The tale that everyone should sell in startups

When I worked at Microsoft, a portrait of the then head of the company, Steve Ballmer, hung on the wall. And under it is his quote - “if you do not sell our products, what are you doing here?”.

Must sell all
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Every employee must be involved in sales.
This of course does not mean that the cleaning lady should catch potential customers in the corridor and persuade them to make a purchase.
But the ultimate goal of all actions performed by each member of the team should be one - sales .

I will give a simple example.

The programmer has delayed the release of the new version -> the new functionality has not been added to the system -> the potential client refused to purchase and preferred the competitor's product. And maybe the programmer released the version on time, but it was necessary a day earlier.

The same cleaning lady wiped the floor badly, the client slipped, fell - and out of anger decided not to buy anything here. It is a real story.


And here is another absolutely real story that eventually became a textbook. In one system integrator, the sales department was preparing a tender for a large customer. For those who do not know - “prepare a tender” means:

• make good connections with the client company;
• prepare the need for a product or service;
• achieve through communication in the customer allocation of money;
• write tender documentation so that only your company can win this tender;
• run the tender itself.

All these items require a considerable amount of effort, time and money. But everything was ready, the tender was announced and it was time to apply for it. An application that was 100% supposed to win.

The only trouble is that I am preparing some people for the tender, and others from the tender department should have applied. I must say that they reacted to this process very formally. To begin with, the documentation preparation process was delayed Then they could not send the courier.

As a result, on the last day of submission of documents, the courier finally went to apply for the tender.
And stuck in the elevator ...

I stayed there for three hours and arrived at the customer when the applications had already ceased to be accepted. And those nice people who worked in the tender department did not do anything to resolve the situation after the courier call. They didn’t make an extra new package of documents, didn’t send a new courier ...

As a result, many months of sales efforts flew into the basket. The integrator's lost profit was measured in millions.
And the dismissed employees of the tender department were all outraged - what was the matter with us? !!! We did everything according to the instructions ... And that were not focused on the result, so we are not a sales department.

For a startup, focus on results is ten hundred thousand times more important than for a large and successful company. Startup is much more vulnerable to all financial conflicts, it does not have a “safety cushion” in the form of money in the bank, reputation and loyal customers.

Startup employees who are not focused on selling the result of their activities are often confident that in the event of the collapse of this company, they will be able to find a job in another. This applies both to the representatives of the sought-after specialties (programmers) and to the careless representatives of the “office plankton”, who simply do not think about tomorrow.


And we must not forget about one more important thing. Startup employees should receive a salary of the money that the client paid. But it is difficult and dreary.
Therefore, they prefer to live at the expense of investor money. Of course for the "plankton" this option is preferable. But will he be satisfied with the founder (and the investor himself)?

What you need to do to increase the interest of each employee in sales

• Talk to employees . People need to know how things are going in the company, what's going on good and what's bad. How their work can affect the business - for better and worse.
• Publicly evaluate employees . Let colleagues know who is to blame for disrupting important deals, and who, on the contrary, has brought millions to the common pot with his heroic work.
• Do not distance yourself from employees . If the director shows that he is in charge here, and the rest is a pot-bellied trifle, then people will have every reason to say “a plague on both your houses!” And not try their best to increase sales results.
• Financially stimulate . Let the collective purse feel the results of their work. Both positive and negative results. The main thing to do is open and transparent. For example, like this: “Errors in the product led to the fact that 5 buyers refused it. Loss of profits 100,000 rubles. We spent 20,000 rubles on the generation of these interests. Gentlemen programmers, you wrote the code with errors, so 50% of these amounts will be deducted from your premiums. ”
• To control . Well, for those who are not afraid of lowering salaries, the anger of colleagues and are alien to the ideas of the development of the native company, but at the same time idle during working hours, use the employee control system.