I agree. Going head on into sales makes all the difference.

My first company was an ISP that we started with a $40k seed investment, out of a basement. I literally sat down with the phone book and started phoning companies to people to host web sites with us. This was in '95, and many of the people I called did not even know what the internet was, much less had any idea of why they'd want a website, so it was a difficult proposition.

All I knew about sales, I knew from a one day course and two weeks experience doing calls for a charity.

My main takeaway from said charity, who had professionalized extracting money from people, was that if you worry about your product, you don't understand; when you do cold calls, it's 99% about emotion and gaining trust. They'd even diagrammed out how you wanted the person on the other end to feel at any stage of the call.

And it worked, scarily well. Despite the fact that I'm an introvert and was painfully shy and lacking in social skills. I winced before making every call. I'd sit there and have to breathe to calm myself before dialling even the first digit.

Way too often when people complain that their product isn't ready to sell, it's because they try to sell it on price and feature bullet lists without building any kind of rapport and trust first. That's hard enough in person, when people have far more to judge you on.

But if you cold call, if the person on the other side does not trust you, you could not even get them to accept cash from you for free.

If you don't get them excited about you, no feature list in the world is going to get them to buy it from you, because all their defences will be set to "full nuclear deterrent".

But if you get them to trust you, they'll often go out of their way to give you all the information you need to successfully sell it to them. Sometimes that mean you go away with a list of changes you need to make to your product because you genuinely wasn't ready. But if you get people to be excited about you, sometimes you can even get them to pay for some of those changes as custom development.

Any chance of getting access to the diagram you mention?

If there's anything I could read/watch to learn more about this, I'd love to do so. Is anyone aware of such a thing?

Zig Ziglar's 'Secrets of closing the sale':

http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Closing-Sale-Zig-Ziglar/dp/080...

What's the reason for the gratuitous insult to people with an mba? It's quite a prevalent theme on HN. I'm an mba, and it's an offensive stereotype. I've noticed over the years that it's one of the more common strawmen that commenters like to use on HN. I did an mba at Harvard many years ago, and I would suggest that the level of entrepreneurial hustle among a typical cohort is far higher than that in a typical engineering program. It doesn't take much googling to find lists of mba's who've founded prominent companies in the valley or elsewhere. Anyone doing that would discover that your slam is nothing more than ignorance or just plain bias for whatever reason.

I guess the perception is that MBAs are trained to become a part of an already established traditional business and not a ground-breaking start up, their skills are specifically trained to support the current form of corporations. This notion is supported by entrepreneurship courses from people like Steve Blank. Moreover, MBAs are perceived as being unable to grasp the technological advancement, "getting in the way" of technology and insisting on leading because they have such a degree and not because of their real-world skills (and often insisting on non-sensical and "trendy" priorities), and this sentiment is pretty common amongst typical techies.

That perception is not entirely without merit, but it's a little dated. Steve Blank, fwiw, teaches and lectures at the MBA programs at both Stanford and Berkeley. MBA programs, like those and many others, are actively embracing his methodology, and methodologies like his.

Modern, top-tier MBA programs are increasingly driven by entrepreneurship, and less by traditional, hidebound business courses and corporate line-management skills. A lot has changed, and much of it changed in reaction to the embarrassments of the late '90s. Furthermore, engineers make up an increasingly large percentage of MBA cohorts these days; the old MBA/engineer dichotomy could use a refresh. The two skill sets -- engineering and analytical business strategy -- are often quite complementary. MBA programs have recognized as much, and today, being an engineer is a serious advantage in an MBA curriculum.

That's not to say you won't find your fair share of entitled, naive, or opportunistic MBA students in any given program. They're still around. But their numbers are dwindling, because many industries (finance and consulting notwithstanding) have realized they don't want that type. In time, these people will become the exceptions, and not the rule. That may already be the case at many MBA programs.

I'm not here to play apologist for the reputation MBAs have earned in the tech world. A lot of it has been deserved. At the same time, a lot of it is no longer as fair or accurate an assessment as it once was.

It's an HN thing. You just have to ignore it - it's based on ignorance not malice.

I'm an "MBA type" running a very early-stage startup and I am only too painfully aware that cold-calling is the way forward to get our first few hundred sales. Somehow we spend so much time reading about digital marketing, and optimising this sign-up flow, and A:B testing this and that, that we forget that a significant number of users can be persuaded to use your product just by being compelling and enthusiastic.

Pure "cold calling" isn't the only way (but I've been there too) predictablerevenue.com/book changed the course of my first company by helping us fail faster. We built some internal tools to support the 'Cold Calling 2.0' process he lays out in the book and when we realized our product wasn't sellable, we pivoted our company around the tools we built.

6 months in, we're doing more revenue each month than we did all of last year.

I was going to say, the other source I find really good at the moment is http://saastr.com/, but I now see they are the same author. Thanks for linking - I'll check that book out. I'll be the 1st to admit I need all the help I can get to teach myself to be good at sales.

Because to us developers, we've seen a lot of business folks who just don't get what it is we do. Unrealistic expectations, no concept of technical debt, endless pushes for solid deadlines despite being told things won't happen on those dates, no understanding of what it takes to scale things past a certain level, etc, etc, etc.

If you're an MBA with a CS degree, or even simply someone who has actually done your share of boots on the ground dev work, this attitude probably doesn't apply to you. MBAs have a perception, rightfully so I think, of not really understanding what happens to turn all of their great ideas into working software. There's also nothing like company wide (or god forbid, external) emails promising features by a specific date without having consulted developers on timelines, or worse, having consulted them on the timeline without taking into consideration that it requires moving everything else they're working on down the line to meet that deadline. "Oh, it's just adding a textbox here, plugging it into a formula, and spitting it out over here here and here, how hard can it be? An hour tops."

That wasn't an insult. That was an empirically observed fact. The people who have told me not to bother cold-calling have tended to be MBAs.

Doesn't that make it an anecdote then, rather than a fact?

Hey, i am not an MBA, but working on my start up, i feel there is a NEED for some formal business training. I mean there are so many businees things I am trying to figure out and i feel I can't be the only one doing this. They must have come up with formal standardized processes for this now. And i am sure they teach you all that stuff during an MBA

That dude always gives really bland, re-read advice (lol at his jaw-dropping at some random cold-calling people, sounds super privileged to me, and he always insults folks while he's at it). King of the Aspies here at HN.

First time I've heard the pointy haired boss was essentially all about hustle.

Simple advice: if somebody expresses even a slight interest in your product keep calling until you get firm "no - I don't want your product" (preferably not yelling at you). And founder(s) MUST BE doing that 'till company has maybe 5 to 6 employees. Even if founders are not "good in sales". When company is early, there is no "good in sales": it is just if your product solves the problem or not.

Anyone who thinks cold calling doesn't work is living in a bubble. It is still the quickest way to reach your prospects and one of the most effective forms of marketing when you crunch the math properly... http://affordablemarketinglists.com/why-cold-calling-works-i...

Beyond the value that you get from whatever sales from cold calling, it's a character building experience. It sucks, it's a grind, but you're definitely a more resilient person after dogging through 200 phone calls where no one wants to talk to you.

FYI, it's a Reid Hoffman quote, referenced here http://paulgraham.com/really.html#f3n

Cold calling is one of the hardest jobs in the world. The people who are good at it, and can think on their feet, are worth their weight in gold. Maybe even worth their weight in bitcoins.