I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

It's actually a very good sales question, I don't find it demeaning at all.

If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.

It could come off as standoffish but when used correctly it's very effective because it gets the person on the other end to open up more and you try to get to the bottom of their objections.

>If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.

Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is going to be "fuck you" followed by ending the call.

Arrogance might work in used car sales but it's not a panacea for closing the deal.

I'm sure that happens occasionally as well.

I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.

I was ready to agree with you because question in the OP wasn't so bad, but "So you have perfect user retention then?" -- seriously? Yeah, that's being demeaning. Maybe being demeaning is a good sales technique, I dunno, but that's definitely being a jerk.

But "Are you sure increasing your user retention isn't worth something to you?" or something like that maybe.

Incoming spam is unwelcome in general, and I would not assume that this people are trying to help me.

HN guidelines: “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”.

I would presume that sentence is a quickly typed paraphrase. If you presume they are a competent salesperson, you can also presume that they say it less antagonistically in real life. Edit: Or perhaps they have found that antagonism is the most profitable solution for the business to turn around a “no” answer.

It really depends on your tonality when you say it. In either case, saying "Are you sure increasing your user retention isn't worth something to you?" is just going to be met with another "No, we don't need it" from the other end.

"So you have perfect user retention then?" is a better question because you know for a fact that they can't have 100% user retention and they know that as well so it forces further dialogue.

>HN guidelines

The comment to which I'm responding explicitly argues that the phrase, verbatim, is a good sales tactic.

>I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

Oh please. Not every product that's applicable to a given business would necessarily be beneficial to that business.

I get it, sales people have to drink the kool aid, but some humility is needed. Your product isn't right for everyone, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you can improve the quality of your lead generation.

i guess this is why I'm not a salesperson. If it works it works, but I'm having trouble accepting that it's not demeaning, which was the original contention. Because it's not really a question at all, it's a sarcastic question. Maybe being demeaning gets sales, sure.

Agree with you on that.

Think of it more as being a pattern interrupt. They are saying no to you over and over, so by asking the question, "So you have perfect user retention then?" they can either say "No" instinctively which opens your sales pitch because they've now told you they have a user retention problem, or they stop and think about the question in which case you've successfully interrupted the pattern of no's that preceded the question and can further the discussion.

There are definitely better examples I could come up with, but now I'm stuck with this one because it's what I quickly typed out earlier.

People have argued that the tone and context in which it is being said will influence effectiveness. Verbatim has nothing to do with it but you keep ignoring that point.

If you have a vendetta against sales people you can just say that. We are talking about a completely hypothetical situation here, I don't see how you're now implying that the lead generation isn't good enough.

On HN, people hate cold emails. In real life, I've found that most people will respond or ignore. Like a tiny minority will act like you killed their mother, but that's life.

I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.

The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.

So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.

Makes sense, you're typically not cold calling or emailing engineers which is presumably the majority of hacker news users

Sales - like marketing - definitely does have an element of psych to it.

Anecdotally, it feels as though it leans on a lot on the targets level of politeness and decorum to want to continue the conversation. I favour polite but abrupt and seemingly heartless conversation enders for this reason.

"Hello sir, would you like to help a child keep eating for $2 a month?" "No, thank you!"

Back to this specific case, I guess the trick is to deliver your question almost rhetorically with both parties knowing that it leaves an answer that is common knowledge. Kinda like safe small talk about the weather.

Keeps the conversation going buying time for another hook to be deployed.

I don't have a vendetta. I used to work in sales. My first job out of school was cold-calling and I saw first hand what types of people tend to rise to the top in that environment.

I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.

That makes a lot of sense then honestly. "Boiler rooms" are definitely not good environments.

>If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.

That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No, almost certainly not. But, they might derive a massive cost savings, time savings, increased employee satisfaction, or other efficiencies by using whatever you're selling and your job in sales is to get them to listen which is the hard part.

>That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially.

This is a fiction that salespeople tell themselves to help them sleep at night. I use twitter not because someone from Twitter Sales sold it to me but because I sought it out of my own volition.

Only bad products need sales. Good products can thrive on marketing alone because people want good products.

> Because it's not really a question at all, it's a sarcastic question

It's not sarcastic, it's serious and that's the point.

Obviously they don't have 100% retention, so this question might open them up to talk about their retention instead of saying "no, it's fine like it is".

It doesn't matter how good your retention currently is, if the product can boost it even by a couple of percent it would probably pay for itself many times over.

I think you could make the argument that saying "no, we don't need it" before even trying to understand the value prop is just as demeaning.

We're talking about the context of a cold call here. It's extraordinary unlikely for something that is genuinely beneficial to me to come to my attention via a cold call. Maybe your product is actually good, but there's a wave of pushy salesmen trying to sell snake oil via these types of channels. At best, you've got a very tough job to make a sale to a business under those conditions. I don't know about the typical business, but that kind of talk isn't going to keep me on the line.

Arg I HATE that angle ! It's like that sales calls.. "Do you like money ?".. if you say no thank you I"m busy... they like... oh so you don't like free money ?

beep beep beep

You seem to have an idiosyncratic definition of “demeaning”.

I guess that it is a selection bias.

People hating spam will complain about it, people not hating it will not bother with commenting.

And HN may have higher share of people more affected by spam (surveys send to emails scrapped from github and so on) and more likely to be able to find needed services - what makes beneficial cold calling even more rare.

And I guess that my reaction is unusual. I moved to another phone service after previous one cold called me offering a loan on bank service operating under their brand - and that was a sole reason.

you referred to the caller as a sales punk before he uttered the phrase, exposing your attitude. Just because you are biased against sales people and also have a thin skin when it comes to the slightest challenge in a question does not mean that the product would not be beneficial and worth it to you if you had a more open mind, nor does it mean that the sales technique on average is a failure.

i.e. when I read your comment it struck me as much more revealing about you than about the salesman, his technique, or his product.