Sales Motion

Selling used to be one undifferentiated block of work. Hire people, have them make calls, have them book meetings, and the only distinction that mattered was who was good at it. Then subscription software companies started seeing contract sizes inside a single company spread across a factor of several hundred. On one end sits an individual paying 9,000 won a month by card. On the other sits a corporation signing a 200-million-won annual agreement. Approach both the same way and one of them breaks.

It breaks in two directions. Assign a rep to the 9,000-won customer and hold two meetings, and the labor cost of those two meetings exceeds everything that customer will ever pay. Revenue goes up while every additional sale loses money, which is why the problem usually gets noticed late. The other direction is handing a signup page to the 200-million-won buyer. That company has to pass a security review, a legal reviewer has to work through the agreement, and three departments that will actually use the product have to agree. A signup button answers none of it.

Pagedeck lost its footing here once. In a quarterly review Grace asked why the win rate had dropped by half, and Sofia opened her calendar. A three-person company and a three-hundred-person company sat in identical thirty-minute slots. The first would have paid without any meeting at all. The second couldn't settle anything in thirty minutes. Sofia hadn't done anything wrong — nobody had decided who gets met, and how.

So companies began splitting customers by size or industry and attaching a different path to each group. The name for one of those paths is a sales motion. Which one applies isn't a matter of preference; it's set by average deal size, the average amount that arrives from one closed deal. That figure directly caps how many hours a person can spend on a single customer. The arithmetic is blunt. Spend twenty rep-hours on a 6-million-won annual contract and you have sold time at 300,000 won an hour, which is usually more than the company keeps from that contract in a year.

The terms under this name fall into two branches. One covers where and how customers get met (form). The other covers what gets said once you're in front of them, and in what order (approach). The branches don't substitute for each other. A company picks one from each and layers them.

Form splits by the path to the customer and the size of the deal. There are five.

1. Inside sales — running the whole process by phone and video without visiting the customer. One rep can hold five or six meetings a day, which suits handling many mid-sized deals at once. Contracts in the range of a few million to a few tens of millions of won a year mostly run this way.
2. Field sales — the rep travels to the customer's site. Half a day disappears into travel, so two meetings is the daily ceiling, and the deal has to be large enough to cover that. It survives in industries where the conversation requires seeing a factory or a branch office, and in ones where the decision-maker rarely joins a video call. The travel buys something real: a rep who has walked the floor can describe the customer's own process back to them, which is hard to fake over a call.
3. Enterprise sales — selling to large corporations over a long horizon. Six to eighteen months pass between first contact and signature, and the person across the table keeps changing. The using department, information security, legal, and procurement arrive in turn, each asking about something different. Several people work one deal, and one deal is worth dozens of deals from any other motion.
4. Transactional sales — small amounts, fast decisions. A call or a few emails finishes it, and the buyer doesn't deliberate long. Self-serve signup, where the customer registers and pays without ever speaking to anyone, is the far end of this motion, and many companies blend the two by having a person step in only for buyers who stall at the payment step.
5. Channel sales — selling through partner companies instead of directly. It's a way to multiply the number of people selling, useful in regions where sending your own staff is impractical or where another firm already holds the customer relationships. The cost is a commission on each sale, so the same contract brings in less, plus a person now sits between you and the customer and requirements reach you late. Partners rarely sell only your product either, so getting their reps to mention you first becomes a separate job.

Approach governs the structure of the conversation. There are three.

1. Consultative selling — pushing the product talk back and starting with the buyer's situation. A first meeting made entirely of questions is common. How does this work get done today, where does time leak, how much does that leak cost per month. Only after counting it together does the product come out.
2. Solution selling — selling a resolved problem rather than a feature list. Instead of introducing real-time co-editing, permissions, and version history one by one, it raises the situation where three people edit the same document and end up with three different files, then shows that situation disappearing. It looks like the previous approach but the weight sits elsewhere. Consultative selling puts its weight on asking; solution selling puts it on assembling an answer and handing it over.
3. Land and expand — not chasing a company-wide contract up front, but entering small with ten seats on one team and widening to neighboring teams afterward. It lowers the bar on the first contract so several decision-makers don't have to be convinced at once, and the widening is picked up by whoever owns the account after signing. The tradeoff is that the first deal is small, so if that one team never really uses the product there's nothing to widen from.

Layering the two branches produces what an actual company looks like. One firm meets mid-market buyers through inside sales while running the conversation consultatively. Another visits large corporations but still starts small and grows the footprint. What decides the combination is the average deal size mentioned earlier. Below roughly a million won per deal per year, attaching a person puts the deal underwater, so it belongs in self-serve and transactional territory. In the tens of millions, inside sales fits. Once deals reach the hundreds of millions, visits and a long horizon become unavoidable. And the path isn't the only thing that changes across those bands. Who gets hired, what material they carry, how many accounts one person holds, and how often results are counted all move with it. In the self-serve band the signup flow decides the outcome rather than headcount; in the top band one person cannot hold twenty accounts at once.

Which side a whole company leans on is a decision one level above this. Leading with a sales organization to generate revenue is called sales-led growth; letting the experience of using the product drive spread and purchase is called product-led growth. The first grows revenue by adding reps, the second by reworking the signup flow and the free tier. Choosing one doesn't erase the other. A team that arrived through the product eventually grows to the point where someone has to write a contract, and sales takes that seat. The reverse happens too — a company that sells only through reps still ends up building a self-serve path once the volume of small inbound requests outgrows the people answering them.

"This account is too big to run inside. I'll put a visit on next week's calendar."

The same product needs a different path depending on the size of the buyer.

"We haven't settled our sales motion yet. Right now we're selling one product three different ways."

Each rep is running their own path, so there's no way to compare what worked.

"Going through the channel drops what we take in by 20 percent. In exchange we stop sending people to every regional account."

Commission and headcount cost are being traded against each other.

Pagedeck drew this line for the first time right after its Series A. Grace and Sofia laid out a year of contracts by size and found that deals under thirty seats were 70 percent of the count and 15 percent of the money. Sofia had spent more than half her hours on that 70 percent. They set the line at thirty seats: below it, buyers go through signup and the payment page, and questions get answered with help articles. Above it, Sofia gets involved directly.

What changed afterward wasn't only Sofia's calendar. Mia's priority list shifted too. For accounts under thirty seats to get through without a person, the flow for inviting teammates right after signup had to work without friction. Deciding a sales motion doesn't stay inside the sales team; it moves what the product builds next. The first item Mia picked up that quarter wasn't a feature at all — it was the wording of the invitation email.

The most common mistake is reading this as a rep's personality or style. It mixes easily with stories about who prefers to be on the road and who prefers the phone. In practice it's a structure the company sets: how many hours one customer is worth, who spends them, and how far the process has to run without anyone involved. Those numbers come out of contract prices and customer counts. Leave it to individual preference and different paths run side by side inside one company with no basis for comparing them. When the win rate falls, nobody can tell whether the motion or the person caused it, and nobody can say who to hire next.

Treating it as a one-time choice is the other frequent mistake. Each motion has its own name, which makes it look like a menu with one selection. Established companies usually run two or three at once — small buyers through self-serve, mid-sized ones over video, and only the largest through visits. That means the dividing line and the handoff procedure have to be defined as well. Skip that and leakage runs both ways: a large buyer slips in through self-serve and sits unnoticed on the free plan, or a rep attaches to a small account and spends more in labor than that account will ever pay. Neither shows up on a revenue report; both surface only when time per rep or margin by deal size gets counted separately. Companies that draw the line tend to spend more care on the handoff than on the line itself. Unless it's written down which conditions move a self-serve account to a rep, and what travels with it, the line holds for about a month. Most teams settle on a trigger they can watch without anyone remembering to look, such as a workspace crossing a seat count or a billing page visit from a company domain already on the target list.