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Learn to sell

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Re: Learn to sell

#141

Post by countryqt30 »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #16

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…

Hi. I've also been learning Chinese and am also a founder for language learning products (though not for Chinese ;)). The first thing I thought about your site: So what? I didn't get what I should use it for. The competition for Chinese language tools is enormous, probably just as big as the resources for learning English. I used Skritter, Anki, hackingchinese, chinesegrammarwiki and a Chrome Plugin that would show the pinyin and translation on hovering a Chinese symbol. I just don't see how your site would help me improve my Chinese, beyond these existing, excellent tools.

I hope my honest feedback helps and you appreciate it.

Re: Learn to sell

#142

Post by markfer »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #119
nesyt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What colour should the tie be, and where? Seriously. Do you want orange buttons? Specific, actionable feedback, please!

Do you want him to write the code for you too?

It looks like an app from the 90's. There is zero design. If you want people to use it, you have to sell them on the idea of WHY and HOW they'll benefit. If you aren't willing to do that, then you've already lost.

Re: Learn to sell

#143

Post by sergesalager »

sogen wrote: post #54
peterburkimsher wrote: post #16

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…

Hi Peter, this might sound harsh, but first of all 1.- Get a domain.com to look more professional otherwise if I see "GitHub.io" looks like a code repository Pick a better name for your product. Right now it doesn't mean anything (i.e. dropbox reminds people of storage, submittable.com also sounds like form management, hope you get the idea) 2.- Look at well designed websites (i.e Invision, xero.com, mint.com. stripe…

7.- sogen, I am one of the founders of visualping and super-proud of the mention :)

Re: Learn to sell

#144

Post by sogen »

sergesalager wrote: post #143
sogen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Peter, this might sound harsh, but first of all 1.- Get a domain.com to look more professional otherwise if I see "GitHub.io" looks like a code repository Pick a better name for your product. Right now it doesn't mean anything (i.e. dropbox reminds people of storage, submittable.com also sounds like form management, hope you get the idea) 2.- Look at well designed websites (i.e Invision, xero.com, mint.com. stripe…

7.- sogen, I am one of the founders of visualping and super-proud of the mention :)

Great service man, so simple to get started :D

Re: Learn to sell

#145

Post by convolvatron »

EKLM-ZK88 wrote: post #125
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally just did exactly that half an hour ago. 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.

I think the issue he's talking about is more along the lines of "hey we promised X _and_ that we could deliver it in Y" when Y is an unreasonable amount of time. Situations like that almost always lead to death marches in my experience.

hopefully you will never see the the salesperson charging into the engineer meeting yelling "I promised the customer 6 months ago that we would ship this feature in 3 months, where the hell is it" at a sea of faces that had clearly never heard of any such thing.

Re: Learn to sell

#146

Post by dreamfactored »

selleck wrote: post #22
madamelic wrote: post #8

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.

I was in sales for 10+ years, now am a dev. Best sales book I ever read was New Sales Simplified. Really breaks down the sales process.

Second this

Re: Learn to sell

#147

Post by dreamfactored »

syntaxing wrote: post #81

I agree with the author of the article that sales is important to any organization. It's a chicken and egg game between engineering and sales. No sales means no customer but no engineer means no product. I feel like sales gets a bad rep from engineering because whenever we do projects, it feels like we do the work and they get the glory and money (which may or may not be true). The worse is when a company cuts out en…

Many of the best sales people are introverted. It can be a very strong advantage when you need to ask insightful questions, actively listen, and project integrity. Strong extroverts can be very weak in those areas and many would kill for that last superpower in particular. Having done both roles I have no doubt that every engineer would benefit from learning about sales and having some practise in it. Regardless of whether they pursue it as a career, it is incredibly widely applicable in many areas of life, from selling your ideas, to getting jobs, to dating. If someone really sucks at it, they will benefit immeasurably throughout their life from being slightly less bad. They are basically handicapped without being aware of it.

Re: Learn to sell

#148

Post by dreamfactored »

abhiyerra wrote: post #26

As an engineer coming into sales I found the thing I love about sales is that it is problem solving. If you can get in the door the main thing is you are solving a problem for your prospective client. That is no different from engineering you are interfacing with people instead of computers. There are some great books on sales and why sales gets a bad rap is most sales people don’t seem to have read those books. I no…

Yep agree 100%. It's amazing how bad the general standards are in sales. A lot of people cargo culting off sales as portrayed in the movies and doing the opposite of what they should. Maybe it should be taught in schools.

Re: Learn to sell

#149

Post by peterburkimsher »

markfer wrote: post #142
peterburkimsher wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What colour should the tie be, and where? Seriously. Do you want orange buttons? Specific, actionable feedback, please!

Do you want him to write the code for you too? It looks like an app from the 90's. There is zero design. If you want people to use it, you have to sell them on the idea of WHY and HOW they'll benefit. If you aren't willing to do that, then you've already lost.

I've written about my experience in the blog. Why and how will you benefit? You won't, because you're not trying to learn Chinese.

"There's zero design" - you just said "You're ugly". What is ugly? Should I lose weight? Plastic surgery? Wear different clothes? Tell me what to fix and I can try! But insults get nowhere.

I also think it's very ironic to criticise my design decision on Hacker News. Is there any "copy" here? Design? It's functional. I like the style of HN. But it sure doesn't follow your "best practices" of design.

Re: Learn to sell

#150

Post by dreamfactored »

imiric wrote: post #19

The article makes some valid points, but sales/marketing is just not for me. I understand how important it is for my product, but I just don't enjoy it, and would rather pay someone else to do it for me. Essentially, I would need a Jobs for my Woz, if I can ever aspire to be a Woz. :)

I used to have this same idea. I changed it when I looked into the costs of outsourcing sales vs outsourcing dev. Market rates are around 80:20 sales vs dev when outsourcing. That should tell you something about where money is made and where you may not want to limit your involvement. Funny you mention Jobs and Woz...
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