I watched a few of these videos and I didn't hear outbound mentioned once. Did he cover this in a video? I may have missed it since I skipped around.

I was watching/listening to it from the perspective that the company is generating inbound leads from a marketing team/channel.

I read a similar post from Peter Levine earlie this week too. And in this of videos, I think it is a bit more inbound focused.

However, I will say. The moment you start hiring sales reps and marketing reps, here is what starts to happen:

1) Any leads generated from Youtube or inbound email inquiries or etc are treated as "golden leads" and are typically given to the most politically connected reps

2) These inbound leads happen so infrequently that reps often just sit around waiting with "nothing to do"

3) So then marketing starts thinking about outbound massive email blasts to send out

4) and sales reps start thinking about outbound cold calling campaigns to "follow up on the email we sent you"

5) anddd now you've got 500k of payroll per year engaged in the least productive, most intrustive form of prospecting in the world

6) when you should probably just focus that on making your product and youtube presence so wicked that people bang down your door to buy

Not everyone has access to millions of dollars in investment. How am I supposed to keep my startup above the water if we don't sell our product? How are we going to get feedback?

Why aren't people using your product? Why aren't they banging down your door for more features and support?

Until they're doing this, your product isn't good enough.

> Why aren't people using your product

Obviously because no one is (would be) selling it and thus no one knows about it.

I unfortunately must disagree with you here. For one of my services, a reddit post and a youtube video were all I needed to get 200 users overnight.

Now, most of them didn't pay, but I can assure you they were beating down my door for more service and more features and etc.

That's nice, but:

1) 200 customers, even if everyone paid, is an order of magnitude less than I need to pay my team (we're primarily a research&development company)

2) Our product/service isn't something you buy without a second thought on an e-shop, based on YouTube video or a Reddit post, it's a big, long-term and important investment that will be a powerful factor in the decisions of your company for the next 10 years and the selling process involves a great deal of analysis and customization, and of course internal negotiation and decision making at the customer's side

3) Our product/service isn't something you'd think you need before we offered it to you, and each company has very different needs

4) Everyone we're competing against has powerful sales teams, if we don't do it, everyone will buy from them because they got there first and the cost of switching is way too big

That's a bold statement. What's your reason to make it?

I replied to the other two posters with some detail but I will give you another story from a former employer:

This employer sold a tool that removed crappy data from salesforce databases. It was available for free from competitors, but the company was too proud to release it for freemium-type marketing.

So, they constantly had a revolving door of 30 high school graduates who would be calling literally random people that the IT guy scraped a list off of random sites. The quality of the data was atrociously bad, but the CEO didn't believe it was bad. He instead blamed the interns and the reporting, fired them all, and brought new, "hungrier" ones in and forced them to use an auto dialer.

Out of the 60,000 phone calls this team made, not a single one of them resulted in a sale. The company continues to burn 800k a month in losses.

They have tried to pivot to a Youtube presence, but they only have one guy doing it instead of a full team. Additionally, their product is shit and non-differentiated. So, it's only a matter of time until their Founder, who is worth 150M, decides its time to pull the plug on his terrible, disorganized side-project of a company.