The Macro: Corporate Commerce Guide for Y Combinator Residents

Original - Enterprise Sales for Hackers (Ryan Junee, TheMacro.com)
For the translation, thanks to Evgeniya Filimonova and the Edison company (which develops electronic sales systems and a federal catalog of goods and services ).

Many hackers who have opened their company understand that selling skills is an important and valuable skill, but they shy away from this occupation because of fear and insecurity.
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And if I say that in order to be a great, bold seller, you need the same skill set as a good hacker? You just need to look at sales from a different angle.

Before you start, I want to note that this article is relevant for start-up companies, for those who are still at the “Wild West” stage and who do not yet have an established sales process and structure. However, I assume that you have found the right product for the market, or are close to it. [one]

Hackers are experts in understanding complex systems and subjecting them to their will. [2] Large corporate sales require the same set of skills, but for different types of systems. [3] If a computer system is a complex network of hardware and software , then a large company is a complex network of people and processes — and it can be dealt with and managed just like computer systems. The unpredictable behavior of a corporation is the result of the interaction of the motives of its members and their relationships, which are built according to certain rules, just as the work of a computer system is the result of interaction between data streams in code in accordance with structured rules.

To manage the sales of the enterprise, in addition, you need an understanding and influence on the components of the system (people) in order to obtain the desired behavior (buying your product). Each system (company) is different, and therefore you need to develop a systematic approach to its hacking (selling your product).

This is especially true (important) in the early stages of a startup development. The mature company as a whole already knows how to hack most of the possible systems in its target market, and has created scenario processes to secure repeat sales. If we continue the analogy, then a sales manager in a mature company looks more like coin machines, he is more like a script kiddie than a hacker.

As a rule, the more complex the system, the more satisfying the hacker gets when he (or she) hacks it. Great news: selling to corporate customers is a real challenge, and hacking this system can be much more difficult than hacking a computer system. This is because the components do not always work according to structured rational rules. People work in companies, and each person has his own emotions. This means that you must understand their motives, hopes and fears. If this additional chaos is not enough for you, keep in mind that the feedback loop when hacking this system is much slower: hacking a company against hacking a computer system. This means that you have to be much more methodical in your approach - brute force is usually not an option - and you do not have much chance of error.

Below I will give some tips on how to hack a company. First, I want to draw your attention to some typical objects (people) that may occur in the system, and also consider the main motives and problems:

Champion

The champion is your ally in the target company. He or she should be familiar with the pain your product solves, and let's hope that this is true. When you present your product, you will find that there is a person in the room who agrees to nod in time with your words and ends the sentences that you say instead of you. This is the champion.

The champion will do everything from him or her to his company to purchase your product. But the influence of the champion is limited by the official framework and the powers he possesses. Although the line level champions are excellent, it is advisable that you find champions at the level of department heads and above. Champions can be so enthusiastic about your product that they want to quit and start working in your company (this happened to me several times), and, in any case, the champion often acts as if he is one of your employees - this is his boyfriend / girlfriend inside client company.

These people are gold. Find them as early as possible and quickly start building strong friendships.

Slanderer

The opposite of a champion is a slanderer. For some reason, these people really do not want to see your decision in the enterprise. Maybe it compromises their work. Maybe they have already invested in a competing product. Perhaps they built the solution that is currently being used. Your task is to find out who these people as early as possible and, if possible, stay away from them. Try to secure enough support from champions and other company members to defeat any slanderer.

ITishnik

There are two types of IT departments that you may encounter: risk-averse organizations that perceive any changes as a threat and a risk to the business and therefore evade them, and visionary IT structures that are programmed to accept risks and related changes. Unfortunately, in large companies, the former are much more common than the latter. Therefore, the best strategy is to avoid conversations with IT (unless they are direct users of your product). As a rule, it is much easier to arrange a meeting with representatives of IT departments than with employees of business units, but keep in mind that these meetings may ultimately lead you to a dead end. Some IT departments do not really understand the true needs of the business - I have often been burned by this in the past: we prescribed software components that were asked as a condition of a deal by IT people to eventually find out that this is not what what real consumers of our product would like.

Your main strategy should be - avoiding communication with IT-people until you need to pass a security check and other approvals. By this time, you should get strong support from representatives of the business department, so that they “pull you out” and so that IT employees cannot slow down too much. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. In the past, I worked with several phenomenal IT people who, in the end, turned out to be real champions and helped us launch with our product in several business lines at once.

Purchaser

If you are lucky and you were able to convince the decision maker (the one who manages the budget funds) to buy your product, you will most likely be handed over to the buyer to discuss further details of the transaction. Get ready for the pain, because usually these people tend to get the lowest possible price (although there are always exceptions). Just understand for yourself that you are ready to give them back - as soon as they receive their pound of flesh, they will free you to the roads. This is one of the reasons why such a ridiculously high “price list” is available for most corporate software, but a discount of up to 80% when selling it is standard practice.

Lawyer

When you have overcome all the above tests, the next one you come across will probably be legal services. Their choice of weapons is often limited - this is the return to you of a contract with endless marks under each of its points, which in fact will not be able to influence anything significantly.

Here your best strategy will be to decide in advance on what is really important for you and what you are ready to give in to.

After you have sustained one or two rounds of corrections in a contract, a good strategy is to frankly discuss and list those things that are fundamental to you and make concessions in those paragraphs that do not really matter to you. This, combined with the active support of your champion (who must be above the soul of the lawyers and hurry them to make a deal as quickly as possible), will help you to complete the negotiations and get a signature.

Financier

You do not need to interact with the financial department directly, as they can simply talk to the staff from the procurement department, but it is important for you to know what the financial team is guided by. The main thing they care about is the budget and the budget cycle. For example, you may find that the financial department will prefer to pay a large part of the contract amount in advance in order to spend a part of the current quarterly budget than to pay in installments over a long period.

It is also important to know how they are going to make your payment: as capital costs or as operating expenses. This will affect whether the company prefers purchasing software or paying monthly licensing fees. All this will have an impact on your pricing model, as well as on the structure of the sales department.

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Now, when you have some idea of ​​what the different elements of the “company” system are, here are some tips on how to hack it:

Expand the motives of each player

First you have to devote a lot of time to listening and studying. Create a map of people of the company you are interested in, draw a diagram. Just like a good hacker spends a lot of time picking, exploring and trying to understand how the system works, before trying to influence it, you need to spend a lot of time understanding the organizations, motivations and interactions within the client company.

Build strong relationships with your champion (s)

When you make a big deal with a company, before you complete it, you will have to overcome more than one barrier. To move on, look for support from your champions. You have to turn them into your friends — you need so that you can write them at any time of the day or night and ask for help. Your champions are your entry point into the system that you want to influence.

Hire the right sales managers

Now that you know what the sales in the company are, make sure that you hire the right people, taking into account the developmental stage of your company. Personally, I give more preference to skills and individual abilities than experience. A particularly common problem of hiring is that you hire people who are not suitable for the current stage of the company's development - for example, if you take on the position of sales manager for a script player who previously worked for a large company, while you need to hire a hacker.
You need people who feel comfortable in a situation of uncertainty, who quickly learn and have a strong intuition and good intelligence, who are able to understand the system so well that it affects.


Our sales and customer development team at Parsable.

Keep the card in front of your eyes

You have already taken the time to chart the work of the company you are interested in. Now you should always keep it in your head, especially when you think that strange things are happening. Go back to this scheme and appreciate the different people in it, their motives and interactions. Understand how to act in this system with the maximum benefit for yourself and enter the correct messages in the right places. Present your product correctly to the right people at the right time. This is the art of sales, and here I can not give specific tactical advice. I can only draw your attention to the fact that this is exactly the moment when the magic of sales occurs.

Act in several directions

This is a good practice to build partnerships. For example, the heads of departments of your company and the heads of departments of a client’s company can form a good team, as well as your engineers and their IT people and people from security, your product managers and the leaders of their business departments, etc. However, make sure that one person (usually the clerk) coordinates and controls all these interactions.

Customize the process

It is very important to set up the sales process (data collection and report generation) in the same way as you choose whether to use a traffic analyzer or debugger when hacking. You need to streamline the sales process to improve it.

Do not forget that companies are people too

It may seem that one company is selling something to another company. But in reality, decisions are made by people, and people do not always act rationally. You can use this to your advantage by creating the right relationship as described above. Otherwise, if you do not have a correct understanding of the people involved in the system, this could be your Achilles heel and the reason that the deal fell through. Remember that friendship leads to partnership.

If you invest in this relationship, they will pay off many times over.

I hope that this corporate sales guide will inspire more hacker-owned companies to get out of the underground and sell their products more efficiently.

Ryan Juni is an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and investor. He is currently the founder and CEO of the company promoting the ParsableApp application, designed to improve the efficiency of industrial enterprises. He previously founded the company Inporia (W11) and Omnisio (W08), which were acquired by Google. Juni teaches a business course in computer engineering at the University of Sydney and holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Notes

[1] In this article, I am talking about a very specific phase of the company's sales cycle - starting from the moment a prospective client was found and until the moment a deal was made. I believe you already have a good product and it fits the market (or you are close to it). If this is not the case, then the Internet has already written a lot about finding a suitable market. I recommend starting with this. This article is also not about finding and recognizing the right customers, for which you really have to make a lot of effort not to waste time on dead ends.

[2] “A programmer imagines the mastery of a hacker in the most literal sense: a person who can force a computer to do what he wants - regardless of whether the computer itself wants it.” - Paul Graham.

[3] In this article, I am in fact talking about sales to large corporate clients: it is about sales to Fortune 500 companies, complex customer-oriented sales involving a large number of people; and where the transaction amount is more than 1 million dollars. Such sales are often called "elephant hunting."

Thanks to Eugene Levitsky, Ab Belani and Harish Srinivasan for reading a draft of this article.