I read a short post on Startup Spark about making sure that entrepreneurs don’t forget that they need to find customers for their new ventures.

Ah – how true… and who makes that happen?  The sales team.

Sales for start-ups is not easy and its certainly not for everyone.  You are building your product and your market at the same time you are trying to build a customer base.  But, when you can convince those companies to give your start-up a chance, its one of the most rewarding feelings for a sales person.

Salespeople love to talk.  Its a common theme at QuotaCrush.  I’ve recently done two posts on it: Never Vomit on your Customers, and Two Ears, One Mouth.   Expanding on this topic…salespeople need to make sure that whenever they answer questions in a sales pitch, that they need to understand why the question was asked.

The natural tendency when someone asks you a question is to give an immediate answer to that question.  However, unless you understand the motivation behind the question, the chance is that you will answer the question with information that is not relavant or with information that will not move the deal closer to the sale.  And, you will have lost a perfect opportunity to learn more about the customer.

As the U.S. settles into what some predict is Depression 2.0, we are at the end of Web 2.0.  Not Web 2.0 the technology – that’s still just at its beginning – but the term Web 2.0 because I think it will be forever tied to the idea of a second wave of companies with no way of making money.  Web 2.0 means much more than “free web sites” as many people out of the industry believe.  It encompasses user generated content, using the web as a platform, collaborative software, web sites communicating with each other (mashups and more), etc.   I hope that as we start to take the web to the next phase, we forget catchy names… lets just worry about the one thing that businesses have worried about since the beginning of commerce…revenue.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about compensation plans as I start to get ready for 2009.

As I’ve been planning all of this, I’ve been watching the chaos unfold on Wall Street and I’ve seen these articles blaming much of it on highly paid people in Wall Street firms.  Its always been my opinion that if a compensation package is designed correctly, then if the salespeople or executives are making a lot of money – well then the company must be doing well.  Simply saying that “compensation is top heavy” doesn’t always tell the whole story.   It is true that a poorly designed compensation plan can pay out too much money relative to effort, but I’ve been wondering if this was the case for many of the firms that have gone bust lately.

At the risk of sounding old again, I’m going to rant on another “new way of doing business” topic that has been irking me, and one which I think has implications for salespeople.

I see a lot of entrepreneurs starting companies because I work with all of the investors that fund them:  VC’s and Angel Investors.

What boggles my mind, is that I see decent entrepreneurs who get their big chance to pitch in front of the best VC’s, or give a presentation in front of thousands of people.  Its their chance to make the best impression they can as to why someone should believe in them and why someone might give them millions of dollars.