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Comment by avitzurel | Hacker News Reader

You also have to know your audience.

storytime:

We had a demo scheduled with a company. We were shopping for a security auditing system for dependencies across all GitHub repositories.

The person going through the demo did an absolutely terrible job at reading the room and understanding who they sell to (right now). Focused a lot on reporting, compliance while we cared more about the mechanics.

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Sales pro tip: The first thing out of your mouth when trying to sell someone is to ask who they are and what they need. Once you have established those two things, you then tailor your pitch to match exactly that and no more. For example, if you're selling a Thingmabob and your target is a small dentist office in the mid-west concerned about filling their schedule, then spend the time telling them about how other dentists' offices have used your product to attract new customers. Don't spend any time telling them about how Thingmabob helps to drive down costs even though it does this 3x better than the competition. Sell people what they are buying not what you are selling!

You can present to people, or be present to people. Sales would be much better if it was much more of the latter.

Kevin from http://fossa.io here. Did this happen to be us?

If so, I’d love to hear you feedback on our demo, if not I’d love to offer you a demo.

kevin@fossa.io

Wasn't you :)

But I am now actively looking at it.

Look at https://datree.io also. Disclaimer: They’re a client.

funny how Kevin's nick is XiZhao

Not really that funny -- a lot of people with Chinese (I think?) names also adopt an American name to make it easier for people to spell, pronounce, etc.

Yeah, my name is Kevin (Xi Zhao) Wang.

But the funny thing is that a slightly different pronunciation of "Xi Zhao" changes the meaning from (roughly) "western prosperity" to "morning bath".

Can confirm. I have basic Mandarin and I would have definitely thought of you as the guy named "take a shower" if you never explained.

I've been a member of a very traditional Chinese martial arts club for years. I've only ever known most people by their Chinese name and been surprised at times when I catch them being referred to by a Western name. Others use either inconsistently or are mostly known by the Western name, so it happens here in Australia too.

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