Ask HN: How to learn to sell?

There's a difference between marketing and sales. You're building a solution to a problem. Marketing is about getting people who have the problem to know your solution exists. Sales is about convincing them to pay money to solve the problem.

If you built the MVP but don't have customers yet, you should already have some people in mind who suffer from the problem your solution is supposed to solve. Selling is then just a conversation that loosely follows the following steps:

  (a) Ask if they still have the problem
  (b) Ask if your proposed solution solves their problem
  (c) Ask them to spend money to buy your solution

Note that every step starts with "ask". This means that you need to listen to their response. If they don't still have the problem, walk away. If your proposed solution doesn't solve their problem, listen to why not, and focus on improving your product until it does solve their problem (hopefully in a generic way such that your improvements will help you sell to other customers in the future). If they aren't willing to spend the price you're asking to buy a solution that they consider to be a solution to a problem they have, then find a way to add more value so that they will be willing to pay that price.

Exactly. Sales is solving other people's problems, which we find out about by asking a key question or three, and then listening. IF we have a good fit, we see if the other person is even interested in resolving the problem. THEN we explore the possible value to them, which will assist in price negotiations.

There is always a current pain in every business, or they would not need employees and could replace all operations with AI and robots. It's the promise given by the comfort of removing the pain and the increased power and acceleration of their business is what business people want.

Marketing is explaining the problem and educating about the solution.

Advertising is raising awareness.

Sales is convincing individual customers to spend money. This is difficult to scale but is sometimes necessary.

When possible, automate sales and marketing in pleasant, self-service SaaS apps and work legitimate influencers to advertise. Specialized B2B Fortune 500 solutions usually need sales. SMB B2B apps usually shouldn't try to scale using salespeople because the ROI isn't there.

I agree with this and have 2 book recommendations to help with marketing and sales.

For marketing, I recommend Traction by the founders of Duck Duck Go. It gives a practical guide to tons of different marketing channels and when each one is appropriate https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

For sales, I recommend How You Make the Sale. It's a general sales book no matter if you're selling software, services, or physical goods and it does a great job of walking you through the sales process and where it overlaps with the buying process. It also helps reframe a lot of the "scary" parts of sales like objections as "requests for more information". Highly recommend for technical people who are new to sales https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204....