Ask/Tell us about being in Sales! (We're a notch below "Child Molester")

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Ask/Tell us about being in Sales! (We're a notch below "Child Molester")

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Question for the thread: what is your preferred sales and marketing tool(s) intelligence tools? I'm helping my market director look through options and figure out our best fit.

I don't want to give too much personal info but we are ~2,000 people technology consulting firm. We usually do business with fairly large companies in their marketing or IT departments.

We are pretty preliminary right now so I'm not totally sure our exact needs. We have Salesforce so we aren't looking for a CRM tool but more people/company intelligence.

Prospective tools that have been mentioned so far:
Discoverorg
Rainking
Kitedesk
Ecquire
Nimble

# ¿ May 19, 2015 23:34

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:05

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Snatch Duster posted:

Are those 2k people all salesmen? Or is your team relatively small?

You could get subs to sites like Zoominfo or whatever, but in my experience LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been by far the best for my team and our clients.

2k consultants or something like that. Our actually team is one dedicated bdm and then various people who are partner /principle types that manage and sell as part of their overall job.

What are you up to for the 3 day weekend?The tool would be for the bdm and possibly some sales people that are hired or tasked in the future. I've seen the LinkedIn sales navigator recommended before as the best option. Good to hear another + for that.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 18:46

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

KittenofDoom posted:

I'm going to keep working at it until I make it work, but at what point should I assume that I'm doing something wrong in applying for job postings? I've applied for dozens of jobs from low-level Account Executive to entry-level Sales Development Representative positions and I haven't even gotten a phone call.

I really, really want to make sales into a career. Ideally B2B SaaS or similar, but I'll do all the work needed to earn my way up there. I live in SF, have been working as a waiter forever, have great soft skills, have a degree (graphic design, but with a CS background as well), work as a sales rep at trade shows whenever I can, my resume's gotten the blessing of people in the industry, and I have the desire to do whatever I have to do to be good at this. I want this more than I've ever wanted any job before.

Is this just a matter of chugging along, or what can I do better to stand out?

apply to hundreds. Like for real, the system is broken. Figure out the tricks, meet people and just keep grinding away.

I'm transitioning to sales in our company by pretty much volunteering time and reaching out to people. I think looking for a job as a fresh grad in a recession was perhaps the best sales training I could have received because it calibrated my scale of effort -> result to where its a nice surprise if anything works.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 17:36

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Not an experienced sales person but an experienced sales person I've been learning from had me read this book and they talk a lot about that "dry run" problem:

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes/dp/0470533110

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 22:21

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Kraftwerk posted:

Is it possible to migrate into a tech sales job if you sold something unrelated before? Like my industry requires me to be really familiar with all kinds of manufactured equipment including things like solar panel inverters so I can best match the right kind of solution for the product. I figured that means having a mind that can learn quick and catch onto technical concepts and understand them well. If I can do that in my current job I'm sure tech sales wouldn't be too hard to get into.

Anecdotally, yes. I have a friend that moved from mattress sales to tech.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2015 21:51

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Jordan7hm posted:

How you are as a cool and relatable guy is less important than how you act as a professional in my experience. Just struggle through the sale and focus on the product and then do what you said you'd do in terms of follow up, and that will probably put you ahead of most sales guys.

Depends on what you're selling obviously.

A very good experienced sales person told me this. You can't be a total poo poo but what you can do for them and their business is what matters.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 00:06

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

How big are they?

Are they are past the really early stages and have an actual cash flow from real users?

I know from my own job that because the big IBM Salesforce applications are very expensive and heavyweight, we have had internal discussions on replacing them with something simpler more than once. It usually dies because of the cost/disruption of switching and lack of compelling reason to replace "basically works ok" with "unknown but possibly better future". So... lookout for that haha.

I would assume if it's been discussed here it's come up elsewhere and maybe some of them would switch or adopt a smaller provider as their first platform over the behemoth stuff.

Xguard86 fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Sep 13, 2016

# ¿ Sep 13, 2016 19:49

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Kraftwerk posted:

They started out as a consultancy that does implementations and systems deployment. But then 2 years ago they got into the Business Intelligence, Performance Management etc world.

I had the interview today and they told me that they are in a young market and predict they can capture a sizable amount of business. In the 1st quarter of this year they hired over 25 people. They gave me a lot of the same arguments you did about how IBM might be too big, too expensive and that this company is positioned as a more agile, cheaper and user friendly solution.

A lot of consulting is looking that direction. Even McKinsey the blue chip 500k a month strat firm is pushing "mcKinsey Solutions" their software platform. It makes sense: you have better margins more reliable revenue and way better scalability, which is the key to mega bucks.

I don't have the expertise or knowledge of the situation to say much. It might also depend on your risk tolerance too.

The old saying "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM/Salesforce/ whatever" still seems sadly true in big enterprise. It's often a real battle to get a free open source option better suited to a task over a very expensive very broad but "supported" alternative from a major brand. I imagine a proprietary alternative could be harder still.

but there is also a laundry list of successful companies humming away serving smaller companies, a few big clients and/or specific niches.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 13:34

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:05

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

taqueso posted:

You can say it is confidential. If they don't let you sidestep and are demanding a W2 or else pound sand, they are probably going to be lovely to work for. It's a dick move to ask for a W2, and they probably know it.

Didn't someone earlier say something like "I'll happily hand it over once we've agreed and signed an offer letter". Seemed like another good option

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 19:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Ask/Tell us about being in Sales! (We're a notch below "Child Molester")