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No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.612s | source
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focusedone ◴[] No.42726381[source]
Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.

Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.

I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

I wish I could use what this guy is selling.

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ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.42727027[source]
> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.

Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

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karatinversion ◴[] No.42727095[source]
> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries

The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.

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1. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.42731028[source]
GP's company is (at least in their eyes) not interested in selling per se - quoting:

>> That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.

If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.

It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.

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[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.