I think sales is a skill that mystifies plenty of HN'ers, and engineers in general. Learning to become a better salesperson is the best "growth hack" for your company. You'll need it for users/customers, journalists, potential hires and investors. Many of the tips/tricks are useful across those disciplines. Look forward to seeing what happens here.

After spending a good chunk of my time in sales before I became a developer, this is one of those skills which can set you apart from everybody else.It's such a valuable tool and one of the reasons I've been hired multiple times out of large pools of candidates.

The other great thing is it doesn't take a lot of time to master. Oh sure, if you want to close multi-million dollar deals it takes some time, but if you just want to learn the basics of closing and how to read people, it's pretty easy.

Also, a lot of these techniques never get old, they're still the same methods people have been using for decades, so it's not like tech where tools and techniques are quickly outdated.

If anybody's interested, I can post some resources.

Spoken like a true salesman, not giving the goods away immediately :)

I'm not much of a salesman, but i strongly recommend Robert Cialdini's Influence. The author created the scientific field that studies how to influence human behavior - he is a sociologist and embedded himself within multiple sales teams. The book itself contains lots of references to scientific trials, and has plenty of actionable, practical advise.

Spot on. It really does help in all aspects of company-building, and like you say - it's not an extremely steep learning curve, the basics will take you a fair way.

Please do. Thank you.

Here you go. Some of these were obviously outdated, so I dug around to find resources people could download and read later.

Brian Tracy - The 24 Best Closing Techniques: http://media.briantracy.com/downloads/pdf/CloseThatSale.pdf (I used this as a reference for years)

Promerica - Overcoming Objections and Answering Areas of Concern: http://unstoppablecrew.net/files/How%20to%20Handle%20Objecti... (training guide for their sales people. It gives you all the ways to overcome people's objections. These are fairly universal techniques so I just grabbed this version since it had good examples for all of them)

The Art of Negotiation - http://interactive.snm.org/docs/The%20Art%20of%20Negotiation... (You should also know the two types of negotiating - Integrative Negotiation vs. Distributive Bargaining)

The Art of the Deal - Donald Trump: https://www.scribd.com/doc/119362644/Donald-Trump-The-Art-of... (It's an old book, but still relevant to today's entrepreneurs. The only chapter you really need to read is the one on the Elements of the Deal.)

Body Language for Sales Professionals: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/kyle.html (A good primer for reading body language. Always helps to give you an edge on matching what someone is saying with their body language)

Cold Calling and Sales Pitches: http://info.4imprint.com/wp-content/uploads/1P-11-0511-June-... (Cold calling sucks, but is a necessary evil in any business trying to gain traction. This PDF recommends using your elevator speech for your cold calls which is spot on. Also, you'd be surprised how good you can get once you overcome your fear on the phone, and are able to talk to people and walk them through your pitch)

I'm a dev who has spent many years closing largish deals, and the best thing I've ever read on the subject is "Spin Selling" by Neil Rackham. The focus is on the difference between closing 6 figure deals vs smaller deals and closing deals within organisations as opposed to selling to individuals. http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil-Rackham/dp/007051113...

It's also the only sales book I've read that actually measures the results of its advice, which might make it especially relevant to technical people.

Thanks. This looks like a great set of links.

I think Dan Pink summarized it nicely in "To Sell Is Human": Sales is an activity we do all the time. Every time we want to get something, and have to offer something in return, that's sales.

I'm all for niche HN clones, but looking at the articles on the homepage.. yowza. Are they simply poor selections or are they truly top-notch articles?

I found at least one post[0] that I thought was quite interesting to read actually.

[0]http://casjam.com/system-for-selling/

Similar problem when trying to find good articles on online marketing (nature of the subject matter). So much crap, so little substance. You have to really look to find the good stuff.

What are some topics you'd like to read about? Always looking for blog post inspiration!

Feel free to share something you think is worthy.

I see these niche hacker news clones pop up all the time and then never hear about them again. Have any of them gained real traction?

DesignerNews is alive and well: https://news.layervault.com/

Growthhackers.com, inbound.org and producthunt are the biggest I know of. The key is cultivating a community within them.

Datatau's still going strong.

lobste.rs is pretty good.

It does seem so, I just wish I had an invite.

Sent.

Lovely, thank you!

theeconolist.com is still going

It looks like all submissions are from one user though

Thanks for this! The sales side of startups is not discussed enough on here. As much as I love HN, I get lost in the coding side of it being a sales person myself.

Great idea, I love discussing sales and would love to see this take off.

What is up with the github username in profile? Most of the sales experts I know won't even know "what a github is."

Edit: really love the UI, particularly the main page and the share button. Well done!

Another nice site built on Telescope (https://github.com/TelescopeJS/Telescope).

Its nice to see these communities come up, particularly when the focus is something of interest.

On Chrome (using Disconnect, AdBlock and TabCookies, though the first two claim to be blocking nothing), the page is stuck on "Loading".

Pages that bootstrap their content using javascript are frustrating when the bootstrap doesn't work.

Yet another Telescope instance with minimal effort to customize. You guys haven't heard of Lobsters? Or Pullup?

What more should be customized? It seems quite good currently. And I've heard of Lobsters, but that's not dedicated to sales, and I haven't heard of Pullup, and couldn't figure out what that was by a Google search, is it focused on sales?

HN for Sale?

Ok, this is not the case. How can one estimate the worth of this community? 10$ per user?

Depends, We could all be worth from 44 dollars to 217.[1][2]

I mean, at least we are worth a good 40.

[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/31/how-much... [2]http://b-i.forbesimg.com/tristanlouis/files/2013/09/2013-08-...

I prefer to base all my valuations on the sale of broadcast.com, which puts us at a bit over $10k per user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

Well,given than there is quite a few influencial people hanging around here,the kind of people you can only meet here frankly,i'd multiply that price tag by at least 10.