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by amelius 3383 days ago
> [•••] selling and relationships are the most difficult things to master for a consulting company and you will die without those skills.

How about outsourcing the sales part?

3 comments

The short answer is it turns out to be a hard thing to do.

Right off the bat your choices are limited because many sales roles benefit from being close to customers. You may be limited to local and have no option to leverage hundreds of millions of people outside the country like tech can.

Secondly, they're expensive. The stars can make double what a top architect makes. You might think, no problem it's just x% on what they sell and we all benefit. Then the problem becomes why should they join your company now if you don't already have a lucrative pipeline to maintain and expand? To get around this some companies will pay fixed cash rate until commissions ramp up, but often that's hard to do for a startup.

Also salespeople tend to care less about how cool the technology is. It does matter somewhat, it's better to be selling software than cigarettes. However it would be common for a tech star to turn down a cobol job even for a 30% raise, whereas I estimate that's less true on the sales side.

Consulting = Selling. If you outsource the selling and you work on the tech, then you're the one being outsourced. It sounds like OP just wants to work on interesting technology, but not for someone else. Turns out it's pretty hard to do that without being proficient in running a business.
The great irony in tech is that we all rail on tech outsourcing, but no qualms about it elsewhere (marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc). I get it if you aren't quite big enough for a full time person, but just remember incentives are usually against you.
Outsourcing is a useful and necessary skill for entrepreneurs. Outsourced dev has a bad reputation overall but there are also good devs in other countries. That said most business work is far less complicated than dev work, and the risks of doing it wrong are lower.

If a dev turned entrepreneur values their time @ $100/hr and a 10-hour business task can be outsourced with a 15-minute description to someone else for $15/hr, it's the "right" decision.