Enterprise Sales for Hackers
You lost me here:<p><i>you can consider the typical “coin operated” sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.</i><p>The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:<p><i>The “coin operated idiots” mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It’s why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.<p>But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you “slot onto” your organization when you need to...<p>Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.</i><p>[1] <a href="http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-sales-into-the-leadership-team/" rel="nofollow">http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-...</a>