comment>