Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

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> I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves.

I fully agree.

I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't very technical, but he was always curious about what was possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing. Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to create. Learned a lot from him.

Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since.

Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results, and destroy site performance without any concern for the path of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result, few people in management care about how marketing impacts anything else in the company.

On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats pass blame to.

Things don't have to be this way. :(

Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how can I convince this rube to buy my crap?"

When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to really, truly understand the problems of their customer base and help them find solutions. That is an incredibly special skill, and one that should never be underrated.

I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.

…and since there's so much overlap in the skillset between a conman and a good salesman, a technical co-founder looking to hire them can't tell the difference. The safest path to avoid hiring a fraud is to create a culture that has disdain for the entire profession.

I'd say a thousand rather than ten, but yeah.

Part of the problem is that a lot of products are just shit that can't be sold legitimately, only mis-sold based on false promises. If you're a salesperson in a company peddling such products, your option is to mis-sell and become a conman, or be replaced by a conman.

Interesting. Although I'm a developer, I was forced to take some sales training courses when I worked for Xerox. Imagine spending three weeks in a hotel suite in El Segundo with thirty salesmen & programmers.

The essence of what Xerox taught was: to sell, find out what problems your customer has, and figure out how your product/service can help him/her solve the problem. That's it.

Xerox was very good at sales.

> The essence of what Xerox taught was: to sell, find out what problems your customer has, and figure out how your product/service can help him/her solve the problem. That's it.

Oh, cool! That's the SPIN model[1], implemented by Neil Rackham at Xerox in the 70s.

https://books.google.com/books/about/SPIN_Selling.html?id=0n...

> Things don't have to be this way. :(

You're right, all you have to do to eliminate it is get rid of all of the ridiculous metrics that people try to apply to human interaction, ban billion dollar "platforms" like the social media companies, and reduce everything back down to face to face scale.

We would be better off, I'm not being facetious.

I write code and do marketing (for a living). So how do you label/categorize me?

Unicorn.

Somewhat off topic, and speaking of unicorns: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/07/the-craigslist-r...

You're a person, not a department. I don't have an issue with the profession. I have an issue with misaligned corporate structures.

You are the unicorn I've been looking for. Jokes aside, can I reach out to you regarding the intersection of coding and marketing?

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