In this conversation, the speakers explore how early‑stage marketplaces can design a sales playbook from the ground up. They argue that a sales team is essentially a human placed at strategic points in the supply‑side or demand‑side funnel. For SMB acquisition, paid marketing is often too costly and ineffective, so direct human outreach (calls, meetings, conferences) can achieve higher conversion rates. They suggest combining sales with onboarding and operations—having the same person who signs a partner also guide them through setup—thereby improving retention through personal connection. A simple self‑serve landing page can capture interest, after which the team decides where to intervene (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel). The discussion references Bounce’s luggage‑storage marketplace as an example of a successful playbook and likens Uber’s driver‑acquisition effort to a high‑velocity sales partnership model. Overall, the advice emphasizes high‑velocity, partnership‑style sales rather than traditional enterprise sales for marketplace businesses.
Chapters
For those here that are thinking about, you know, sales and essentially kind of building, you know, that kind of initial sales playbook from scratch, I know this is quite a broad topic and this could be an entire group chat itself on that. But could you maybe use an example of an earlier stage marketplace, maybe even one that you've worked with, and, you know, how that kind of playbook has looked like for building out sales?
Sure. Yeah. So I mean, I think you had Cody from Bounce, you know, it's luggage storage, and they're actually layering on some really interesting new products as well. And they've done incredibly well as far as growing both on the consumer side and then on the business side. I mean, I think one of their key advantages is they have more partners for luggage storage than any of their competitors. And so it's just a better experience for the consumer when you've got that liquidity in the marketplace. And I think without giving too much away around their playbook, which has worked incredibly well, one of the things you want to think about Like, okay, do I need a sales team? Like, do I need a sales team? You know, do I need one or not? And, you know, I like to think about a sales team as just simply inserting a human being into some part of the funnel, simple as that. And so you've got a funnel on the supply side, you've got a funnel on the demand side, and you're like, does it make sense to insert a human being at a certain point within this funnel? And in some cases, when you think about on the supply side, if you're acquiring SMBs, it's really difficult to market to SMBs. The value of acquiring an SMB may not be a ton, so you don't have a lot of dollars to throw around at paid marketing. They're notoriously tough to market to as far as to get their attention. If I'm running a hotel or a restaurant, How do I market to that person? I guess I could go to a conference maybe and try and get in front of a lot of them. It's really expensive, and that's basically a sales thing anyway, right? It's not a sort of a scalable paid marketing solution. So, you know, you think about the sales funnel. Well, in that case, hey, maybe from an awareness perspective or a marketing perspective, having a human being contact these businesses directly is more efficient than trying to do paid marketing or trying to do, you know, any sort of non-sales, you know, focused strategy, right? You may find that from a conversion funnel perspective, having a human being at the conversion point to do a call and walk them through, it's economically, it just makes more sense. The conversion rates are higher, we convert more of the right sort of supply. You can think about— I think one of the interesting things about marketplaces is onboarding and operations, right? There's always this sort of onboarding, there's always this operationally heavy sometimes part to either one or both sides of the marketplace. Well, if you're going to have a human being involved in operations and onboarding, why not have that person actually do some sales as well, and then part of their job is to do the onboarding? Call or to onboard the person, right? You could have that person do both. And then finally, retention, right? So if you're looking at that part of the funnel, you know, do you find that businesses or the supply side or whatever side of the marketplace, do you find that retention is a lot better if they've had that human experience, right? If they've had that connection with a person? So you basically think about it as You know, I would build a landing page, right, where they can put in their information and say, I'm interested in signing up, right, for one or both sides of the marketplace. And now you have a base case that's essentially self-serve, even if it's not, even if you still have to manually do it. And then you can start to think about like, okay, should I insert a human being at some point of this funnel? Is it at the top of the funnel? Is it at the middle? Is it at the end? And that's how I think about sales teams specifically. I mean, you can think about the driver acquisition team for Uber. Were they a sales team? I mean, they were convincing people to become drivers for Uber and they were spending tons and tons of money and they were doing that through one-on-one conversations and meeting the drivers in person, right? So were they a sales team or the growth team? I don't know. But you are inserting a human being at a certain part of the funnel for one or both sides of the marketplace. And that's how I like to think about sales teams generally. You tend to find sales teams with these sort of more higher velocity. So you're not going to have some enterprise salesperson who's making $500K or something like that, right? For a marketplace type business, that's less common. You're going to have more of a higher velocity sales team, more of a partnerships team, that's doing, you know, higher velocity acquisition. That's what I tend to see with most marketplaces. And lots of them have made it work pretty well for themselves.
