4 lessons I've learnt from working in sales
Here's 4 things I've learnt from working in sales since graduating University:
If your product is truly great (and I mean so great that people cannot contain their excitement for it), then marketing will take care of itself. People can't help but tell everyone about your product and how amazing it is. They'll make videos about it, start reddit threads, and will be sending personal thank-you notes to you for making such an amazing product.
If someone wants to buy something, they probably will. 90% of their mind is already made up before talking to you. If you've done lesson 1 right, they've heard amazing things about your product from a friend, and now they want in. Your job as a salesperson is to help them fit the product into their life / business by answering their questions. Being a salesperson is being a problem solver, not a persuader.
Salespeople get all the credit, but also all the blame. This is mostly a systemic issue. If a product from a reputable brand is amazing (like the ScrubDaddy), then sales is a piece of cake - an untrained monkey could sell it! But if the product sucks... it's going to be a lot harder to hit your sales targets.
Outbound sales is complete bullshit, and it should be the very, very, very last piece of the whole company. Do it after hiring, improving the product, buying snacks for the office, paying for team events, getting nice laptops for everyone, having a kick-ass Christmas party, getting a coffee machine, and buying a robot vacuum cleaner (or two). If you still feel like you need outbound sales, then you probably just need to make the product better (refer to lessons 1, 2, and 3).