In start-up world, good ideas will also need good sales staff

Wanted: executives who can sell.

That’s right, sell, not invent, evangelize, market, or engineer. In these challenging
economic times, with companies spending hesitantly, if at all, on technology, what
start-ups really need are experienced sales people.

By Beth Healy, Globe Staff

Howard Anderson, senior managing director at YankeeTek Ventures in Cambridge,
puts it bluntly: ”The `90s produced a whole generation of order takers. No companies
did sales training.” That’s a problem in a competitive market, he notes. ”Usually the
company with the best sales team wins.”

Anderson is beating this drum not just with his portfolio companies, but with his
job-seeking students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. In the latest semester,
students of the elite school who had started their degrees in hope of landing jobs as
venture capitalists, consultants, or investment bankers found those avenues closed to
them. Anderson has urged them to pursue sales jobs, a route that few tech-minded
MBAs would have considered in the boom years.

Anderson is so serious about this that he is launching a sales class at MIT in the fall,
along with his YankeeTek colleague Tim Kraskey and Ken Morse, head of the MIT
Entrepreneurship Center. The course is called ”Sales and Sales Force Management,”
and it covers price negotiations, closing deals, and managing big accounts, as well as
quotas, compensation, and the hiring and firing of sales executives.

Selling has risen to an art form at companies like EMC Corp. and Xerox Corp. They
trained sales teams in the 1970s and ’80s and had cultures in which high-powered
sellers were recognized for helping to drive performance. Easy spending by corporate
America in the 1990s led EMC to continued success and delivered big sales numbers
to companies like Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

But today, Anderson says, even blue-chip companies are looking to upgrade sales
forces. They’re culling the order takers and trying to add talent with the tenacity to
thrive in a difficult market.

The dearth of strong sales resumes at big companies, of course, affects the start-up
world, because there’s a small corps from which to recruit. When young firms come
looking for venture funding, Anderson says, they often tout ambitious sales goals, but
they don’t say how they plan to achieve them. It’s as if they think their hot boxes or
software will sell themselves.

”We say to them, `How are you going to get to that sales figure?”’ Andersen says. ”I
assume maybe they won’t.”

DataPower Technology Inc. in Cambridge is a start-up that has just landed $9.5 million
in its first institutional round, with backing from Venrock Associates, Mobius Venture
Capital, and Seed Capital Partners. CEO Steve Kelly says that hiring sales people is
high on his priority list. With just two-dozen employees and a brand new CEO,
everyone at DataPower, including founder Eugene Kuznetsov, is a salesman.

The company has already landed a big, so far undisclosed client in the United
Kingdom. But more firepower is needed in this environment, Kelly acknowledges.

DataPower is in a rather new market and needs sales people with strong knowledge of
both networking and Web services. The company sells a green, pizza box-shaped
device that is used to handle XML traffic that otherwise ties up servers. Kelly says the
product can improve server speed 10-fold by offloading this traffic and making
applications work more efficiently.

”You really need a sales person who is comfortable in both worlds,” Kelly says,
meaning the person would have to be able to talk to both networking people and
application people. That said, he feels it’s a good time to be hiring, if only because so
many tech workers are looking for new opportunities.

When it comes to selling technology, Anderson says, it’s virtually impossible to prove
that one gizmo is better than the next. ”Usually the best sales team wins,” he says.

Whether a new sales culture can emerge from the hangover of the 1990s is unclear.
The stars of the tech world were the inventors and the CEOs who could get investment
bankers excited about a quick IPO. Sales execs were largely behind the scenes,
especially if they weren’t hotshot engineers.

Then again, money talks. Anderson points out that selling is a great way to make
money, especially now that cash is more appealing than stock options. It’s also a way
to become important to a company and climb the ladder to top management. When
things get tough, the ax falls first on marketing, advertising, and administration, not the
top sales people.

It’s black and white, Anderson says. ”Sales is the only area where you can truly
measure performance.”

Beth Healy can be reached at [email protected].

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