Great friend (and mentor) Jim Clifton has a nice post up about the disappointment he sees in software as a product.  Jim gave me my first software product management job and has a broad perspective on the topic having built software, funded new ventures, and now consumed it as a small business.

I couldn't agree more that the most important thing to understand is the broader process you are either enabling or disrupting.  If you (or your sales team) lack the domain or business process understanding, you will have lots of first meetings and very few next ones.

One of the companies that I am working with is confronting this reality head on.  Every start-up I have been a part of has learned the lesson (the hard way) that staffing up with a large national (and many times mediocre) sales team for an emerging technology company is a recipe for disaster.  Here's my previous post on Being Intellectually Invested that touches on this. 

Why is this?  I suppose it seems like the right thing to do and I have consistently found investors drive this thinking.  After all, "how hard can it be, pick up the phone and sell."

Here's the challenge: if the company does not understand its product/service within the context of the market and market needs, this approach will fail.  Sales reps will be terminated, soon the pressure is on both the VP Sales and VP Marketing to explain the poor performance, and both will go before the CEO gets the pressure from the investors and is shown the door. 

These cycles of usually good people are expensive, an organizational distraction, and build absolutely no comfort with those to whom you are trying to sell. 

While it may seem counter-intuitive to have fewer rather than more dedicated sales people early in a company's lifecycle, the true cost of adding and losing sales professionals before the company has really figured out how to sell is much more significant than any "lost" sales because of fewer feet on the street.

Once the sales path (or model) is understood, then it's time to spend some bucks on a process and metrics driven VP of Sales and quota bearing sales reps (QBSRs).

This is a fascinating post in which CPA Scot Justice (The Virtual CFO) talks about his blog and Twitter usage as marketing tools stating that 75% of his business comes from these efforts.  Bill Seaver of Nashville-based MicroExplosion Media made this cool video and great to see this type of thing coming from Nashville (where I was born and mostly grew up). 

The true test of any technology or innovation is its application to the mainstream or practical users.  Scot is definitely on the front end of the curve but the adoption of these tools by a CPA who is himself a small business is an indication of things to come.

The rules of marketing are definitely changing as are the costs to reach and engage customers.  The bar is much higher so if you don't have the expertise or lack authenticity you'll be found out quickly and treated without mercy.