Startup Culture – Be Selling
With a company as engineering-centric as AccelerEyes, it is important for us to embrace “Selling” as a critical element of our culture.
Engineers are often naturally suspicious of salespeople, thinking to themselves that salespeople: don’t build things, use “fuzzy” numbers and uncertain predictions, struggle with “simple” computer things, spend a lot of company money traveling/wining/dining, or waste time talking or in meetings instead of being heads-down focused. Over the years, I’ve seen various engineers harbor one or more of these prejudices.
Here are things we do to embed “Selling” into our culture:
- Invite all engineers to join sales calls on a rotating basis. This serves two purposes: 1) our products are very technical and engineers provide technical validity in the sales process, and 2) exposing our engineers to customers and the sales process helps them dismiss their natural prejudices while also helping them hear feedback directly from leads and customers.
- Maintain visible company dashboards which give realtime aggregate sales information to the whole company. We use a projector on a wall that shows our Salesforce dashboards. We also post our sales numbers as the topic of our company’s Skype chatroom.
- We bring our engineers to trade shows for immersion in the customer-facing experience. Engineers can get a great appreciation for the sales process by manning a trade show booth for a full day.
- Salespeople also need to keep “Selling” at the forefront of their minds. It can be easy to miss the mark by chasing bad leads or wasting time on extraneous todos.
As a deep engineering company, we are very fortunate to be in Atlanta which is a major hub for B2B technical sales and marketing companies (e.g. 100+ employees in MailChimp, Pardot, Silverpop, Vitrue, etc as well as up-and-comers like SalesLoft, Rigor, Rivalry, MessageGears, Brightwhistle, etc). The software solutions these sales and marketing companies provide are great for engineers like us. And being close to this cluster of companies makes us want to be best-in-class at sales and marketing in our high-performance and technical computing markets.
The high-performance and technical computing markets are rife with software companies that flounder at selling their products. At AccelerEyes, we distinctly strive to out-execute and out-sell our competitors in this space.
What do you do to keep a selling mentality strong in your business?