Ask HN: How to Sell Software?

[tingtok]

I have spent over a decade building software working as engineer and working with product/Business Analysts in enterprise (FAANG or FAANG alike companies). I can confidently say that I can build software with features that delight customers. However, I don't understand how to sell software.

1. How to find customers?

2. How to sell?

Let me know your experience and how you learned to sell software.

Cheers.

[j_autumn]

Asking myself the same question, it seems hard while starting out especially for B2B.

A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways?

Attending events, conferences, etc. is not possible either during the pandemic.

2020 doesn’t seem to be a good year trying to start a company :(

[Random_ernest]

Cold calling businesses is definitely not illegal in Germany if you got the contact info from their website.

[vbsteven]

and every german business (or business operating in germany) is mandated by law to have contact information on their website.

[tixocloud]

Spot on with cold calls/emails but on the contrary, all events are online and it’s easier at times to start conversations.

2020 could also be a good year because while not people are buying, there’s more time to explore and have conversations.

[quickthrower2]

Realise this is as big and open of a question as a salesperson asking “how do I code”. So hard to know where to start!

I am still learning myself and for me selling online not face to face is the focus. I have failed a few times to get anything off the ground but technically people have paid me money so I have sold software! But usually less than the time and money I have put in.

My next move is to understand more about market validation and research, or how to get in the shoes of potential customers. Hopefully that’ll increase the chances of my next thing making money.

If you want to sell as a job rather than start a business that might be another question entirely I’ll leave that to the sales people to answer!

[bullen]

I have no clue, but this is what I have tried, and what I'm now planning:

I built an open-source multiplayer online system; I made a game with it, together with a company that had an IP and used Unity, that sold 250.000 copies almost for free.

Now that the system was proven I tried selling it to bigger B2B clients, but failed because I didn't really want to. Instead I'm moving into making things closer to the consumer, a HTML5 client for 2D and a C+ client for 3D.

Recently I realized, if I don't have a way to charge customers the whole stack is not going anywhere so I'm now in the process of adding subscriptions through github sponsors and prepaid through itch.io.

Now my engines (2D and 3D) are nearing the point where making the games is the only remaining thing to do and getting started on that beyond solving the technical unknowns is really hard, procrastination hides in the undecided subjective details.

However I believe that the only thing you can do is to make good _finished_ products and learn. Eventually you will get a break and then you'll have to handle the other side of the coin: being successful. Which BTW is harder than most think.

The hardest part is to make the software so good that you are not ashamed of selling it. Then having the courage to actually sell it, put a price tag on the thing! The rest usually happens automatically eventually; people can sense if you want to sell things, and they will exploit that, in other words: people will buy what they can afford if they sense a good deal.

Selling works best if you are confident: the interface is proven and has little friction, but you need to figure that out manually by doing it. B2B and B2C are surprisingly similar if you remove the wrapping, it's still about "how much of your time will they take away"!

The end goal is to build something that works and makes money without taking any of your time.

TLDR: Figure out your interface so that underlying complexity can be provided simply without friction while pushing closer to the end customer!

The rest is luck.

[Jugurtha]

The question 0. to prepend to your list is: "How to dissociate between value of something to someone and the effort to implement it?". It appears that engineers are cursed of a chronic dismissive attitude toward things that weren't hard to make, because a lot of the most valuable things were hard to make.

This brings us to one helpful mindset is to get out of our own head, and consider the value of what we build from the perspective of the entities we build for. I say entities because I have this thing that I can delight a system whose input is the output of a differential amplifier I build with really low distortion, or a plant looking forward to being watered since the last time it has been.

So, after all that touchy feely stuff you probably know very well, as you have been building things that delight customers for a long time... Here are things you can do:

1. Get into more sales meetings if you can in order to witness and pick up from what people who consistently do it.

2. Offer technical help to your own salespeople and marketing people who are selling the very product you built. You have deep technical knowledge and you can be of real help for them to explain things. They will tell you about common objections or questions that prospects are throwing at them, and your input can be valuable. Why a specific bug fix or feature is important, etc.

3. Learn from your own salespeople and marketing people about how they're selling the product/features you built.

[tixocloud]

Based on my experience, it’s hard if you’ve never done it before but it gets easier when you absorb the learnings.

Firstly, it starts with identifying a problem/frustration that your customers will value. You’ll need to be very specific because what does selling “software” really mean? Focus on what your users can do with your software and how you can help them.

As others have pointed out, B2C is also different than B2B but within B2B, there are many sub groups within it. For example, company size and industry.

To find customers, it helps by knowing who your users are? Are they developers, analysts, etc.? Then you’ll also need to know how your users can purchase software - is it their own decision? Their boss’ decision? IT’s decision?

To be able to sell to enterprises, your product needs to be incredibly valuable (order of magnitude better than their existing process). However, that’s just the beginning for enterprise sales. You’ll need to demonstrate and prove your product and in most cases, business stability before getting the sale. However, the average contract values could be $100k+ to over a million in enterprise. You also have the option to expand to other teams within the same enterprise.

To be able to sell to smaller companies or startups, it’s an easier journey but nonetheless, in most cases, you still need to prove the value of your product.

[sinac]

I used to sell software and I used to be a developer. Happy to jump on a call to share some frameworks + approaches if you'd like. My email is in my profile.

[trysomechai]

https://www.unusual.vc/field-guide Full disclosure: I work for AppDynamics and this is our founder's VC field sales guide.

It perfectly articulates on a high level, how to build a sales force and the metrics / GTM for B2B selling. Another thing to keep in mind is your product and target audience. This will help you figure out your Pipeline Generation. Feel free to PM me, I have been in B2B software sales (I was also a software engineer previously) and I would love to help / guide you.

A16Z - Love their blogs and articles. Here is my favorite one for Enterprise Selling: https://a16z.com/2020/07/29/growthsales-the-new-era-of-enter...

[mindhash]

Read books. See what works for you. The firs thing is to decide acquisition method. Inbound or outbound?

Inbound is great if you are well known inthe space. Else it's slow. If you don't have a large network reach out to people.

Find the right channels that would work for you. Read https://brianbalfour.com/ he has a page for learning to be customer acquisition expert. Lots of good recommendations.

Most companies survive on a single channel. So you must find which one is that for you.

If your only way to reach prospects is ads, you must have a good price on your product . High LTV to support CAC.

If your users are active on LinkedIn. Then try apps like clickedIn.

If your prospects read emails (e.g. marketing, swe ) then try cold outreach. Read more on lemlist.com

Join Facebook groups where SAAS founders hang out. You might find more tricks.

If you dont have sales experience then focus on product led growth. Read the book.

Regardless of sales, you must have good grasp of marketing even if you intend to drive product led growth.

Good luck.

[aj_nikhil]

1. It's easier if you have worked in the domain. If not make a list of top 50 companies who might need your product. Use linkedin to find the CXOs of those companies who have the power to say yes or no. Approach them thru mutual contacts or directly.

2. You have to explain the benefits of your product. Benefits should be much greater than the cost. Good thing with SAAS is that commitment needn't be long . One popular theme is "your software increases efficiency" of employees .

Good luck.

[dglass]

You should take a look at "Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook"[0] by Pete Kazanjy.

I haven't read the book myself, but I know some of the other books Holloway has published are high quality and filled with great advice.

Disclaimer: I am writing an unrelated book that will be published on Holloway early next year.

[0]: https://www.holloway.com/b/founding-sales

[smarri]

Just call and email your target market. Honestly most of the time people don't want to do it, but that's all you have to do. And it's hard. But hammer away at it. Also approaching clients on LinkedIn. You can arrange to speak at events as well and produce great content for online marketing, but in the end, just contact people directly.

[ApolloRising]

What type of software are you selling? Are you selling to the enterprise vs. a consumer. Two very different sales methods.

[treis]

>1. How to find customers?

>2. How to sell?

>Let me know your experience and how you learned to sell software.

IMHO, you've got this backwards. If you don't know the answers to these questions you shouldn't be writing the software. It means you haven't identified demand or market fit. Do that first and then write your software.

[pryelluw]

Ladders and funnels.

Figure out how to get people into the funnel. Then figure out how to get them to climb the ladder.

Think of motivation.

Also, go read the Way of the Wolf. Best salesbook there is.

If you have time, any video about Dan Kennedy on youtube is gold. Study the content of the videos.

[kanwisher]

watch the videos on startup school from YC https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum

they are also on YouTube if you don't want to signup

[dinkleberg]

Since I don't know anything about what you are selling, other than it being software, the advice is going to be generic.

I work as the technical counterpart to a bunch of sales reps, so I can't speak to #1, but I can help with #2, I've seen what makes good reps and bad reps and have gone through lots of training with them.

When you're just getting started in a new industry, it's important to understand how your customers buy software. Based on your price point things are going to be drastically different. Can a solo engineer pay for and expense the software or are you going to have to work your way up the chain to get the C-level involved in the purchasing decisions? The sales cycle in these two cases will be on complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

If it is B2B, what types of companies are you targeting? 10 person startups or 100,000 person massive corporations?

It is important to understand your landscape.

From the personal side, it is ideal to be empathetic towards your prospects. Understand that (at least initially), the people you are selling to don't care about you and are only talking to you because they are interested in a solution to a problem they are facing. Far too many people try selling before they understand what the prospect is actually trying to solve.

Rather than jumping on to a call with a prospect and demoing your tool and every feature under the sun, don't try to sell them at all on your initial conversation. Instead, spend your initial call with a prospect on understanding their problem and what they are currently doing. Try to understand how this problem actually affects them. If this is purely a nice to have, you probably aren't going to have any luck with the sale. But if you can discern that this is a $100k problem for them and your software is $10k then you'll know this is worth pursuing.

You may get pushback that they just want to see a demo, but if your product is like many enterprise tools, it has a lot of features to check all the boxes. Just showing up and throwing up all the features in a demo is the way to ensure that nobody is enjoying it. You would have to give a boring generic demo and the prospect would have to hear about a bunch of features that aren't relevant to them.

Instead, when you spend the first call understanding their problems, when you present your own solutions in future conversations you can actually target their specific needs. It's a much more compelling story when you are demoing to their exact needs rather than your assumptions about what people want to hear since everyone is different.

There is a whole lot to sales, and I could go on for a long time about tips I've learned. But I think most important of all is to build relationships with people. Genuinely try to help them solve their challenges and you'll gain trust and respect from your prospects and customers.