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"No, it's less effort than that"

(smartguess.is)
388 points replyifuagree | 19 comments | 21 Oct 23 04:43 UTC | HN request time: 1.028s | source | bottom
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corry ◴[21 Oct 23 14:19 UTC] No.37966968[source]▶
“Pushing sales people to increase their amount of sales/quota is like asking meteorologists for sunshine”.

Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly.

It’s like asking sales people what their quota should be. They pick a number that is no-brainer hittable, because there is a lot of complexity and many unknown variables in getting deals signed, so to prevent looking bad they’ll pad their number. But their no-brainer number is below what the business needs.

So you tell them their quota is going to be a bit higher. They’ll have to stretch to hit it.

And it’s even MORE important since their comp is DIRECTLY tied to hitting that number.

And yet sales people aren’t writing article after article about how self-set quotas are sacrosanct, should only settable by sales people themselves, and how clueless management is to try to get more performance above the no-brainer target.

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lukevp ◴[21 Oct 23 14:27 UTC] No.37967032[source]▶
Isn’t sales a numbers game for the most part? Like you can convert 10% of leads, so if I need 5 conversions instead of 4, I need to call ~10 more people?

A better comparison to software I think would be construction of a novel building. Try constructing a geodesic dome house with no experience, and little knowledge of the issues you might run into, but then you’re asked for accurate estimates and then pressured to shorten them.

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1. paulddraper ◴[21 Oct 23 14:30 UTC] No.37967057[source]▶
> I need to call ~10 more people?

I need to write 10 more lines, code for 10 for minutes, etc.

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2. replyifuagree ◴[21 Oct 23 14:35 UTC] No.37967116[source]▶
Maybe bonus developers on lines of code written?

Or my personal favorite, bugs fixed!

https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan

3. lelandbatey ◴[21 Oct 23 14:38 UTC] No.37967136[source]▶
Except a sale is a sale; did they buy it or did they not? There's additional nuance for whether they'll buy again or what support they need going forward, but a sale is still a sale.

A program is not just a program. A bug fix is not just a bug fix. They are not fungible, while sales, definitionally due to the exchange of money, are fungible.

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4. ◴[21 Oct 23 14:39 UTC] No.37967154[source]▶
5. thfuran ◴[21 Oct 23 15:08 UTC] No.37967426[source]▶
Taking a narrow view, maybe. But a sale in a jurisdiction you don’t currently have other customers in could impose significant regulatory burden for relatively little gain. A single 100x sale is very different than 100 1x sales both in overhead you’ll have and in how much leverage the customer will have in the future, etc
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6. xctr94 ◴[21 Oct 23 17:10 UTC] No.37968627[source]▶
This is ridiculous. The number of LOC doesn’t define whether something is well implemented. You can’t crank out a better design or proper feature implementation by asking developers to write code faster or write more code in a given day.
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7. c0pium ◴[21 Oct 23 17:17 UTC] No.37968680[source]▶
You’re restating their point, just with more words.
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8. ◴[21 Oct 23 17:18 UTC] No.37968692[source]▶
9. paulddraper ◴[21 Oct 23 17:18 UTC] No.37968696[source]▶
> The number of LOC doesn’t define whether something is well implemented.

And a phone call doesn't mean a sale closes.

See conversation upthread.

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10. replyifuagree ◴[21 Oct 23 20:29 UTC] No.37970176{3}[source]▶
If we consider that Fungibility is on a continuum of very low on the left and very high on the right. Where do you think most sales fall on the continuum?

I'd claim that businesses are biased toward chasing a highly fungible sales model, to the point of eliminating the need for a salesperson altogether, and so naturally sales tends to the right.

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11. replyifuagree ◴[21 Oct 23 20:36 UTC] No.37970219{3}[source]▶
Not really, the shotgun approach actually works with sales - especially if the sales force has been slacking and not chasing leads.

Whereas with code, deleting code and writing less code is very much preferred because each line of code written increases the complexity and risk in the system.

This is why business teams who are shirking discovery and instead focusing on the anti-pattern of trying to increase engineering productivity is such a massive mistake. Not only is the team pooping out code that doesn't fill a need (and hence won't be monetized), but they are also rapidly increasing complexity and opening the business to future liability when the code causes customers to seek remediation.

The quarter driven nature of most companies amplifies this bad behavior. This is why we see this revolving door of executives who come in, drive some bad initiative to incompletion, declare success and move on before their chickens come home to roost.

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12. replyifuagree ◴[21 Oct 23 22:03 UTC] No.37970882{3}[source]▶
But 100 phone calls will, there is actually no such relationship in code - in fact deleting code significantly reduces liability, I guarantee reducing sales calls will not have the same effect.
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13. thfuran ◴[22 Oct 23 10:00 UTC] No.37974116{4}[source]▶
That's definitely the sort of thing I'd expect Generic Tech Startup to do, but it certainly isn't standard in every industry. B2B stuff is often a bit bespoke.
14. c0pium ◴[22 Oct 23 20:15 UTC] No.37978686{4}[source]▶
That’s not how sales works. At all.
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15. c0pium ◴[22 Oct 23 20:16 UTC] No.37978697{4}[source]▶
None of that is how sales works. “Just try harder” is bad advice in basically any context.

Everyone in this thread is trying to point out to you that your assumptions about sales are the same as the LoC assumption that equivalently clueless people make about software.

replies(1): >>37980868 #
16. replyifuagree ◴[23 Oct 23 02:13 UTC] No.37980852{5}[source]▶
Yes it is.
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17. replyifuagree ◴[23 Oct 23 02:15 UTC] No.37980868{5}[source]▶
There is a proven relationship between contacts made and sales made. Which is why sales managers constantly push sales staff to be making calls. Sales has been around for way longer than development, the underlying theory for sales is well known. Just like the underlying theory for manufacturing is well known.
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18. thesnide ◴[23 Oct 23 12:30 UTC] No.37984720{6}[source]▶
Also it how scam works.

Every time the probability is non null. Small, but not zero.

Law of big numbers always help scammers. And mediocre sales.

19. c0pium ◴[25 Oct 23 21:26 UTC] No.38018606{6}[source]▶
No there isn’t. There’s sometimes a correlation, but only people without knowledge of sales think that’s causal. If you want meaningful sales you have to approach it fundamentally differently than you seem to think. Your universal law of sales only applies to commoditized products, and if you’re selling those you’ve already lost.