What's easier to hire for in NYC? Developers or salespeople?
Well, let's see... if hiring is a function of the top of the funnel--the number of leads you get, you have to imagine that at least finding larger pockets of those people is helpful to the process.
There are two meetups of Ruby devs that total over 3,000 people in NYC. There's an iOS developer meetup that hosts over 4,000--and two more than have more than 1,000 each.
In terms of companies, the average NYC founder can name a bunch of places off the top of my head that have over 50 engineers--Google, MLB, Gilt, Spotify, Foursquare, Etsy, Mongo, Appnexus, Shutterstock, Yodle, Meetup, Squarespace, Quirky, Shapeways, Stack Exchange, Refinery29, Aereo, Smartling, Tapad, Taboola, Yext, all the agencies, all the banks, etc, etc.
Ok, so who has over 50 salespeople?
Who are the top sales leaders in NYC? It feels like the revenue engines of NYC are pretty under the radar compared to the teams that write the code. Is it me, or are the top CTOs in NYC much more of a startup household name than the folks at the top of the sales organizations?
And I thought NYC was supposed to be all about salespeople and not developers? So where are they?
There are a few burgeoning groups out there that are starting to take shape--but they're quite small in comparison to the size of the overall population of salespeople. Why? If anything, there's just as much turnover in sales orgs, if not more--so wouldn't salespeople want to connect with others to check out new opportunities.
And sales is changing a lot. The number of tools available to sales groups has skyrocketed--so keeping up with best practices seems more of a challenge than over.
It can't be a time thing. Don't tell me time is money, because the average developer is putting in just as many sheer hours as anyone in the organization, but they still find a way to interact with the community. Plus, sales teams aren't all about hours--they're about the productivity of their hours. If anyone knows about how to leverage knowledge and tactics into better output, they do--so I'd assume they'd understand something learned is something gained later on.
So why is the community of salespeople so fragmented compared to engineering, design, founders, or VCs?
On Monday, I've got a best practices event going with top sales folks from H.Bloom, Offerpop and JW Player and it's something I'd love to discuss with the sales professionals in attendance. Hope to see you there.