It's not Business Development. It's Sales

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tl;dr - this post shares a mental model how to think about “business development” in Polkadot right now. Read it if you want to get better at discussing it with your peers. If you want to get the serious exposition, directly head to this article in the OpenGov Portal.

The cocky intro

omg. What an ugly word: Sales. Us tech guys definitely don’t want to touch that. Except it’s not exactly what it seems.

We want the Polkadot ecosystem to find adoption. Which means talking to people about our products, convincing them that they are good, and getting them to a point where they start using them. That’s basically sales.

Previously we talked about this as “business development”, but business development is only a part of the sales journey. What we have in reality is a sales funnel (“deal pipeline”) consisting of “lead generation” (getting prospective users, “leads”, interested in the product) → business development (think of it as b2b sales) → key account management, aka being there for the client.

So I would invite all of you to talk about sales rather than business development if you talk about the process of onboarding new businesses into the ecosystem.

Yes, it doesn’t seem like we are selling them anything, but actually, we do. We sell coretime, we sell them the Polkadot Cloud Services (e.g. calling a transaction on a chain or smart contract IS consuming a service that you pay for). It’s all just very indirect. Even if they don’t buy directly from us, the least we do is sell them an idea of a better future.

The advantage of calling it “sales” is that we can dive into a rich pool of knowledge accumulated over the past hundreds of years on how to do this.

And sell we must. The most commonly invoked example in our industry is Betamax vs. VHS. While the former was said to have the better tech, the latter won the market because it gained adoption more quickly (<cough>porn</cough>).

Let’s accept the fact that we have the best tech AND must rub it into people’s faces EVERYWHERE on this planet to make sure they hear about it.

Confronting our biggest Growth bottleneck

There are hundreds of people in our eco that do sales. They work at Parity, at the Web3 Foundation, at parachain teams, at smart contract teams, in SDK teams, etc, etc… Typically we call their roles BD. Or Growth. Or Marketing. Or Ecosystem Development. Or Protocol Relations. But what all of them also do is build relations with potential integrators to adopt their protocol.

So far, they are badly connected and there is an overall lack of strategy. This is bad. We are selling Polkadot badly. This might be our single biggest bottleneck right now!

If you look at the funnel of getting Polkadot tech adopted, you would draw a value flow like:
Marketing → Lead Generation → Business Development → Key Account Management → DevRel → deployed apps → users and capital

Our two weakest points right now are BD and KAM.

  • Marketing, we are not the best and not the worst
  • Lead Generation is “easy” (it is not, but let’s pretend it is mostly a matter of operationalization for now)
  • BD is limited by the number of humans in the process. A single BD person can work on a limited number of deals.
  • Key Account Management - we almost don’t have this. That’s one reason why we bleed protocols to Ethereum and Solana.
  • DevRel → not the best, not the worst
  • deployed apps - this is a hard KPI to measure and the growth rate here is low because we failed at the previous steps

So our biggest bottlenecks right now are BD and KAM. Imagine we had 10 times the people there. It would allow us to process 10 times the leads to onboard to Polkadot.

Presenting our latest Research

“BD” is known to be an unresolved issue in the ecosystem. I set out on a learning journey to “solve BD”. In the last month, I talked with Christoph from Scytale, @ingo.ruebe from Kilt, @nickdouz from DotPlay, @NickD, @strindbergman, @natalie & @jashar, @replghost, Peter and Yoon from Transistor, @nico_a from Velocity, @shawntabrizi, Nate and Katie from Distractive on the issue.

The common pattern is: We need a strategy and we need ONE actor to coordinate the deal pipeline: pull from lead generation, dispatch to BD and KAM.

I share the learnings this article in the OpenGov portal.

Biggest insights:

  • “Business Development” is used as an umbrella term for sales, which encompasses lead generation, business development, key account management
  • no proper strategy exists, but “Polkadot Cloud” as a new paradigm could greatly inform the future strategy
  • virtually everyone agrees that there should be a central coordinator for high-stakes deals (everyone is looking at the W3F)
  • there is no single product in Polkadot. Instead, there is a range (or menu) of products. The best BD is the one that looks to help clients develop solutions where they can meaningfully integrate Web3 primitives (of which Polkadot intends to provide ALL of them eventually)
  • we have no clue how to grow sales talent and it is one of our biggest bottlenecks (influx of new projects is determined by a pipeline of Marketing → Lead Generation → BD → Key Account Management and our biggest miss right now is not doing enough BD)
  • unclear structuring regarding regional vs. vertical BD
  • a collective could not act as central coordinator, but support essentially every other function of sales (point of contact, growing talent, network of subject matter experts, support)

Next step

For you: Read THE article in the OpenGov portal.

For us collectively: The most important next step is to agree on a framework/strategy (I laid out some common themes in the doc) and to do that, collect the right people to push it forward.

Happy to receive feedback on this; or arrange a call if you are keen to talk: opengov.watch/booking (preferably in the second week of Jan and forward)

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First of all thanks to Alice&Bob for listening in on so many discussions and then sorting all the thoughts into this article. I agree on the separation of sales tasks. It seems we now have 3 dimensions in sales:

  • Vertical (enterprise, onboarding, VCs, …)
  • Regional (NA, EMEA, APAC)
  • Task (Lead generation, BD, Key accounting, …)

Maybe we should get rid of the Regions. Tasks and Verticals require specific skills.
I also agree that we need the central point of coordination. It’s good that David picked up this task.
At PoKe we will start a discussion tomorrow on how we can support in developing a structure.
I would also like to support the work on a collective if others will join in. It could help a lot with growing and binding talent.
Cheers,
ingo

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Thanks for the post @alice_und_bob , I completely agree that we need a some type of centralized coordination setup, a core team to oversee, align, and provide resources while setting clear goals for everyone involved.

I support a local structure, forming teams that truly understand the needs of their regions and focus on potential markets. These teams can stay connected globally to share insights, collaborate, and ensure alignment. DAO tools can help keeping things organized, rewarding performance, and maintaining transparency throughout.

@ingo.ruebe , I’ve to disagree about removing regions. Locally based teams, even if not strictly confined to their regions, tend to operate more effectively and achieve better results. Their on-the-ground expertise and connections bring valuable insights and drive real impact.

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It is sales and Account Management, pick your acronym. If you just sell this will flop, it requires process and variations of process by region. POV

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Hi @alice_und_bob ,

thanks for your post, and obviously everyone for chiming in.

this is Alex D. speaking, Parity’s Success team member, more specifically focused on pre-sales, which is slowly being setup in a way to identify key verticals, their industry leaders and infrastructure requirements to enable integration with Polkadot.

i joined Parity 1,5 yrs ago within the Growth/BD team, focusing on Infra/Tooling vertical, which might already tell you that i have some technical and product knowledge. :slight_smile:

at the same time, i’ve considered myself as a 3-year core bd contributor to the Polkadot ecosystem, being active in contributing to parachains, but also projects like DEX on AH, etc.

right now, i am taking a role of leading the pre-sales team and finding the best way to:

  1. service and enable Parity’s engineering teams to improve the delivery of upcoming products by providing clear requirements on the group mentioned above (Hub, Cloud, infrastructure, key verticals)

  2. enable BD teams sell Polkadot with more resources (value props, messaging, or any colateral whatsoever) , but also with right technical support (and sometimes lending Parity’s name for key deals)

  3. simplify W3F’s coordination within the BD group making them closer to the goals

things i’ve mentioned are both still ‘a goal’, meaning that I am (not just me, much more people from W3F, Parity and Ecosystem BD teams) active in providing progress in:

  • clear leadership and accountability in (BD/commercial) setting direction/crafting strategy — based on structuring of Polkadot Hub vs Polkadot Cloud as two main products (and proposing ideas/further breakdown which could be lead by industry/domain/vertical experts, or simply best positioned teams to pick up any of those two products)

  • some level of unification and coordination between the parties according to the strategy/direction matrix proposed above

  • parity’s pre-sales (for now, just me Full-Time, but getting amazing support cross-functionally from engineers and other teams) is still building processes, experimenting a lot, proposing different things, analyzing the market, what worked and what didn’t before in the ecosystem, setting the foundation to achieving consensus in tackling broader ecosystem BD, etc.). We’ve started with this initiative months ago and the three points on Parity’s pre-sales mandate came from tens of refinements, and I believe is still not final, but prone to improvements.

i am more than happy to share more – but in all the honesty, i’ve been meaning to jumpstart a Community forum thread on ‘building in public’ (pre-sales) and the specific deliverables from last few months, and proposed/planned next steps (and how can the community help). It’s obviously not just me, but rather an org of more teams, my colleagues who have been contributing significantly - so plan to ‘go public’ should not be just me getting out here. :slight_smile:

with that said, while I don’t want to talk much about phrasing/wording roles, I believe we have a few important actors:

  • W3F (leading the direction, enabling strategic approach)
  • Parity (mostly technical/product) // more passive role
  • Eco BD teams // active role, tackling outbound (active) pursue according to industry verticals, as they’re experts in given fields

and proposed way to move forward is structure between:

  • Hub (Polkadot Smart Contracts)
  • Cloud (Rollups/parachains)

with more specific initiatives under each of the two (again, up to leading parties to coordinate the structure/strategic approach, and BD teams to execute).

i haven’t shared anything ‘special’ here, these things could have been taken from the DFF announcements and recent news since the decentralization a bit more than a yr ago. So apologies if I’m being vague, but hoping that I am answering at least a portion of the discussion.

i think this is a fair point to start, and after practical experience and tangible result of performing in a following way, we can identify pain points and understand if we need key account or partnership managers, DevRels, or SDRs or something else :slight_smile: or if a specific vertical is weak (or need more BD people), etc.

overanalysis leads to paralysis, and that’s why I believe we need a minimal structure with clear leadership and accountability, as well as execution and data to know where and how to iterate. especially with market movements/shifts (positively) and more clear narratives to follow (repeating, one of the parity pre-sales team’s mandates is to bring these closer to engineers, so we know how to improve on upcoming products). And I guess FOMO a little bit :grin:

talk soon, and always happy to chat. Please consider me as anyone’s go-to to in these kind of initiatives, and as mentioned – ‘building BD in public’ is in my plan!

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Good article @alice_und_bob and I agree with most of the problems listed here. We are aware of them and are working on solving them at Web3 Foundation or at least the coordination part.

To also share it here: If anybody is working on an interesting deal/contact at the moment and you either need additional support or you think somebody else might be in a better position to lead/help with this deal, feel free to share it with growth[at]web3.foundation, and we will see what we can do.

This is an interim solution. We are working to update the website to help everyone coordinate the ecosystem independently and have some initial thoughts regarding a shared CRM. If you have good ideas about how such a shared CRM could be set up, feel free to also reach out to me or growth[at]web3.foundation.

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