Sales

“Well, I actually think they do. I think if you're trying to sell to the frontier what, how are you going to have a conversation with a customer who's talking to you about, you know, the difference between model gateways and three harnesses and memory systems, …”

“The bottleneck is not sales, it's demand generation and pipeline.”

“I do still believe that, like, AI agents are not that good today actually at doing something that is very relationship driven. But they're getting much better at it, right? So, like, the problem is when you look at LLMs, they look at the distribution site, and…”

“As long as there's a way for them to discover, there's, like, some Basic level of discoverability and you're doing something that people really want, then it takes off. Right? And then I think like, and then if you're good at sales or good at marketing and goo…”

“When you're pre-revenue, You have to do those sales. You have to do those demos. You have to learn from people so that you know what you're building and why.”

“This is 2008. We're going from one million to three million in sales. I think we have, you know, probably six or seven full-time employees”

“Door knocking is the single best way to learn sales, period, full stop.”

“What is the ultimate version of sales? You need to, or like marketing or customer success. That's why it's called go to market in my opinion. It's just like, how do I take the thing that I made and give it to you when you need it? And that's the, I, if I reall…”

“Development, sales, and marketing, if you want to learn them, like, I think there's curriculum out there, there's people, there's, you just go and dive in, you, whatever. I think they, In my opinion, are a little, there's intuition in all of them, but there's …”

“Maybe the most useless sentence in sales is just checking in.”

“If you actually take the mindset of like, this message is to close this customer because I need my first customer. It's like, it's never going to work. So I felt like it was almost like putting too much detail and like why we're amazing. Whereas like the goal …”

“So our sales over the past like five years has been about 600,000 dollars.”

“Sales can be a trained skill. I sat next to very introverted people. Who were exquisite salespeople. I sat next to people who I considered to be pretty average horsepower. Very strong salespeople. I sat next to a very good looking, very charming people who cou…”

“I think anyone that did something that was based on passion and obsession and that was inherently repetitive for long periods of time so you could string it all together in a game or in a play, like, that's a good profile for sales.”

“If you feel awkward saying something, someone's going to feel awkward hearing it.”

“Like for example, rich people care about saving time and getting things done right the first time. Poor people care about getting the best deal and just getting like a couple dollars off. Old people care about security. Young people care about the dream. Women…”

“Sales is like a mercenary profession. It's one of those jobs where you hire people and fire them every 90 days if they don't produce and there is no place to hide. Like if your software code didn't release on February first and slipped by a week, nobody gets f…”

“And the attrition in the accounting department is one of the highest After sales because people just need to take health breaks and they just, they are done with this.”

“I think we were sold a big lie as salespeople with this one sentence. You'll sell more if you keep them talking. That is not true. You will annoy more people if you keep them talking in this generation.”

“What becomes more important is your product as a channel, where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth, that drives that likability, and what becomes less important is something across marketing, sales, like more old traditional techniques…”

“This is my big worry for 20, 27 is it happens. It's going to be true in sales. It's already true in support.”

“School misses the two most important things, which is sales and public speaking.”

“Guys like you and me actually suck at sales. And the reason we suck at sales is because we want to use charm, charisma, talent, whatever, and they, you know, people, the best people use process, and even the reason we actually suck isn't even because we can't …”

“My favorite definition of sales is an ability to transfer enthusiasm from one person to another. And I think that when you're recruiting, when you are on stage at your conference speaking, when you're an interviewer or interviewee, when you go home for the hol…”

“And I think one of the very common mistakes Many of them made is they waited way too long to build out sales. And they built out sales only when they needed it because their PLG business started stalling out or whatever. And like, that is too late. Then you en…”

“Sales, marketing, product, and development. Those are the core four elements of building a SaaS company. And if you go on social media, or you listen to podcasts, or you see founders who are trying to succeed and failing over and over, usually they're missing …”

“I mean, because I saw that power in Amazon and Amazon, every time we dial the speed down, our sales went up. There was never a time when we dialed our speeds down to say like, oh, could we do three day versus two and a half day versus two days versus one day. …”

“The live shopping market in Asia is like monstrous, you know, like nearly a trillion dollars in sales.”

“Sales is something that the founder will always do better than most other people in the early days of the business.”

“Oftentimes CEOs are great operators. They usually have come from sales or marketing or operations. They seldom come from finance, and it's not usually the career trajectory”

“I think it's really important. To have this really close relationship between sales and marketing and for marketing to treat sales as their customer.”

“We believe that sales cures everything, and that is total nonsense. Total nonsense. What sales does is it can bring in more cash, but also brings in more organizational stress. You have more responsibility now, more things you need to service.”

“The zero to one phase, in my case, but I think it should be the case for every company, all of the closings, all of the sales are done directly by the founder. You are in touch, you are involved in every single deal. Then the one to 10 phase, you start stickin…”

“And the problem is, in sales, unlike almost any other part of the company, Has been, it's not data driven. It's all been kind of subjective and gut and intuition.”

“Sales is the only part of the organization where you're trying to convince somebody you have no control over to do something, to make a decision, to move in a certain direction”

“They can act like a portfolio, but it seems to be a lot more correlated. The sales happen together. Deal flow happens together.”

“A founder, they may not love doing sales, but the feedback that they get by getting in front of a customer in hearing what message resonates with them. Are they going to buy if they don't buy why? You know, what is their reason for not buying and getting that …”

“I am now fully convinced that sales definitely increases our ACV, but is not the most efficient thing in a business like ours, or cannot be run, at least in a traditional way.”

“Transactional sort of commodity like sales will be disrupted in ways that support has been disrupted, where more and more revenue will be generated from just pure models, converting website visitors to revenue without the sales touch. And I think that will con…”

“Oh, at least a 40% lift.”

“Sales is like effectively process engineering that's been worked through for Decades, you don't need to go reinvent sales. You know, you just hire a sales team and it'll work just fine.”

“And, you know, if we, if you look into sales specifically, it's not gonna change dramatically because I see this as people will still be buying from people.”

“I mean, if I'm advising anyone, like sales one-on-one, don't throw out the first number.”

“I believe sales is on, I believe sales is a 75% framework in science, 25% kind of individual attributes, how you say the thing, whatever, which AI could figure out pretty quick, is it harder than I'm giving it credit for right now? Yeah.”

“Which is an absolute shame because it is literally the most important skill in business. I do not say that facetiously. Sales is king of the hill. Without it, your startup will not succeed.”

“Bad sales is icky. Because bad sales doesn't feel mutually beneficial, and it feels like aggressiveness is compensating for underwhelming value.”

“I think the next, next one is like sales, right? How can you do sales? And it's again, like, There's this there's this term called, like, you know, lead qualification, right? You qualify leads. Why do you need to qualify leads? Why don't you, like, treat every…”

“Don't have a hire for sales or marketing until product market fit.”

“No one can sell the product better than the founder.”

“The thing that I've always loved is this idea of like leadership interchangeability. Can you walk in the shoes of your revenue peers, right? So as a CS leader, can you actually drive a sales forecast call? If you're a sales leader, can you run a risk review me…”

“So relationships seem, the value of relationships seems to be accelerating the value of a cold email is going to decline, you know, pretty dramatically.”

“I think it absolutely can be learned. And I think when people say that someone is born a sales, a salesperson, usually what they're referring to is charisma and a big personality. And I don't know that those things are necessarily what makes a great salesperso…”

“There are people who are savants, who are gifted, and there are people who can Connect dots that others don't see, but then others can follow, can learn, and can replicate those things, so I think it's more science than art, candidly.”

“Anytime customer success is part of sales, customer success is just weaponized to do upsell. It's literally just weaponized to upsell.”

“If you want the equation of sales, sales is equal timing times trust. Timing and trust is either equal to zero or one.”

“But actually sales is the most important skills. You need to learn as a founder because everything is about sales. It's about sales when you want to hire like a top talent. It's about sales whenever you need to make your first dollars and understand like what …”

“I think the biggest mistake is not trying to sell. And if someone is not paying, whether your product is ready or not, if they're not paying, it means that something is wrong.”

“Learning to sell is way easier than learning how to speak with a developer.”

“Sales, marketing, customer success are becoming go-to-market and you're thinking more holistically about The different sales marketing and success basically align with the different stages that a prospective customer can be in, right? It's almost like a pros…”

“Because I think the best way to learn how to sell is studying how you got sold.”