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I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

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I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

#1

Post by telecomsteve »

I recently left my role as a lead devops engineer and would like to work for myself under a devops service contract model (multiple clients, each part-time). Unfortunately, I know nothing about sales or the mechanics of creating and following up on leads. Are there any good books that can explain the tools and workflows of someone who works in sales? Thanks in advance.

Re: I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

#6

Post by leetrout »

I am in the same boat and am interested in the same type of books!

If you'd like to have some accountability and some sort of light book club kind of thing let me know, as well. I am a social creature and would love to collaborate.

Also, I have reached out to a SaaS sales guy I know for some personal coaching... happy to let you know how that goes after this weekend :)

My partial reading list while I wrap up at $dayJob:

- Corporate Rebels

- Secrets of Productive People

- Docs for Developers

- Influence, new and expanded (kinda meh so far)

- Cult of the customer

- 48 Laws of power (kinda gross, honestly)

Finished books I would gladly re-read

- Disruption

- Peopleware

- Never split the difference

- The Scout Mindset

- How to win friends and influence people

- Amusing ourselves to death

Re: I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

#8

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

Optimising for sales at the beginning is just not worth the time.

You have to start with word of mouth to test out whether your offering is really going to work, with kindly/friendly people who already know you as a person and aren't going to panic and get demanding in a way that a customer can do with someone they don't know from Eve.

And you'll need to be earning enough to at least partly offset the raid on your savings to give you time to think through sales strategies.

Freelance devops is often _not_ fun though; your biggest challenge will be controlling the seemingly unbillable work that you end up doing where people really only want to phone you up and get advice. Goodwill kills, so set boundaries with your early clients.

So if you are wise you will have a consultancy package that you can use to control that. And you'll have some sort of pre-paid token/bucket/time allocation system that encourages your clients to use your time wisely for the small stuff, so you can concentrate on the bigger stuff.

(When I say “if you are wise” I don’t mean to patronise. I mean “don’t just pretend it’ll be OK like I did”.)

Further thoughts (learned the hard way)

Consider how your off-ramps are going to work. Clients who are dependent on you but always make the cheap/expedient choices can become a millstone: they have to take your advice or you will end up resentful.

And consider how you are going to manage price rises.

Re: I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

#9

Post by downrightmike »

The major lesson will be to ask for the sale. And work that into the conversation, so less "that'll be $99", but more like "So, would you like the blue or pink one?"

If you don't ask for the sale, you won't get it. If you're solving a problem, making the sale is helping people. They came to you for help for a reason, so treat them well.

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