如何找对销售人员？
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下面这种情况是不是听起来似曾相识？你的产品即将推出测试版。你的员工全是工程师、产品经理或设计师。你作为首席执行官是唯一一个生意人。你知道，必须得把产品变成钱（你一直在说你的模式将是“免费+增值服务”（freemium），但你还没有真正采取过行动来落实细节）。你还不确定，应该采用怎样的定价结构。你或许已经从吸引人们登记注册的网页搜集了一份非常初步的电邮地址列表。然而，还有很多事情你需要知道，但却并不知道。 -- 哪些是典型客户？我如何找到并限定客户？ -- 销售给谁？（产品经理，营销主管，销售主管？） -- 哪些收费？提供怎样的价格分级？ -- 完成一笔销售需要多长时间？销售线索的最终成功率有多少？ 基本上，你对于如何销售自己的产品以及它真正的市场价值一无所知。 你自然会想到要聘用一名销售人员来“解决这个问题”。但在这一环节往往容易犯下大错，下面我想谈谈决定聘用销售人员时普遍会遇到的情况。 我相信这个世界上有两种销售人员：开拓型和流程型。（一般而言，我对于将世界简单一分为二的人总是持保留态度，因此我能理解我这么做可能招致的任何质疑。） 这两类销售人员都很有价值。但他们的价值体现在一家公司生命周期的不同阶段。如果在错的时间用错了人，结果几乎肯定是一拍两散，而且还会放缓公司发展的脚步。 开拓型销售人员 企业发展早期，很多事情都不明朗、不确定，开拓型销售人员最为适合。他们不介意销售尚欠完善的产品，乐于打电话给几乎所有他们认为可能需要这款产品的人，从中了解到产品与市场需求的契合度。出色的销售会将自己的判断力和对公司已有产品的了解投射到客户正在试图做的事情（不一定会明确提出要求）中去，而不只是回来告诉工程师们“客户需要X，请做出来”。如果有必要，他们可以在买卖过程中确定定价。简言之，他们都有点像业务拓展人员，区别在于他们享受让人们打开钱包付钱的这个过程。 我来举个例子。在JotSpot，我们的第一个销售人员是尤金•列维斯基。雇佣尤金时正是我们准备推出测试版前后。我们手头有15,000个电邮地址，都是有兴趣在我们产品上线后试用的用户。我们猜想我们会采用“免费+增值服务”模式，但定价架构还没有确立。当时，已经有约100个人在使用我们做出的产品。 尤金一头扎进销售工作中。他给我们的前100位用户打电话，了解他们将这款产品用于何处。当他发觉我们的产品是用于一些关键事情上时，他开始要求人们付钱（虽然产品仍处于测试期，也没有公开定价）。在这个过程中他测试了很多种不同的价格，尝试用各种各样的方式来说服人们，我们所做的是有价值的。简言之，他做了太多事情，尝试了大量的价格和销售策略，并将有效的方式保留下来重点运用。他在销售领域所做的无异于伟大产品公司的快速原型制造。对于我们当时的业务阶段，他太完美了。 那么，开拓型销售人员不擅长的是什么？普遍而言，他们喜欢新的挑战。如果问题解决了，他们就会感到乏味。他们更加抵触传统的销售额度和目标（虽然他们知道这是销售工作的一部分）。他们当然不喜欢正规的流程，因为他们感到这“太僵化”。而且，最重要的是，他们想的不是如何建立一个强大的销售“机器”——用一些可重复运用的方法来识别、确定客户，用清单式流程保持客户参与，大量打电话、发邮件以推动销售。 |
Does this situation sound familiar? Your product is about to go into beta. Your employees are all engineers or product people or designers. You, the CEO, are the lone business person. You know that you have to figure out monetization (you've been telling people your model will be "freemium" but you haven't really done any work on nailing down the details). You're not sure what your pricing structure should be. You might have a pre-beta list of email addresses you've collected from a sign-up page you drove people to. But, there are lots of things you don't know and need to know: -- What's the profile of a typical customer and how do I source and qualify them? -- Who to sell to (product manager? head of marketing? head of sales?) -- What to charge and what pricing tiers to offer? -- How long does it take to make a sale and what's the ratio of leads/sales? Basically, you don't know squat about selling your product and what it's really worth to the market. The natural inclination is to hire a salesperson to "figure this out." But this is where a critical mistake is often made, and I want to talk about a generalization I like to make about sales people when making hiring decisions. I believe that there are two kinds of salespeople: Expeditionary Salespeople and Process-Oriented Salespeople. (In general, I'm skeptical of people who divide the world into two buckets, so I understand any skepticism that comes from my doing just that.) They are both extremely valuable. But, they are valuable at very different times in your company's life cycle. Hire one type at the wrong time and you're almost certainly going to part ways or radically undershoot your potential. Expeditionary sales Expeditionary sales folks are fantastic in early, ambiguous situations. They don't mind selling an incomplete product. They relish in calling nearly anyone that they think might have a need for what you've built and in learning about product/market fit. The great ones don't just report back to engineering "the customer wants X, please build," but instead use judgment and knowledge about what you've already built to map to what the customer is trying to do (but not necessarily asking for). They can make up pricing on the fly if necessary. In short, they almost look a bit like business development folks, but the key difference is that they thrive on the game of getting people to open their wallet and spend. Let me give you an example. At JotSpot, our first sales guy was a guy named Eugene Levitsky. I hired Eugene right about the time we were going beta. We had 15,000 email addresses of people who were interested in getting access to our service when it was ready. We suspected we were going to be a freemium offering, but we had no pricing structure in place. We had let perhaps 100 people use what we had built. Eugene dove right in. He called on our first 100 users. He sussed out what they were using it for. He sensed when it was being used for something critical and started asking people for money (despite the product being in beta and us having no published pricing). He tested lots of different prices on the fly. He tried various pitches to convince people that what we were doing was valuable. In short, he made a ton of things up, he explored a huge range of prices and pitches, and he zeroed in on what worked. In the sales world, he was doing the equivalent of the rapid prototyping that great product organizations do. He was perfect for that stage of our business. So, what are expeditionary sales guys bad at? Well, in general, they like new challenges. When something feels figured out, they get bored. They have greater resistance to traditional sales quotas and targets (but they know they come with the territory). They certainly don't like formal processes because they feel "too rigid." And, for the most part, they're not thinking of how to build a massive sales "machine" with repeatable methods for identifying and qualifying customers, checklist-driven processes for engaging with customers, and banging the phones or email queues to drive sales. |
