BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

 For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.
The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.
This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.
"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
The process of sales pushes the burden for understanding the market and distilling it from the customer to the sales person. That is a very valuable thing; it is why almost all businesses buy almost all of their big-ticket purchases (including e.g. employees) from sales.
(A candidate is absolutely doing a sales job when attempting to get hired by a company. This is one of the things that both sides of that market are frequently in denial about, but I digress.)
Simply getting oneself to be comfortable with sales (or at least present as being comfortable for a phone call or two) unlocks a crazy amount of success for founders, because founders have a few advantages over every other sales rep.
One is that they present as being almost irrationally obsessed with the market. Founders tend to live and breath the product for a few years, and it often shows, mostly in positive ways.

Unlike most sales reps, founders can credibly promise tight feedback loops for product.
Stealing a line from @asmartbear which has paid for at least a year or two of my kids' education:

"If you go with BigCo, you can call them at 3 AM. Someone will listen to you politely, explain they have no solution, and open a ticket. If you call at 3 PM, same answer."
"You can't get a useless answer from me at 3 AM in the morning. But when I'm up, your business *really is* important to me. I am the engineering team. I will push fixes so fast you will be amazed. I *will* get this right because it *actually matters* to my business that I do."
Founders have to sell.

Many, many technical founders of my acquaintance want to offload this to someone ASAP. I've never seen this work: you need to have a deep understanding of your market and customers to arm that first non-founder salesperson. It is gained by doing.
(And even if you don't do sales day-to-day anymore, you still have to sell candidates, investors, and partners on the desirability of using your company. Though most B2B SaaS CEOs that I know still very much have an account in their CRM and talk to "opportunities" frequently.)
The transition from founder-driven sales to founder-assisted sales generally starts with hiring a "maverick" sort of salesperson; someone who is comfortable extracting what you know about the market, iterating rapidly on scripts, and doing "things that don't scale" to win.
This may often be a necessary step, but it generally doesn't last for growing companies, partly because there is a crushing market undersupply of very effective mavericks.

These folks are capable of writing their own ticket and then, by construction, getting folks to buy it.
So eventually one tends to hire a VP of Sales who has done this before. They'll immediately start hiring reps under them, and start systematizing what you've learned about sales into scripts and playbooks.
You'll see this maturity model start to creep into all parts of the funnel, too, which will probably actually be written down for the first time somewhere around this stage.

Sophisticated, mature processes for marketing to pass leads over to sales for qualification.
Sophisticated, maturing processes for sales to actually physically close deals. ("What, you mean we don't just edit a few things in Word and then ask them to print, sign, scan, and send back?") Defined, scheduled startup calls, onboarding, and handover to AMs / CS aftewards.
(Sales, like many professions, benefits from specialization of labor. One that happens early is splitting the team into "account executives" (AEs) focused on getting new accounts and "account managers" (AMs), focused on keeping existing customers happy and expansion revenue.
(Some companies even split their AM teams into dedicated subteams for doing true expansion, for cross-selling products, for winning renewals, and for the generic "I want the direct contact information for someone at your company because our business must be important enough" job)
If you're at all interested in these topics, the people to read a heck out of are Steli and @jasonlk (who writes https://t.co/7FpEMvXdLZ ).

Steli is so effective at sales he has closed deals he wasn't even a party to. My favorite anecdote about this:
At a previous company I had invited myself out to lunch with a software CEO, with intent to get them to sign up, but was not really sure where we were at end of lunch.

"Hey apropos of nothing: do you know Steli?"
"Oh yeah he's great."
"He is. Steli wouldn't let me leave lunch...
... until you explicitly tell me you're going to use our product."
"He wouldn't, would he."
"He wouldn't."
"OK then; we will."
"Great! Email me and we'll figure out logistics."
That is called "asking for the sale" and, while that is a very unconventional way to ask for the sale, a *ridiculous* portion of all energy expended in the art of sales is to get conversations to the point where someone has to actually say yes or no.
Relatedly: in the highly likely event that you get an answer which is not a yes or no, effective salespeople follow up until the sun goes nova waiting for either a yes or no.

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.


I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
FOOD
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
TECH
Advertisement
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.
FINANCE
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.
ALL
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!
ALL

More from Tech

SwiftOnSecurity
SwiftOnSecurity
@SwiftOnSecurity
I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
TECH
WIRED
WIRED
@WIRED
On Wednesday, The New York Times published a blockbuster report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It's.... not flattering, to say the least. Here are six follow-up questions that merit more investigation. 1/

1) During the past year, most of the anger at Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg. The question now is whether Sheryl Sandberg, the executive charged with solving Facebook’s hardest problems, has caused a few too many of her own. 2/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


2) One of the juiciest sentences in @nytimes’ piece involves a research group called Definers Public Affairs, which Facebook hired to look into the funding of the company’s opposition. What other tech company was paying Definers to smear Apple? 3/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


3) The leadership of the Democratic Party has, generally, supported Facebook over the years. But as public opinion turns against the company, prominent Democrats have started to turn, too. What will that relationship look like now? 4/

4) According to the @nytimes, Facebook worked to paint its critics as anti-Semitic, while simultaneously working to spread the idea that George Soros was supporting its critics—a classic tactic of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. What exactly were they trying to do there? 5/
TECH
Advertisement
Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter
@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
TECH
Santiago
Santiago
@svpino
Here is a simple example of a machine learning model.

I put it together a long time ago, and it was very helpful! I sliced it apart a thousand times until things started to make sense.

It's TensorFlow and Keras.

If you are starting out, this may be a good puzzle to solve.


The goal of this model is to learn to multiply one-digit
TECH
Abadesi (she/her)
Abadesi (she/her)
@Abadesi
🙋🏾‍♀️ In 2011, I was hired into my first junior role in tech @Groupon

👩🏾‍💻 By 2020, I was headhunted into a VP role in a global tech company @Brandwatch

🤖 I achieved this progression in less than a decade, without ANY coding skills

🔮 How did I do it?

*a thread*


🤓 I established a track record of results.

💪🏾 No magic formula can replace hard work: do your job well & hit all the targets you are set.

😬 When you're struggling, ask for help so you can stay on track to get results, or collaboratively adjust targets.

🎨 I stayed creative.

🧙🏿‍♀️ When challenges arose I was bold enough to try new solutions. Not everything worked, but constantly trying produced valuable innovations.

🧠 I was proactive in finding new, better ways to get the job done.

🤩 I was a self-promoter. I recorded my achievements & ensured they were mentioned in any performance / compensation reviews.

😎 I put myself forward for any opportunities to gain recognition e.g. speaking opportunities or awards.

👀I actively worked on gaining visibility.

🙂 I was myself. Some say you need to be ruthless to succeed. I don't buy it. I'm a nice person so I'm nice at work, too.

❤️ I didn't fake it. I always acted on my values, and spoke up when something didn't feel right. I showed integrity.

🤗 I was a team player. To everyone.
TECH

You May Also Like

The Light - Truthpaper
The Light - Truthpaper
@LightTruthpaper
Latest update from @TheBernician

1/19

Hancock, Whitty, Vallance & Ferguson Stand Accused of Pandemic Fraud.

After yet more damning evidence arose last week, further additions had to be made to the court papers, which we are now aiming to lay in the coming week.

2/19

The four defendants will be Matt Hancock, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Neil Ferguson, each of whom has inextricable and ultimately incriminating connections with Bill Gates and Big Pharma.

3/19

As well as three counts of fraud by false representation and seven counts of fraud by non-disclosure, under sections 2 and 3 of the Fraud Act 2006, we can now also prove that the entire worldwide scamdemic originated on these shores.

4/19

In fact, we can show that, without the dishonest statements and non-disclosures of the four defendants we are initially proceeding against, COVID-1984 would not have transpired.

5/19

Furthermore, the 1st defendant, Matt Hancock, cannot rely upon the defence of Parliamentary Privilege, on the ground that none of the evidence relied upon by the prosecution is capable of preventing parliamentarians from carrying out their lawful business in Parliament.
CULTURE
Ramblings of a Sikh
Ramblings of a Sikh
@RamblingSingh
1/ Jassa Singh Ahluwalia & his role in the history of Shri Harmandir Sahib (A Thread)


2/ Jassa Singh was born in 1720/21 at a village called Ahlu in the Lahore District of Punjab.


3/ Jassa Singh was educated in Delhi, in Persian, Arabic & more, under the care & supervision of Mata Sundari Ji.

Mata Sundari Gurdwara in Delhi.


4/ In 1733, Jassa Singh's mama, Thag Singh (ਤਾਗ ਸਿੰਘ), requested Mata Sundari Ji's permission to take Jassa Singh back to Punjab.


5/ At first Mata Ji refused but eventually gave permission for Jassa Singh to go with his mama, giving Jassa Singh a blessing and weapons, informing him, it was now the right time to take up arms.
HISTORY
Advertisement
Brian Cates
Brian Cates
@drawandstrike
Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
POLITICS
Justin Kan
Justin Kan
@justinkan
1/ Throughout my startup career, I’ve seen many founders have an aversion to sales. This is a mistake that can kill your startup.

2/ Sales is often viewed as either a saving grace or proof that the product isn’t good enough (because it should sell itself). Neither are ever true. Some common mistakes that result in...

3/ Mistake 1: Hire a sales rep before reaching product/market fit to get your initial batch of customers. This is a mistake because founders need to work through their MVP with early adopters to truly understand what it is they’re selling.

4/ Mistake 2: Reach product/market fit, need to scale, and rely entirely on self-serve. For enterprise products that require big commitments and internal shifts, almost no product is self-explanatory enough to sell itself.

5/ Mistake 3: Make a first sales hire who isn’t scrappy enough to help mold the sales process from scratch. Some salespeople are amazing at their jobs, but not cut out to establish the processes that others end up following. This skillset is what @rdedatta calls a “sales ninja”.
STARTUPS
Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple
#Palakkad #Kerala
#keralatemples 🚩

Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple is situated in Athipotta near Alathur of palakkad district. Devi is kshipraprasadi here and grants relief to those who worship with full faith.
Mookken Chathen, situated on the Northern 👇


side of the temple, is guarding Devi here.
Story says that, once there lived a weaver named Kuttan who was a Devi Bhaktan. During one festival time Kuttan was so pleased by the Devi Vigraham that he requested her to come along with him. At that time wind blew heavily and Cloths


in Vigraham flew. Kuttan immediately decorated Devi with his cloth which stuck to Vigraham and returned to his village and with his Umbrella. Devi came with him in that Umbrella and stayed in his place. This place is Mangottu Bhagavathi temple now.

Amme Narayana
🙏🕉🙏
ALL