🤔 sales is a search problem
- common view of sales:
- "always be closing", car salesmen, the hard sell (~Glengarry Glen Ross)
- somewhat true in very mature markets with well-defined customer personas
- when someone walks into a dealership, they have already signaled:
- they want to buy a car, probably one of this brand's cars
- cars are almost commodities (because it's a mature competitive market)
- (the difference between one brand's sedan is minor to another)
- (most car marketing is on vibes / identity)
- dealerships are commodities (most consumers don't care about buying from one vs another)
- thus, car salesman will push hard (be manipulative in various ways) to get you over the finish line (because there's no significant reason for the customer to buy from them vs another brand and dealership)
- but... in non-mature markets
- rather than investing hard in closing a specific customer, the alternative is to spend that effort on reaching customers who are easier to convert
- ie. go after "the low-hanging fruit"
- it's often non-trivial to figure out who "the low-hanging fruit" are
- ...or how to reliably reach them
- => thus, customer development, marketing in startups
- very different approaches, very different skills, very different mindset
- (often: very different people are good at it)
- ie. don't expect a successful salesperson from a mature company to be competent at early stage startup sales and marketing
- this also applies to...
- pitching to investors
- dating
- compare/contrast above vs:
- push- vs pull- marketing
- simple products vs complex products
- sales vs marketing
- "major donors" vs "annual donors"