I am going to get banned from developer events for saying this but:

As a technical founder I really love having a sales team. I wish we had built it sooner.

A about why I was skeptical of sales as a technical founder and what I learned since

From 2014 we had a support team, and a belief that "everyone does support". It instilled a real sense of customer-centricity in the company culture.

When it came to sales, we treated it like a support queue - if you email us we'll reply and answer the email, but not much more than that. No CRM, no pipelines, no process. Just reply and move on.

With support we tried to be very self-serve - lots of great documentation. If you do contact support you should have a great experience - a fast answer from a smart person - but you shouldn't have to. But you shouldn't need to contact us to get answers to simple questions.

Sales was the same. We wrote an FAQ and tried to send people there. Process the order on our website, please don't send us a P/O! And definitely don't ask us to do a demo. We hate doing demos. Use the free trial.

I had many of the same biases that I think a lot of technical people do: "sales people exist to bamboozle me into buying"; "they will pester all my customers with calls"; "they will sell a product that doesn't exist"

Then I talked to a head of sales at another company who often sold to customers who also use Octopus, who said "your customers are dying to talk to you. Not through support tickets, but to get more value from your product. Many of them aren't using it right."

So I dropped everything and just did sales for 3 months. And she was right! There was a whole class of conversations and feedback we were missing. A bunch of people who needed things from us, but had no one to talk to.

We had a customer who *loved* Octopus and was trying to sell it upwards within their own organization - to convince his boss. And nobody at Octopus at the time was set up to talk to him. "Just use the free trial" we would say. Looking back, it was a poor customer experience.

I also got to know people working in sales in different companies, and realised there are definitely sales teams that are hugely customer-centric and that my biases weren't grounded in reality. Like anything there are bad ways to do sales, but also really good ways.

It's been a long road but our fledgling sales team is now 15 people (including sales engineers). They are customer-centric and truly care. And it's a different kind of feedback. We have more conversations today about specific customers and how we can help them than we ever did.

As much as I love the product and talking tech, my favorite meetings the last 12 months have been with the sales team, because it's *all about customers*. I am really proud of the sales culture they have built.

All credit here to Diana Ortiz our VP of Sales for really driving this culture and execution, and @Roper1982 who gave the best advice I have ever gotten around sales when we were starting: forget the books, just talk to your customers.