Hey Sales Guy - Stop Pissing Off The Engineers
blog.aha.io
blog.aha.io
Startups and customer development (a la Steve Blank or PG) is messy by nature. That's the whole art of a startup - balancing your own vision for the technology with the market demand and other forces. Both hands are needed to wash each other.
So even a small startup should have a robust Product Management function/group/team that has a leg both in the Customer's world and the Engineer's world.
What's odd about this post is that the company is apparently targeted at Product Managers... but reads like its from a world in which the brilliant-and-precious engineers only ever deal directly with horrible sales ogres. If I was a product manager in the market for a tool like this, I would hope my software vendor had a more nuanced view of how customer/technology teams should interact.
My $0.02!
If they're salespeople worth their salt they'll be able to help leverage this newfound understanding to better sell their feature requests.
I do agree that ideally this nuggets of wisdom would not have been hidden in such a ranty article though.
P.S. Their equivalent post aimed at product managers is at http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissi...
On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code.
If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.
It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM).
I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion..
I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers.
Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)
and then sales people make it possible to make money off of that thing...? I'm not seeing how engineering doesn't need sales just as much. It's as if the author just said:
>~ However, the reality is that farmers need well diggers more than well diggers need farmers. Well diggers come and go but farmers grow what matters.
No farmers: everybody starves. No well diggers: everybody dies of thirst. Acting like one is 'more essential' is the wrong distinction to make. (How about: cost to replace, return on investment, comparative advantage?)
Same here. Earlier in my career I had that same sort of "we don't need no stinkin' sales-people" mindset, but once I started a startup and really started focusing on what it takes to sell something, I started to see things a bit differently. I've gained a new-found appreciation for the value of good sales-people, and I've always learned a lot about why bad sales-people are so damned annoying.
FWIW, for anybody coming from an engineering background, who is interested in learning sales, I'm a big fan of the book Mastering The Complex Sale by Jeff Thull. His approach is based on NOT doing the stereotypical "bad salesperson" stuff and actually having intense focus on delivering real value to customers.
Also, yes, there are some businesses where aggressive sales aren't that important. But most companies want to move up into the larger deal size at some point...at which point you definitely need a sales person. So let's cut the BS about sales people being less or more important than any other function in the company. It's so tiring.
For example, I see customer support as the most important aspect of sales now for SaaS companies. It is likely to be the first, and one of the most common, touch points for any customer. So getting the customer support team to realize they are selling too is crucial to success.
The enterprise sales model is still alive and kicking for big contracts, especially in large organizations (enterprises). It just doesn't apply to products that are so cheap that procurement departments don't pay attention to them. Atlassian and Palantir both have sales forces, even if it's not what they call it - even Fog Creek, which was a sort of anti-Atlassian for a long time, has a sales force.
When customers write BIG checks, they want someone on the other end to answer questions, help them find the right solution, and assuage their fears.
Sales is hard if you don't have innate talent or a decent amount of experience.
Design, development, implementation and testing of modern technology is pretty much impossible without engineering education and experience.
Independent consulting engineers may find they don't make as much money as they could with a little more salesmanship.
A salesman, however, with nothing to sell, goes broke.
The relationship is not symmetric.
I agree with the first paragraph where a sales person needs to know more about engineering than he presumably does. The other part which I would like to add is that an engineer (or a competent one, at least) needs to know how his product is sold, marketed, and presented as a sold commodity.
Am I the only one to read the typical stereotype of arrogant prig engineer characteristic between the line? A kind which a sales person would think of.
The truth is that you need all parts of the business to succeed, working well together.
That said, I think there are stages in the progression. In the beginning, you can't sell anything if you don't have a product. But once you have a reasonably good product, you need good marketing and sales to have people become aware of it.
I worked closely with the marketing department in my last job and it definitely made me see how big an impact a good team can have. They did a lot of creative work to sell the product.
A strong product manager is qualifying the product requests, is pushing a roadmap that's opaque where it needs to be, is making judgement calls on revenue vs. "win the customer" probability, (in some firms, work with marketing to) is preparing white papers on what is possible with the product, and often ends up recording demo videos, or writing demo scripts for pitches that show what is possible.
If anyone but a small percentage of the most senior engineers, has spoken to sales - you're probably doing it wrong.
I've worked with some excellent, and some terrible, product managers, as a developer, team lead, delivery lead, and as pre-sales. The worst think their job is all about features, and a great product, but completely miss the product <-> market fit, rarely talk to customers, and have an attitude towards sales that is not productive.
What engineers generally don't understand is how hard it is to get people interested, qualify out prospects who are a waste of time, make your stuff a top priority, and most importantly build trust. Engineers only see a very small part of sales. Unfortunately what they see is the gaps in the product, and the customer's requirements that may not match theirs. Most people hate sales, keep that in mind when you consider how hard of a job it is. With biases like this, it is a miracle a sales team can deliver.
I am not the author of the post, but I am an engineer, and I've worked with sales teams ranging from large enterprise sales, to SaaS inside sales, and I know just like you that it is hard, hard, hard. But I also know, just like the author of the post, that everyone trying to close a deal thinks that their deal is the only one the matters. Getting to club, or meeting your quota is a strong motivator - and one that many engineering teams are oblivious too. I would imagine that many line engineers don't even realize what a big part of a typical salesperson's compensation is performance based.
- If you can only sell when your product has every feature, and the cheapest price, then you're not really selling. You're taking orders.
- The sales job creates value by convincing customers to pay up for added value in the product, or accept less value (or benefits or features) if they want to pay less.
- There are two types of salespeople who find a way to add a lot of value.
1 - Those who are in so deep with their customers that they are almost indistinguishable from their own employees. You know you have it when they're invited to join their customer's company softball team, or the customer's security guard waves them through with a smile. The insight they bring back is priceless, and they allow you to preempt most competition.
2 - Those who are fully knowledgable and networked within their company, and can efficiently bring the full power of the organization to bear on the customer problems, making credible promises to the client.
Either 1 or 2 can add a lot of value. It's 1 in 1000 that has both, so that's too much to ask for. The author of the article seems to be asking for #2. I'd suggest that #1 is incredibly valuable too.
Sales has (a lot) more than it's fair share of dominant, persistent and driven people. They ask for a lot. Not because they are lazy, but because they've found they often get it. If you can't deal with that, maybe you shouldn't be a product manager.
A good product manager understands sales is pushing a boulder up a mountain. They should be patient and supporting. Good ones will direct a sales guy to an existing road map, the feature request/voting process, the exceptions process (for huge deals) for getting features into the next release (which usually means "bring more money to the table"), pre-recorded sessions with other customers/prospects that explain what the product can do in that area (often the sales guys didn't know). All product managers, good or bad, should be protecting the engineers from the worst offenders, and sharing the successes of all sales with their developers. We like to know when you win with our products.
The key to being successful as a salesperson is the same as the keys to being successful in life:
* Be Humble
* Be Understanding
* Be Patient but with clear deadlines
I see salespeople brag, I see folks explaining why the client is wrong, and I see plenty of phony patience but what I rarely see is kindness. You know what always worked for me? "How was your weekend?"
Most salespeople want to rattle off a feature list until they're blue in the face, the best ones only ever say what matters. The best ones don't waste your time by making sure they don't waste their time. How do you wrap up a meeting? Is it 'call me when you're ready?' or is it 'This is what I can do for your business and I think it has real benefit. Would a week be alright for you to evaluate this technology?'. Is it rude to put a timelimit? Actually, it's quite the opposite. Open-ended sales cycles are terrible; endless calls and avoidance, it just isn't fun. The polite thing to do is to bring the relationship to a head; it's hard but it's the right thing to do. Even if you don't win the deal, you'll walk away with class, and in a year you just might come back and win (hardly a rare occurrence in sales).
Most people are bad at sales because they dislike confrontation, but sales is hardly a confrontation if you set expectations correctly. The problem arises when people conceal that they're in sales, or that they have timelines, or that they want to do business with you. Get all that crap out in the open immediately and you'll waste a lot less time.
Here are two pieces of advice I've learned over the years that I've found invaluable in technical sales:
* Don't ever talk about engineering timelines with customers. If it's not released it doesn't exist.
* The only features you need to build are the ones your customers are screaming for; never listen to a salesperson, listen to their customers. Make the salespeople bring you customer examples. Sell something people want.
Edit: I should note that setting expectations is also important for Engineers, but I tend to think of software development as being like a large cooperative painting. If you want it to be beautiful it's done when it's done. There's definitely some accountability on the development side and I don't mean to minimize it but it's important to understand mutual respect. If you have one takeaway from any of my posts on HN it's that you should treat everyone with respect whenever possible.