Polkadot desperately needs a sales team

Ecosystem
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I view polkadot as a company, the customers are rollups. In the future, with JAM, smart contracts will also generate revenue, but for now lets focus solely on rollups.

At the moment coretime sales are ridiculously low for a 8 billion dollars company. Since inception there have been sold only 950 dot worth of core time. Compare that to Ethereum which generated 2.5b in fees in 2024.

I know that the majority of rollups(parachains) are still using auction, but I dont see how coretime price rise significantly enough even with these rollups.

I don’t know a b2b company, no matter how good the product is, that sells their product to business through marketing alone. Sale teams add an extra much needed push. If we believe that our tech is much better than the competition, then we need to push that hard into existing rollups in other echosystems.

This is a race, there’s a bloodbath going on, there’s plenty of competition, and polkadot needs to start shoving itself aggressively to potential customers.

I don’t think JAM is some hidden gem (no pun intended) that would flip the story on its face, it will open more usecases sure, but the core problem will stay, we need to get MUCH more aggressive and be proactive with sales.

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I see how it’s convenient to view Polkadot as a company.
It means that in order to effect the change you want you just need to find the relevant decision maker and persuade them of your case so they can marshal resources behind your idea.
And if you find that decision maker, I wish you well in that conversation.

If you don’t find them, though, you might find it more productive to use a more nuanced model of how Polkadot interacts with its ‘employees’ and within the wider market.
Maybe consider who will do this sales work? A random stranger who thinks that they might be good at it? Will you pay them upfront? Will they make a referendum to get the treasury to pay them upfront? Or is retrospective funding suitable?

If that model feels a bit too trust-reliant, maybe you could do the sales work yourself. Do you need a hand? Maybe ask here for some folks to join you. Maybe convince them to work for maybe future payment, subject to opengov, on the basis of the strength of your strategies. Or maybe they will have great strategies and convince you.

Perhaps you could identify who these potential customers are, what you want out of them and some plan of how to get it. Maybe with more to go on, people here could brainstorm next steps.

I’m not against the concept of ‘sales’ or going ‘aggressively to potential customers’, but posting your analysis here doesn’t really help us get there. If we’re going to start discussing your idea, what we need are suggested action points (or at least suggestions for some way to generate action points to suggest).

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First lets differentiate between sales and marketing

Marketing is more of a “pull” 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 it’s completely self service as in what’s called Product Led Growth. I think that is how we’re currently trying to achieve growth for Polkadot, this is also needed, but usually the bigger deals require actual sales effort.

Sales is a “push” function, they reach out to customers directly, they try several times, they “chase” 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?

  1. Sales are given a specific range within which they can offer discounts and negotiate deals based on the customer’s size, as not all customers are the same.

  2. 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.

Polkadot’s primary customers are:

  1. Developers & Blockchain Projects – 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 don’t have to. Why not integrate with polkadot while keeping their main business in Ethereum and enjoy both worlds and both Ecosystems?
  2. Enterprises & Institutions – Businesses looking for scalable, interoperable blockchain infrastructure.
  3. Governments & NGOs – 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 Polkadot’s infrastructure benefit, rather than opportunistic recipients dumping rewards.
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I understand that you were looking for a more actionable approach, but I want to see that there’s support behind this before going forward with any kind of referendum.

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