Improving Sales: The Excuse Department Is Closed

Editor?s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a two-time entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of venture capital at GRP Partners. Suster writes a blog at Bothsidesofthetable and can be found on Twitter at @msuster. Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. My first startup was no different. �I had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual. �While we did fine learning on the fly, it turned out that a lot of what we did was wrong. �I've started writing up some of those�sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. As we grew into several millions of dollars of sales per year it was no longer acceptable to "wing it." So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does?I hired a coach. �We focused together on improving our sales methodology, our training and our comp plans. These days there are even startups to make this easier for all of us. �Back then it was a larger than life ex-country manager from PTC named Kai Krickel. �He taught me much?most of it unconventional. �Most of it worked and his philosophies have proved enduring to me. He called his business TEDIC. �The Excuse Department is Closed.

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