Risks of not having a sales team in your software company

Generally, software companies are born with technical profiles, whose professionals have often started working as developers for other companies or are taking their first steps in the business world by creating their technology-based businesses.

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Now, how are these people who start a software company supposed to manage their first customers, if they occupy both the roles of owners and employees? At this point, a developer may be hired. As these few people start working, they will generate larger projects that they can no longer manage alone. So, the logical thing would be for them to seek to hire more people who have a commercial profile.

The company begins to develop little by little, but at first, the only real area that exists is operations, which are the programmers. However, there comes a time when every company wants to grow even if it only has software developers and no vendors of these services.

This article proposes to explain the main risks associated with the lack of a commercial team in your software company and the importance of building a commercial area that allows you to develop a profitable business that is oriented to the technology market.

Risks of not having a sales team in a software company

As software companies have this technical profile, they often take for granted that even commercial management can be carried out by their developers, even if they do not know sales strategies. This belief system can lead to risks due to the lack of an influential business team. Below, we reveal what those risks are and how to avoid them.

1. Work overload.

When a developer or systems engineer works to implement technology solutions for their customers without the help of other business-oriented people, they will most likely end up overworked and unable to cover all their customers' needs or respond to your questions or concerns.

You can only make use of your technical knowledge and hope that they understand the explanations, your experience, and the recommendations that you provide as the stimulus they need to buy the service. But the reality of modern companies does not usually generate profiles of passive customers who do not question what is being offered to them.

Modern customers investigate, so the information transmitted by the developer could even be previously known. In these cases, what customers expect is not that the developers work on technical specifications that they have already researched before, but that they put themselves in their shoes, that they understand their current needs and that they know how to convey why they should acquire a certain technological solution.

2. Lack of a commercial profile in sales negotiations with customers.

From what was mentioned in the previous section, the risk of not being able to build a commercial profile for customers. In this sense, a sales representative who belongs to a sales team of several people, even a sales team made up of a single person, who can be the same sales manager, can more effectively guide customers in their journey through the commercial funnel, than a developer conditioned by a technical profile.

Without a commercial profile, customers may assume that the developer is selling a generic technological tool and not a customized solution, which can only be achieved by having commercial representatives who first understand the origin of the problem to later determine the best commercial alternative to solve it.

3. Commercial stagnation.

By not having the ability to choose which company to work with and go out and sell to, you depend on the customer you have been working with for years to continue hiring you since if you are alone in the software implementation you cannot manage so many at the same time.

Consequently, you cannot increase the growth of your company unless your customers ask you for more hours of dedication to a project. Therefore, success or failure will depend on the number of hours that another customer company hires you, and that is something that you cannot manage or decide over time.

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How to avoid risks in the absence of a commercial team

As a result of this, the way to solve the lack of a commercial team is by hiring a commercial team that works independently of the founders to sell and has at least one person whose role is one hundred percent focused on commercial matters and who is not dedicated to selling and, at the same time, directing the area of human resources or finance, to cite an example.

In a nutshell, it means that the roles must be well defined. However, the objection that some salespeople often have is that they are in charge of a very technical task and that to sell software the person hired should be a programmer, which is not necessarily the ideal scenario.

Instead, hiring a person who is specialized in commercial management is the best decision to sell and teach the fundamental issues within sales, so that when the time comes for a technical demonstration, the salesperson can look for a technician who answers the doubts of customers, and then continue the business process through the sales representatives.

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In conclusion, if you have a start-up software company that does not have a commercial team, you may be aware of these risks or they may manifest over time.

In our experience, typically having a sales team, not only in a software company but in any field, allows sales efforts to be more accurately focused on different customer profiles, responding to specific needs that provide them with greater satisfaction with technological experience.