111–120 of 157 posts
Just don't be one of the salespeople that promises the client a feature that doesn't exist, then returns to the team after making the sale and says "You have to build this now." F--- that noise.
Of course, it's my company and I'm both the salesperson and engineer, but sometimes you have to sell shit that doesn't exist yet.
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"…
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.
Don't read the Dale Carnegie book, read "SPIN Selling" by Neil Rackham and the book "Getting to NO" <- best book on negotiation I've ever read.
"Getting to NO" is a book about breaking habits.
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"…
I assume you will advertise on your website?
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good book or an audio/video course on sales for beginners? I'd like to learn this skill in 2018...
> 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…
Google revenue: 89b in 2016 Facebook revenue: 28b in 2016 More than 30k of Google's 80k employees on LinkedIn have titles including either "Sales" or "Account" (Account Executive, Account Manager, etc.). For Facebook it's 9k out of 26k. Facebook and google both sell user attention to advertisers. Exxon deploys vast engineering resources to extract and collect oil, but it would be weird to say that because they don't…
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…
My counter argument is I’ve tried to take this advice multiple times in my life and each time came to the (re)conclusion that I will never be able to think of it as anything but lying and manufactured conflict. Some of us just don’t have brains that allow for that kind of thinking, at least not without severe anxiety and discomfort. I can’t sell. I’ll never be able to sell. I think that makes me feel like a more hone…
Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Sale is a good model for thinking about sales.
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…
I'm not the target market and I don't have any idea how to use your tool. The UI reminds me of old grayscale Mac OS. Salespeople are (usually, I'm stereotyping) 'dressed to impress'. Maybe you should put a tie on your project.
Seriously. Do you want orange buttons? Specific, actionable feedback, please!
Nope, not for consumer products. SF doesn't talk about sales because consumer products don't need sales at first.