Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
These are more enterprisy:<p>If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user.  They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users&#x27; -- if your channel doesn&#x27;t sell the product it doesn&#x27;t matter how much you&#x27;ve worked to add that end-user feature.<p>Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!).  They don&#x27;t have to say anything in the call (in fact it&#x27;s much better they don&#x27;t).  I remember a CFO I told to go on a sales call telling me it was the first time in his career he had been in front of a customer, and that he really had had no idea what the customer thought about what we did.  It makes the team far more effective.<p>Don&#x27;t allow inter-departmental sniping.  We all know it: sales guys won&#x27;t sell the product and always want stupid one-off features; engineering is lazy and won&#x27;t write what the customers actually want; marketing is just lying all the time.  Instead make sure everybody understands that without sales folks, no paycheck.  Without engineers, the sales folks have nothing to sell.  Without marketing, who will know that they need our product, and how can we prioritize which features to build?  That mild-mannered A&#x2F;R clerk is the <i>real</i> difference between paycheck and no paycheck.<p>Don&#x27;t do free pilots for enterprise.  There&#x27;s always someone interested in new products and technologies.  If they can&#x27;t put some skin in the game they aren&#x27;t serious.  Ideally cover your costs, but in any case make sure the number is larger than the person you&#x27;re talking to is automatically authorized to spend (this means they&#x27;ll need to get some buy in, PO, contract etc).  They don&#x27;t have to give it all to you up front, they just need some commitment and desire to do business if the pilot works.  And they have to give you some payment up front, a meaningful amount.<p>Don&#x27;t have one customer be all of your revenue (ideally don&#x27;t have one customer be more than 20% of revenue).  Edit: note that Google has this problem: 80+% of revenue is advertising, and Google is a large part of the overall advertising market.  They have been trying, and failing, to fix this for more than a decade.  This is a case where you want to be able to say &quot;we aren&#x27;t google&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t go in too high in the organization.  If your first call is to the CEO and you convince them to try your product, it will be handed off to someone who likely only cares because the CEO said so, and would be quite happy to screw around a little and then tell the boss &quot;yeah, we looked into it but it didn&#x27;t work out&quot;.  Follow the standard enterprise sales playbook and go in at the right level and find your &quot;coach&quot;: the person who is committed to getting your product into the company because it will make <i>their</i> life better (perhaps promotion, but at least better execution).<p>This is for when you are bigger: If you work with another company, and your company meets with their CEO, your CEO should go to that meeting.  Until you&#x27;re Apple-sized, always treat your partners and customers as peers.  If not, why are you working with them at all?