It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is.
It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is. Even on teams led by people with a background in managing sales teams, the hit rate on good salespeople is low. I came up in my career with a bunch of people who went on to start companies, and so I talk to a lot of founders, and the number of tech founders who managed early in their company to hire salespeople that actually worked out is (0) zero. The biggest problem with this task is adverse selection. A salesperson who can take a product with no traction and no awareness and successfully sell it can sell any other product. The world is full of potentially but not kinetically viable products. Good salespeople have their pick of all of them. So if a salesperson is willing to talk to you... you have to wonder why you're their best option. An approach that can work: 1. You figure out how to sell your product to some subset of its potential users. 2. You execute on that strategy until you can reliably hit some number every month. 3. You hire an inside sales person , a dial-for-dollars robot, to execute on the script that you worked out in the previous step. Don't kid yourself about steps 1-2, or you'll just throw money away in step 3. It's important to understand the implications of this: it means you can't easily hire someone to figure out how to sell your product. You have to cross that gulf yourself.
Posted by tptacek on Nov 29, 2014, 5:35 PM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.9,000 issues0 comments
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To be fair, Inform7 can't succeed, generally, because there is no market for the kind of games that you create with Inform7.
> The notion that somehow LR reliability is misunderstood by Consumer Reports, JD Power, Car & Driver, Automobile etc.
Custom trigger IDs are not displayed in the new 2026.10 trigger selector
I hate that too, but I think it’s more the ux than the concept of a default.
> The biggest problem with UX developers is they know better than you AND force you into their paradigm.
"Focus follows mouse" is what I use to keep the file manager from popping up when click-dragging files.
The biggest problem with this is if the target URL doesn't load but also doesn't quickly error out, like e.g.
Google wants to build up a private web here.
It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is.
It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is. Even on teams led by people with a background in managing sales teams, the hit rate on good salespeople is low. I came up in my career with a bunch of people who went on to start companies, and so I talk to a lot of founders, and the number of tech founders who managed early in their company to hire salespeople that actually worked out is (0) zero. The biggest problem with this task is adverse selection. A salesperson who can take a product with no traction and no awareness and successfully sell it can sell any other product. The world is full of potentially but not kinetically viable products. Good salespeople have their pick of all of them. So if a salesperson is willing to talk to you... you have to wonder why you're their best option. An approach that can work: 1. You figure out how to sell your product to some subset of its potential users. 2. You execute on that strategy until you can reliably hit some number every month. 3. You hire an inside sales person , a dial-for-dollars robot, to execute on the script that you worked out in the previous step. Don't kid yourself about steps 1-2, or you'll just throw money away in step 3. It's important to understand the implications of this: it means you can't easily hire someone to figure out how to sell your product. You have to cross that gulf yourself.
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