Working without a salesperson

As a tiny company, Fog Creek Software can’t afford a sales team, or even a sales person, or in fact, a sales cat. “So how do you plan to sell your consulting services?” you ask.

“Aha!” I say. “I’ll promote them on my web site! Surely somebody out there wants to hire smart programmers and architects.”

Here’s what I was thinking of doing to make it worth your time. If you know someone who can use the services of Fog Creek Software, and they hire us, I’ll pay you 5% of the revenue we get from the project, up to a maximum $5000 (U.S.) for each referral.

I’ll post more details and the complete terms as soon as I get the OK from my lawyer. (“You can afford a lawyer?” you ask. “No, but we couldn’t afford to buy errors and omissions insurance if we didn’t have a lawyer, so it’s the lesser of two costs,” I reply). Meanwhile start thinking of all your friends who are CTOs at wealthy startups and Fortune 500 corporations that need a small but crack team of software wizards.