Why Sales, Why Now?

The world of sales is blowing up. It's a $500 billion dollar industry that employs over 15 million people in the US alone. Salesforce, a sales technology company, may soon be doing $10 billion in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). For reference, that's what the NFL made in revenue in 2014!

The Sales industry itself is currently undergoing a transformation. One could call it the acceleration or the automation era and long gone are the days of rolodexes with smiling and dialing.

There is more financial investment in sales, and more talented people are choosing careers in sales than ever before. The Ivy Leaguers that would once jump straight to finance jobs at Goldman Sachs are getting into the sales game instead. Big venture capital firms are funding sales automation and acceleration start-ups. There are more cash-rich companies in the space with capital to spend on natural acquisitions than ever before. It's a good time to be in sales.

Business executives are realizing that a good sales team will make or break your business. Here's a quote from Peter Thiel's lecture on distribution, given in his Stanford computer science class. Peter is one of Silicon Valley's most outspoken angel investors.

"The first thing to do is to dispel the belief that the best product always wins. There is a rich history of instances where the best product did not, in fact, win. Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current electrical supply system. It was, for a variety of reasons, technologically better than the direct current system that Thomas Edison developed. Tesla was the better scientist. But Edison was the better businessman, and he went on to start GE. Interestingly, Tesla later developed the idea of radio transmission. But Marconi took it from him and then won the Nobel Prize. Inspiration isn't all that counts. The best product may not win."

–Peter Thiel CS183 - Class 9

That's from someone who's been a part of some of the most successful tech companies of the past two decades (PayPal, Facebook, Yelp, Palantir, and many more), is worth over $2 billion, and comes from a product background.

Sales is in everything you do.

Yet with all of these facts, only a handful of colleges offer degrees in sales and most MBA programs don't offer a single sales class. That's why I'm writing this book.

So much is changing, and there are so many new things to take advantage of as a modern-day salesperson. So today, consider this your enrollment—the beginning of your degree in modern sales. I call it Sales Hacking.

Who This Book Is For

This book was written for anyone who is in a selling role. To be more specific, this book is for:

• The individual sales reps who want to get ahead of their peers and be at the top of their organization
• The early sales hire that has to sell and create a process as he goes
• The early-stage company with a co-founding team looking to build out a sales process that they can then bring in experienced salespeople to run

Anyone building a sales process in which you sell to an entity, such as business, government, etc.

Where This Book Fits In

• Your company has a sales process, but it was built in the Prohibition Era.
• You have a process and you're crushing it, but you're working too hard.
• You have product market fit, and some paying customers—Now what?

What This Book Is Not

Start-up Sales 101. I am not here to help you figure out product market fit, validate ideas, give you lean start-up methodology, etc. Want more of this? Steli Efti has a great short book on this that I recommend.

This book is not here to answer all of your problems, you're still going to have to figure out what works for your individual business. Every one of them is different. I can give you the guidance you need to figure those things out on your own though, and that's extremely valuable.

A guide on how to hire, train, and manage teams. I'm here to help the sellers, hunters, and deal-closers.

Having a process, even if it's weak, is extremely important. Without it you're disorganized and disjointed. If you're not tracking and measuring, then how are you supposed to get better? A process is always a work-in-progress, no matter how good the results. The best assets of sales teams and salespeople are great organizational and analytical skills. Companies that figure this out early, and build a strong and streamlined engine, will surpass their competitors. Reps that figure this out will out-sell their peers.

This book was made to help you build a strong foundation. Specifically, this book will help you to do the following:

• Build pipeline in a repeatable and scalable manner that can be refined and enhanced over time
• Close deals faster and nurture leads properly
• Take advantage of all of the new technologies that make it possible to be more efficient

This book can be used at any stage of a B2B business. Some companies will use this book later on to strengthen an existing business. Some will use it early and build from scratch. Consider this your guidebook.

A lot of books claim to have all of the answers, but that's ridiculous. In the end, all companies are made differently. Different variables such as industry, country, deal size, deal cycle, and target buyers affect outcomes greatly.

While I don't promise to serve you the answers on a silver platter, I will put you on the path to find them for your company. I'll talk about problems and solutions as generally as possible, just know that parts of the process vary greatly for different companies. One example is Salesloft's cadence, which I'll explain later in the book, this candence may be drastically different from what yours should be for many reasons. What they do may not work for you. Take this book as a guide, but don't blindly follow. Always test and optimize to find what's right for you.

Most of the book will focus on outbound sales. However, much of this advice will work for inbound sales as well, for example segmenting, messaging, and lead research are relevant to both.

Regardless of how much inbound you have, you should be doing some level of outbound. Always hunt. If your inbound is good you'll have cash to pay the base salary for an outbound hunter. If people come to you and want your services, others that haven't found you might show the same interest, right? Go upstream, aim high, and go get them!

---

About the Author

Max Altschuler has been an entrepreneur his whole life and learned sales at an early age from his father, David, who was a financial advisor.

His entrepreneurial journey led him to San Francisco to work for an online education company called Udemy, in which he was the first sales hire and built the process that launched the Instructor side of the marketplace.

Udemy recently raised a $32 million dollar series C round of funding with a valuation in the hundreds of millions. After Udemy, Max helped build the AttorneyFee marketplace as the Vice President of Business Development and departed after their acquisition by LegalZoom.

He started Sales Hacker, Inc. to help other startups with fewer resources to sell their products and services to large corporations. This book is a product of the community and we're excited to see the growth and innovation that comes out of it