First lets differentiate between sales and marketing
Marketing is more of a âpullâ function, as in you advertise your product, hope that the relevant function in a company sees it and reaches out to you or tries your product on their own if itâs completely self service as in whatâs called Product Led Growth. I think that is how weâre currently trying to achieve growth for Polkadot, this is also needed, but usually the bigger deals require actual sales effort.
Sales is a âpushâ function, they reach out to customers directly, they try several times, they âchaseâ customers, they are hungry.
How/why are sales representatives hungry?
They get a cut of the sale. They are judged by how many deals they close, their salary changes significantly if they close deals.
(E.g: Snowflake pays their sales somewhere between 20-30% of every deal they close)
What strategies can sales representatives use to sign new customers?
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Sales are given a specific range within which they can offer discounts and negotiate deals based on the customerâs size, as not all customers are the same.
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Anther tactic that is used by all cloud providers is to give initial free credit to startups and other small customers to get them starting on their platform.
Who are Polkadot customers?
This is a great question. To be honest I think that existing marketing efforts such as sponsoring a football team do not even cater to our potential customers. It seems like most marketing efforts are actally B2C.
Polkadotâs primary customers are:
- Developers & Blockchain Projects â Teams building parachains equivalent on other blockchains. Such as Ethereum L2s. Now before you write this off thinking that Ethereum L2s will never migrate to Polkadot, they donât have to. Why not integrate with polkadot while keeping their main business in Ethereum and enjoy both worlds and both Ecosystems?
- Enterprises & Institutions â Businesses looking for scalable, interoperable blockchain infrastructure.
- Governments & NGOs â Entities interested in blockchain for transparency, identity solutions, or decentralized infrastructure.
Do we want a fully decentralised sales function?
We can discuss that, but full decentralization is generally not ideal. We want to avoid multiple sales representatives competing for the same deal, as this can create confusion for the customer. Additionally, sales teams typically collaborate with solution engineers, who handle the more technical aspects of the sale.
Maybe we can give one centralized team authority over sales? Judge them month over month according to their success. We can either pay them in Dot, or give them percentage of the deal itself, E.g the team will get a percentage of the coretime bought by the rollup they signed for a year. That way they automatically get paid without us needing to take an inital risk, this is also an advantage over marketing.
Unique advantages for Polkadot
Unlike Ethereum, where gas fees must be paid directly in ETH, Polkadot uses coretime instead of its native currency Dot for execution. This provides a unique strategic advantage when onboarding new customers:
- Risk-Free Incentives Polkadot sales representatives can offer X months of free coretime to new customers as an onboarding incentive. Since coretime is temporary and not as tradable of an asset as the permanent Dot, customers are not as incentivize to immediately sell it for cash. This approach ensures that only those genuinely interested in using Polkadotâs infrastructure benefit, rather than opportunistic recipients dumping rewards.