| HN Mirror

^^ would be interested in this (if it exists). I’ve tried scraping Google for PDFs in the past using terms like: cheatsheet, sales cycle, flow chart(s), checklist(s), etc. and haven’t really found anything that puts it all together simply and concisely. The /sales et al. subreddits have some gems occasionally, but seems like a lot of the "sales-related" stuff falls behind paywalls and gatekeepers, squeeze pages and landing pages with CTAs involving buying recycled courses or resources attached to X pseudo sales guru (more like furus) trying to sell you hot trash.

As someone who has always held a beat on the technical side things (with limited practical skills) and advancements, decent understanding of industry and market shifts, BUT who has always opted to be involved in the more client-facing roles and duties, front office business development ops side of things, I find there’s limited "high quality" resources or even discussion board settings where the science behind selling or business development in general is properly highlighted.

Heck, even formal academia is lacking in this department. We’ve recently seen the rise in Entrepreneurship-type undergrad programs / minors, which seem to be getting more optimized as time goes on, churning out good talent and individuals executing quickly on their ideas, but again, seems like sales in general is something overlooked, at first glance.

I notice this also with the who’s hiring-type posts as well, there has to be 1000s of "fine-tuned" AEs/sales OPS, VPs, etc. that browse this board, which no doubt is meant to cater to the devs and engineers, but I am hopeful eventually the niche will carve itself out. Every firm hiring devs is almost always hiring for sales roles.

My experience and observations have led me to understand that early stage startups usually secure their "business development" talent in early hires (like executives or VPs) with extensive experience in scaling operations with the hope to eventually start adding reps or defining territories, etc. but I foresee this tide changing soon as we enter this era of M&A/IB/"high finance" shift to restructurings, divestitures and spin offs for a lot of the bleeding tech sector and less actual M&A/vertical integration activity.

Private equity firms (who might end up being responsible for the incoming bust cycle - just need to Google things like "private equity will be the cause of the next recession" or "PE ruined X industry" to find books and posts on the topic) who are notorious for focusing on leaning out orgs and "trimming the fat" might have to begin including added sales ops to their early expenses on their roadmaps if they want to remain competitive and keep the numbers healthy for their investors.

More capital will have to go back into revenue generating operations and expenses, imo and traditional ones at that, such as business development talent vs. marketing. The more money your bus. dev people make, the more $ your firm is making. There’s a direct correlation there, since they work for commissions, not their base salaries and performance (%) adjusted annual bonuses.