What sales actually does and models used

Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end.

Why Sales

The fundamental purpose of sales is to ask for money, and get it — whether that’s from new prospects just being exposed to the product for the first time or from existing customers at renewal time or from partners seeking to sell your product.
The following is organized first in terms of functions, then sales models, some misc considerations, and finally an informal definition of terms (which you might want to read first!) and a reading list.

Functionally Speaking — Pre-Sales

Sales Development
This is the act of interacting with leads and filtering out/in those that should get sales attention. Including, but not limited to:
Sales development professionals are called Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and sometimes, confusingly, Business Development Reps (BDRs). The range of activities they actually do varies widely from company to company, depending on size, sales model, customer personas, how the head of sales likes to do things, and other factors.
Sales development is sometimes outsourced to third parties who act as employees of the company when interacting with leads, the way outsourced call center staff assume employee-of identities.
Inside Sales
Engaging in sales with leads that are.. inbound.
In practice, this typically means a marketing-driven funnel where various programs and tactics “cause” people to visit the website, fill out a contact form, start a free trial, etc. At some point, after some amount of qualification, these leads are handed over to sales or picked out by sales.
At larger orgs with separate, specialized sales teams, you might have Inside Sales Reps (ISRs). And SDRs might specifically be part of the Inside Sales team. And you might also have AEs who sit “above” the ISRs.
In a very large, regimented organization, leads get passed along a human pipeline that might look like Marketing > SDR > ISR > AE > AM.
Outside Sales
Engaging in sales with leads that are.. not inbound. 😃
In practice, this typically means an outreach-driven funnel where marketing and/or sales engages in outbound tactics to reach out to prospects to turn them into leads. Including, but not limited to:
The tactics involved with this are generally anathema to engineers.
At larger orgs with separate, specialized sales teams, you might have outside sales reps that are called any number of things, including BDRs and AEs. Outside-specific SDRs are sometimes called BDRs.
Business Development
Sometimes this is just outbound sales. But more often it’s jargon for developing sales partnerships such that a third party, like a consulting firm, either helps to sell, or directly sells, the product.
Strategic Sales
“Strategic” is a euphemism for “Big”. Strategic Sales is typically a specialized function for dealing with very large accounts and deals where the sales cycle may be many months to years, involve multiple departments and geographies, and many levels of contracts and negotiations. Generally requires some specialized experience.
Sometimes synonymous with “Enterprise Sales”
Enterprise Sales
Selling to.. “enterprises”, i.e. big companies. At larger companies there are often dedicated enterprise sales reps or teams. The sales cycle tends to be long and dealing with large accounts, with multiple layers of people to convince and procurement hurdles to jump through, generally requires some specialized experience.
Channel Sales
This used to be a generic term for the various “channels” by which something is sold, which included directly selling to customers. But over time it’s come to mean finding a specific avenue of sales, usually via a partner of some kind, that’s indirect. Including, but not limited to:

Functionally Speaking — Post-Sales

Account Management
After a lead becomes a customer, sales reps are typically done and move on to closing the next deal. Account Management is the process of ensuring a good experience for a lead after they’ve become a customer and maintaining the customer relationships, i.e. ensuring the customer doesn’t churn. Including, but not limited to things such as:
Account Manager (AM) is a dedicated role at larger companies. Where the product is very technical or engineering-y, the term Technical Account Manager (TAM) is common.
Sometimes account management is relabeled as Customer Success (CS), with the role being customer success manager (CSM).
Account management teams are generally compensated, at least in part, on the revenue brought in through renewals or expansion. Sometimes as much as pre-sales sales staff, sometimes not.
Sometimes expansion opportunities are “owned” by pre-sales sales reps who get commissions on sales of new products into existing accounts.
Customer Success
Sometimes “Customer Success” is just a renamed Account Management function.
Other times, Customer Success is a specialty with its own team that does not report into Sales and is not measured or rewarded on revenue generated — but rather on some measure of customer happiness or health.
Renewals and Expansion
Exactly what it sounds like: this is the process of keeping tabs on an account in order to ensure that it renews, or to pursue expansion opportunities within an account.

Functionally Speaking — Sales Support

Sales Engineering
Sales reps are not typically technically adept, so Sales Engineering provides the technical knowledge needed in the process of selling. Practically, this includes things like:
Sales Engineers (SEs) may not have any engineering or science background, as the core function at many companies is doing demos and explaining product function. The more technical the product, the more technical the SEs.
This is usually a pre-sales function.
Solutions Architecture
Solutions Architecture is (usually) the post-sales version of Sales Engineering. Solutions Architects (SAs) provide some amount of technical expertise to existing customers in order to help with the technical aspects of account management, or to help them solve specific use cases with the products available, etc.
This might actually just be doing SE work for renewals and expansions. But it could also be delivering new product requirements from existing customers trying to address novel use cases or putting together novel “solutions”, like a combination of an existing product plus some specialized customization.
“Solutions” roles are sometimes both pre-sales and post-sales.
An interesting take on this is Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineering role, which is effectively SA minus the sales focus (and probably not reporting up through sales) plus a greater integrations and enablement/training focus.
When the required or demanded onboarding, integrations, and training work becomes too extensive — you’ll find yourself in professional services (ProServ, PS) territory. That’s a sign that either the product needs a ton of UX love and/or that it’s time to build a new team to support PS as a new revenue stream.
Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement is providing all the training, documentation, and assets needed to assist in the sales process. Including, but not limited to:
Sales Enablement is usually a product marketing function, but can also be its own role within the sales team.
Sales Operations
Sales operations is the technology and operational aspect of running a sales pipeline. This includes selecting, buying, building, operating, scaling, and replacing (when necessary) all the tech and processes associated with running a sales process. Including, but not limited to:

Models

There are a handful of different, typical sales models in use in software, especially B2B SaaS (my area of expertise).
Self-service / Product-led
This is where leads turn into customers mostly on their own. So your ads, SEO, website, free trial, etc., do all the selling for you and customers put in credit card info to a form to buy directly.
Depending on the product and business model, pure self-service is often not possible. Thus the advent of chat bubbles on websites and pre-sales “success” teams or bots to staff them. Sales by any other name…
Sales-led
Sales staff moves leads through the funnel and actively guides them into becoming customers.
Land and Expand
Aiming to close small deals [land!] and then grow usage or sell additional things into an account over time [expand!].
Whale Hunting
Going after big deals at big accounts . This frequently involves convincing entire companies or teams to start using your product or wholesale replace something else with you. Sometimes synonymous with “Enterprise Sales” or “Strategic Sales”. Often top down.
Field Sales
A “field” is any way of dividing up your market (potential customer base), but is generally done geographically. So this is selling within that specific area and often involves things like running local events.
Bottoms Up
Convincing individual users and using that as a proof point to convince a whole team or company.
This is the classic SFDC case where the product was priced within the expense limits of individual sales people and then when there was enough individual usage, a package bringing all those licenses together (with volume discounts) was sold to management.
Top Down
Convincing management that a product should be used and then having it chosen for their team, i.e. imposing it from above. Closely related to Whale Hunting.
Process
There are some very formalized processes that get put to use in large sales orgs. What process, and the amount of process, you have will be highly dependent on the size of your team and the proclivities of your sales leaders.
See MEDDIC and BANT.
Misc
Sales staff are sometimes referred to as being “coin operated”, i.e. highly compensation driven. Because so much of sales comp is based on things other than base salary, manipulating those variables is a way of changing sales behavior to get a given desired result.
Example!
Reserving some percentage of commission until a customer is successfully onboarded and remains a customer for some period of time is thought to incent sales staff away from closing deals with customers that are bad fits for the product.
This can go amazingly wrong, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
When to Start
As soon as you have something viable that solves a problem and have put it in front of people who validate that, ask for money — whether yourself or through the product or website.
In non-self-service-land: if you’re no good at asking for money, learn. Or get a salesperson. If you manage to get money out of a handful of people, get a salesperson.
How
I’m going to repeat what I stated about marketing.
For better or worse, most of sales is well trod ground. It’s a lot of manual labor, a fair amount of trial and error, and constant experimentation.
Many more people are going to require significant amounts of work, handholding, education, and then not buy your product.. than you could ever imagine. Learning how to disqualify early and not spend time on them is a life or death skill for sales.
Sometimes the only way to reach someone who legitimately would love to use your product to solve their problems is by cold-calling them. Some people will complain. Some will be happy. Many won’t care. Outbound sales tactics might be unsavory to you personally; get over it.

Informal Definitions and Explanations

Posts in this series (and templates)

Reading List