41–50 of 157 posts
That goes both ways. The problems arise when sales start dictating how engineers do their work. The point is you need _both_, and they each need to respect the others work... unless you want to run a company like orcale and milk products into destruction, but then as we know - oracle doesn't invest in the future of their products.
The life of an engineer is a life if sacrifice and 7 days a week work for five days pay. Often you never have a partner so you're the most highly taxed people in the country especially in California. While you often work triple time you're rarely if ever paid for overtime it's taken for granted that you're not ever compensated for 3/4 of the hours you work. Nothing can happen without you but sales people get a piece…
Your situation sounds shitty. It shouldn't be that way; I hope you're able to find time to step back over the holidays. A company shouldn't treat you like that, perhaps another one would be better. Sales is no picnic though. I know it looks like a bunch of high-fiving frat boys talking sports metaphors and rarely coming to work, but the reality is very, very tough. Different challenges to engineering, for sure, but v…
Depending on the industry, sales people aren't the ones to do these tasks. There's other people that do this for them (nor should they, most of the time, based on stories I've heard from my girlfriend, who is a proposal manager. She constantly has to fix and unbreak and un-ugly whatever they do send her).
In fact for the companies she works it sounds like sales people live pretty cushy lives. Although the commissions the salespeople get for winning a single client's business can be as much as half a million dollars (and their bosses would treat them like ambassadors with diplomatic immunity that could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted as long as they got a win every once in awhile. Meanwhile she had a large role in winning the business as well but only got a slightly better than a writer's salary for it.
In smaller companies I don't doubt sales people might have to handle proposals and contracts, but it's not really their core competency.
It's kind of like an engineer that also does graphic design. They exist, but it's not really something most engineers should be doing.
Does anyone have any book suggestions for an engineer who wants to learn sales / convincing people? Do you recommend doing trial by fire and getting a sales job? I've realized that I am good at the technicals but terrible at selling why people should do what I say.
> It doesn’t matter how brilliant your software engineering is if no one buys it. That goes both ways. The problems arise when sales start dictating how engineers do their work. The point is you need _both_, and they each need to respect the others work... unless you want to run a company like orcale and milk products into destruction, but then as we know - oracle doesn't invest in the future of their products.
Does anyone have any book suggestions for an engineer who wants to learn sales / convincing people? Do you recommend doing trial by fire and getting a sales job? I've realized that I am good at the technicals but terrible at selling why people should do what I say.
Because the types of sales jobs that hire people without sales experience are usually
- low touch, so less applicable to good sales jobs
- low pay
- long hours
- shitty
Instead I'd recommend moving towards sales slowly leveraging your dev experience. Find salesman in your org, and convince them you'd be helpful to have along to help them sell. This should be pretty easy, honestly most sales people want to say "And here's Susie, she's a really smart developer on our team and she'll be able to answer or find the answer to any of your technical questions."
If this doesn't work look for jobs marked "Sales Engineer". Or alternatively you could join a large consulting organization. By it's very nature consulting is half sales/half dev.
One of my first jobs out of college was software sales. Really opened my eyes to the absurdity of that industry. Very wolf of wallstreeet-esque. The tech was mostly repackaged opensource software with a nicer UI and the senior sales guys were doing copious drugs and bringing down like six figure commissions on multi-million dollar contracts. They hired an army of associates to generate leads and then swooped in to gr…
Haha. I'm a technical salesperson that is the black sheep of my sales org. Things are worse now.
As a sales leader and consultant, I kept being asked to offer weekly personalized sales coaching for technical founders. I launched it a few weeks ago and so far it's been pretty great for both parties. Being able to sit down on a weekly basis to game plan the sales approach, go over calls, and hold them accountable has been immeasurable. p.s. if anyone is interested - I'm in the process of launching a "Selling 101"…
[6] http://stateofstartups.firstround.com/2017/#introduction
tl;dr - Most of the article tries to justify why it's important to Learn to sell. Actionable guidance: "cold calling, sending tons of emails, doing prospect/company research and developing cold leads into warm ones" and get a job in sales ("role", "experience", "career"). My personal project is a Chinese learning page. https://pingtype.github.io I tried sending hundreds of emails, researching all the Chinese language…
Right, because so many people buy Facebook products, or Twitter, or Google...
Many, if not most, software products don't sell anything. While there are tons of problems with getting 100% of your revenue from ads, the fact remains that many companies don't have anything to sell to their consumers.
Of course, you have to make a good, sticky product, and so there is marketing involved... just not the sort of 1930s handshake-and-a-smile that this article seems to be describing.
That said, my own experience is biased (I currently work for a non-profit!), and so the snarkiness of this reply probably isn't warranted. Surely for many places, sales experience is valuable... but I certainly wouldn't rank it higher over software development, at least not with the places I've worked at.
> It doesn’t matter how brilliant your software engineering is if no one buys it. Right, because so many people buy Facebook products, or Twitter, or Google... Many, if not most, software products don't sell anything. While there are tons of problems with getting 100% of your revenue from ads, the fact remains that many companies don't have anything to sell to their consumers. Of course, you have to make a good, stic…