"Sales" is a very broad topic. What aspect of sales are you looking to get better at? The initial prospecting and sourcing of qualified leads? Turning leads into opportunities and proposals? Closing opportunities? Or something else such as preventing churn?
I'm reminded of the breach reported by Britain's National Health Service in 2014 (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/03/nhs-england-p...), where data was uploaded to make use of Google's big-data sifting technologies in violation of NHS policy about secured storage of British citizenry PII.
The irony that the data had been uploaded to a physically secured, encrypted datacenter network from 27 DVDs in the possession of someone who could do whatever they wanted to with the contents of those DVDs without audit was not lost on me.
I don't reference this to imply it was good and proper use of the data; merely to note the difference between policy security and actual security.
That's not cynical at all, and the reason why Amazon is currently working on building DoD approved data centers (Not sure if it was in mainstream news... I saw it when I was browsing job listings)
They don't want to do this, because they don't want to become a "stamp of approval" for companies coming out of YC.
Specifically, if a company comes out of YC and is looking to raise further funding down the road, it becomes an important data point if YC decided to continue investing with them or not. By not participating in future rounds as a policy, they avoid this potential issue.
> Why would an HR person or a CFO EVER give up
1) expert benefits consulting
2) protection against the ACA
3) access to long-standing carrier relationships that allow for renewal negotiations
4) ability to support complex benefits strategies
I'm really not buying their case here.
1) Expert benefits consulting seems like something that could be made easily accessible via research online
2) Obamacare FUD?
3) Haggling is a feature?
4) This seems like expert consulting re-worded
Big reason we have a broker is time savings - just have them handle it and get back to work. It took me under an hour to get set up with a broker. It took me longer than that to figure out what the Zenefits cost/benefit was.
> 1) Expert benefits consulting seems like something that could be made easily accessible via research online
If you have the time to sort through it all and become an expert on the various products in the market. Oh, and if you make a mistake, you bear all the risk. Also, remember that most HR departments collect people who were terrible at every other job they've ever had -- these are not people you trust to do things correctly. You'll likely end up paying less in the long run if you pay someone else to do it where that is their entire job.
> 2) Obamacare FUD?
There is a lot of FUD around the ACA, but some of it is warranted. You don't know what changes the GOP is going to try to force through, and Obama himself keeps delaying implementation of certain requirements.
> 3) Haggling is a feature?
For a business it is. It's not even an inconvenience, you just hire a professional negotiator and if you save more than his fees (which is usually the case), you come out ahead. If you're not big enough for hiring a negotiator to make sense, you're not big enough to have leverage to negotiate in the first place.
> 4) This seems like expert consulting re-worded
It mostly is, but employment / tax law is not somewhere you want to read a few tutorials on the Internet and call it a day. Again, if you're big enough to worry about this, it'll be worthwhile to pay an expert consultant for the risk coverage alone.
This is generally very sound advice. There is one part that I take issue with though.
>We also looked for proactive junior staff out of companies like LinkedIn who were ready for the next step, but not afforded the opportunity
>A candidate may have worked in sales, but if they were an account manager tending existing customers, they may not be cut out to be an account executive acquiring new business. Just because someone has made 80 sales calls a day in a prior job doesn't mean they can demo and close. Make sure candidates have the expertise you need.
These two points contradict each other, and I think it is a very important issue. If you are not willing to allow a junior person a better opportunity immediately (hiring them into a promotion) then you have to compensate them better compared to the current company for the same position (short of intangibles.)
Often times, larger companies will have a more deliberate and organized sales process that is time-based. This creates scenarios where candidates that are otherwise qualified for the next step (Market Development Rep --> Account Executive) have a seemingly artificial ceiling preventing them from that role at their current company. While it probably makes sense at the larger company for a Market Rep to be promoted after 18-24 months, this person may be very capable of the next level earlier.
If you can successfully find driven junior level people who have this type of artificial ceiling, you can hire very valuable sales people. This also means you are going to have to take a risk that they can perform on the next level, but you can also hedge this risk by offering slightly less total compensation for the opportunity _now_.
Totally right! Goal of this was not to say "don't hire them" but instead "authenticate the acumen."
Also, the non-abridged chapter for the book talks about exactly this:
"But there is a caveat when it comes to more junior staff. Many of these industry bellwethers have the infrastructure to support solid sales training programs and to instrument good sales behaviors, like high calling and emailing activity. So looking there for junior sales staff, like market development reps, who are ready to move on to a closing role could make sense. Just be cautious that the potential hire hits your other requirements, as many of these larger organizations have a lower bar for other important criteria."
Those statements don't necessarily contradict each other. For example, there are a lot of junior sales development (or business development) reps that have these artificial ceilings put on them where it takes a lot longer to get promoted into a true closing role. Their skillsets are still quite aligned with what you'd want in a closing rep in that they have to prospect, cold-call and drum up business in a similar hunting fashion as that of a true closing rep.
On the other hand, you do have to be wary of those that are extremely used to having inbound flow for their calls or were more of account managers. It's a completely different style of sell- more farming and less hunting. For earlier stage companies, you almost always are looking for hunter-types, and that's what the author is trying to point out.
tl;dr: Hire up-and-coming SDRs/BDRs whose growth pattern is too limited at larger companies but avoid farmers when what you actually need are those with the hunter gene in them.
Without knowing much, this does come across as very hypocritical of them to do this to you. It seems like the type of attitude that would be frowned upon by the YC community.
Unfortunately, I think the best way (safest) to handle this as someone new out of school without a network is to ignore it and move on to other potential opportunities.
Most likely, this is an issue isolated to this one employee, who should have his position of responsibility in the hiring process stripped, written up/ demotion, whatever tools are available to the company to _strongly_ reprimand him.
There is a chance that this person (who has already shown to be outrageously unprofessional) would retaliate. He has your resume which likely significant personal information such as cell phone and address.
If you had a network, the best course of action would be to find someone you trust who is connected to the CEO. Any CEO who is not breeding a malignant culture would be absolutely appalled by this employee's actions. The CEO is fortunate to have a female grad student from a top 3 school applying to work at his/her company. Diversity is incredibly valuable to teams, and hi-jacking the hiring process into a personal dating workflow displays such egregiously bad judgement I would probably be personally offended as the CEO to the point of firing the person.
Yes exactly. This is a really badly designed implementation of a pricing tier strategy.
It also seems likely that by incentivizing users to lie about their age, Tinder will create an entire zone of fake ages between something like 25-27, where users do not want to be grouped in with all of the "27 year olds" so they go year(s) lower. Thus, eliminating user trust for ages of anyone at numbers approaching 27.
I agree. This all seems fairly basic, and from clicking through the site for 15 secs I was able to find a lot of bugs. For example, when reading the linked blog post, the social media bar scrolls and then re-anchors to its spot on the page on chrome 40.0. Reading through the other comments it sounds like there are many bugs throughout.
The Grails app that is now Cake PHP is just a tool to aggregate content from other sources and then post it to wired.com site? And it was previously built and maintained by a single developer? Sounds like a basic tool.
