Sales encompasses Lead Generation, Business Development, and Key Account Management. While “sales” is a term that comes from traditional business contexts and does not fit exactly in our context, we will still use it for the sake of simplicity and tapping into existing know-how.
In the context of the Polkadot ecosystem, there is a range of products that could be “sold” to potential users, such as the Polkadot SDK, Polkadot blockspace, consumption of Polkadot Hub & several other Polkadot Cloud services, etc.
To date, there is no established framework for how to organize the sales process. This document presents the current situation, explains our specific challenges, and lays out some strategic ideas synthesized through several conversations with ecosystem agents.
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There is a forum thread discussing the development of the sales vertical in Polkadot. Join the discussion here.
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There is not yet clear notion of a sales process in Polkadot. Typically, the business activities around it are referred to as “Business Development”, a vague umbrella term for achieving adoption for the Polkadot ecosystem. While the key business developers in the ecosystem do understand the general deal pipeline of Lead Generation → Business Development → Key Account Management, most regulars and agents haven’t established a differentiated understanding of the process.
The established teams are looking for direction and strategy not yet provided. “Polkadot Cloud” is emerging as a new paradigm that could give more clarity if it were developed into a full strategy.
The Polkadot ecosystem strongly emphasizes decentralizing all of its essential business functions. At the end of 2023, Parity scaled down its business development operations to let other teams in the ecosystem take over those responsibilities. In 2024, several BD teams got funded through grants by the Web3 Foundation and OpenGov to carry out BD ops in different regions and verticals.
All interviewed business developers agree that business development cannot successfully operate fully decentralized. Strategically important deals require a certain degree of representation and coordination among sales actors. Potential clients should have exactly one primary point of contact and not several agents working on them from different angles.
Not every lead is relevant. Deciding which leads should be picked up and which are a waste of time is important to use time efficiently. This is ideally done by people with a strong alignment and expertise in Polkadot-specific business development.
Polkadot is not a single product, but rather a rich ecosystem of technologies that build on each other. There is the Polkadot SDK, Polkadot Cloud offering blockspace, The Polkadot Hub, and numerous other “Polkadot Cloud Services”, such as parachains and smart contracts that can be tapped into. In addition, there is a range of auxiliary services for RPCs, indexing, validator/collator/archive nodes, etc.
Potential Business Developers often get confused when trying to understand what they are selling.
The issue is made worse through the complex concepts and nomenclature often employed in the ecosystem and the traditional engineering perspective of working on problems, features, software, etc., and not having an end-to-end solution for end users in mind.