如何找對銷售人員？
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????下面這種情況是不是聽起來似曾相識？你的產(chǎn)品即將推出測試版。你的員工全是工程師、產(chǎn)品經(jīng)理或設計師。你作為首席執(zhí)行官是唯一一個生意人。你知道，必須得把產(chǎn)品變成錢（你一直在說你的模式將是“免費+增值服務”（freemium），但你還沒有真正采取過行動來落實細節(jié)）。你還不確定，應該采用怎樣的定價結(jié)構(gòu)。你或許已經(jīng)從吸引人們登記注冊的網(wǎng)頁搜集了一份非常初步的電郵地址列表。然而，還有很多事情你需要知道，但卻并不知道。 ????-- 哪些是典型客戶？我如何找到并限定客戶？ ????-- 銷售給誰？（產(chǎn)品經(jīng)理，營銷主管，銷售主管？） ????-- 哪些收費？提供怎樣的價格分級？ ????-- 完成一筆銷售需要多長時間？銷售線索的最終成功率有多少？ ????基本上，你對于如何銷售自己的產(chǎn)品以及它真正的市場價值一無所知。 ????你自然會想到要聘用一名銷售人員來“解決這個問題”。但在這一環(huán)節(jié)往往容易犯下大錯，下面我想談談決定聘用銷售人員時普遍會遇到的情況。 ????我相信這個世界上有兩種銷售人員：開拓型和流程型。（一般而言，我對于將世界簡單一分為二的人總是持保留態(tài)度，因此我能理解我這么做可能招致的任何質(zhì)疑。） ????這兩類銷售人員都很有價值。但他們的價值體現(xiàn)在一家公司生命周期的不同階段。如果在錯的時間用錯了人，結(jié)果幾乎肯定是一拍兩散，而且還會放緩公司發(fā)展的腳步。 開拓型銷售人員 ????企業(yè)發(fā)展早期，很多事情都不明朗、不確定，開拓型銷售人員最為適合。他們不介意銷售尚欠完善的產(chǎn)品，樂于打電話給幾乎所有他們認為可能需要這款產(chǎn)品的人，從中了解到產(chǎn)品與市場需求的契合度。出色的銷售會將自己的判斷力和對公司已有產(chǎn)品的了解投射到客戶正在試圖做的事情（不一定會明確提出要求）中去，而不只是回來告訴工程師們“客戶需要X，請做出來”。如果有必要，他們可以在買賣過程中確定定價。簡言之，他們都有點像業(yè)務拓展人員，區(qū)別在于他們享受讓人們打開錢包付錢的這個過程。 ????我來舉個例子。在JotSpot，我們的第一個銷售人員是尤金?列維斯基。雇傭尤金時正是我們準備推出測試版前后。我們手頭有15,000個電郵地址，都是有興趣在我們產(chǎn)品上線后試用的用戶。我們猜想我們會采用“免費+增值服務”模式，但定價架構(gòu)還沒有確立。當時，已經(jīng)有約100個人在使用我們做出的產(chǎn)品。 ????尤金一頭扎進銷售工作中。他給我們的前100位用戶打電話，了解他們將這款產(chǎn)品用于何處。當他發(fā)覺我們的產(chǎn)品是用于一些關鍵事情上時，他開始要求人們付錢（雖然產(chǎn)品仍處于測試期，也沒有公開定價）。在這個過程中他測試了很多種不同的價格，嘗試用各種各樣的方式來說服人們，我們所做的是有價值的。簡言之，他做了太多事情，嘗試了大量的價格和銷售策略，并將有效的方式保留下來重點運用。他在銷售領域所做的無異于偉大產(chǎn)品公司的快速原型制造。對于我們當時的業(yè)務階段，他太完美了。 ????那么，開拓型銷售人員不擅長的是什么？普遍而言，他們喜歡新的挑戰(zhàn)。如果問題解決了，他們就會感到乏味。他們更加抵觸傳統(tǒng)的銷售額度和目標（雖然他們知道這是銷售工作的一部分）。他們當然不喜歡正規(guī)的流程，因為他們感到這“太僵化”。而且，最重要的是，他們想的不是如何建立一個強大的銷售“機器”——用一些可重復運用的方法來識別、確定客戶，用清單式流程保持客戶參與，大量打電話、發(fā)郵件以推動銷售。 |
????Does this situation sound familiar? Your product is about to go into beta. Your employees are all engineers or product people or designers. You, the CEO, are the lone business person. You know that you have to figure out monetization (you've been telling people your model will be "freemium" but you haven't really done any work on nailing down the details). You're not sure what your pricing structure should be. You might have a pre-beta list of email addresses you've collected from a sign-up page you drove people to. But, there are lots of things you don't know and need to know: ????-- What's the profile of a typical customer and how do I source and qualify them? ????-- Who to sell to (product manager? head of marketing? head of sales?) ????-- What to charge and what pricing tiers to offer? ????-- How long does it take to make a sale and what's the ratio of leads/sales? ????Basically, you don't know squat about selling your product and what it's really worth to the market. ????The natural inclination is to hire a salesperson to "figure this out." But this is where a critical mistake is often made, and I want to talk about a generalization I like to make about sales people when making hiring decisions. ????I believe that there are two kinds of salespeople: Expeditionary Salespeople and Process-Oriented Salespeople. (In general, I'm skeptical of people who divide the world into two buckets, so I understand any skepticism that comes from my doing just that.) ????They are both extremely valuable. But, they are valuable at very different times in your company's life cycle. Hire one type at the wrong time and you're almost certainly going to part ways or radically undershoot your potential. Expeditionary sales ????Expeditionary sales folks are fantastic in early, ambiguous situations. They don't mind selling an incomplete product. They relish in calling nearly anyone that they think might have a need for what you've built and in learning about product/market fit. The great ones don't just report back to engineering "the customer wants X, please build," but instead use judgment and knowledge about what you've already built to map to what the customer is trying to do (but not necessarily asking for). They can make up pricing on the fly if necessary. In short, they almost look a bit like business development folks, but the key difference is that they thrive on the game of getting people to open their wallet and spend. ????Let me give you an example. At JotSpot, our first sales guy was a guy named Eugene Levitsky. I hired Eugene right about the time we were going beta. We had 15,000 email addresses of people who were interested in getting access to our service when it was ready. We suspected we were going to be a freemium offering, but we had no pricing structure in place. We had let perhaps 100 people use what we had built. ????Eugene dove right in. He called on our first 100 users. He sussed out what they were using it for. He sensed when it was being used for something critical and started asking people for money (despite the product being in beta and us having no published pricing). He tested lots of different prices on the fly. He tried various pitches to convince people that what we were doing was valuable. In short, he made a ton of things up, he explored a huge range of prices and pitches, and he zeroed in on what worked. In the sales world, he was doing the equivalent of the rapid prototyping that great product organizations do. He was perfect for that stage of our business. ????So, what are expeditionary sales guys bad at? Well, in general, they like new challenges. When something feels figured out, they get bored. They have greater resistance to traditional sales quotas and targets (but they know they come with the territory). They certainly don't like formal processes because they feel "too rigid." And, for the most part, they're not thinking of how to build a massive sales "machine" with repeatable methods for identifying and qualifying customers, checklist-driven processes for engaging with customers, and banging the phones or email queues to drive sales. |
