This was the strategy at the SomethingAwful forums. They seemed pretty well moderated, but definitely never hit the scale of Reddit or Twitter.
81 karma · joined April 14, 2014
What kind of jobs are you applying to? If this is your first SA role, you should take a look at the technologies you use every day and apply to those vendors (and/or their competitors). You'll be able to speak credibly to their customers about your experiences and it'll make you a very effective SA.
In my experience, to hire a good SA, the sales skills come in a distant second to relevant technical skills. Rewrite your resume to highlight those skills and you'll have success.
For marketing, I recommend Traction by the founders of Duck Duck Go. It gives a practical guide to tons of different marketing channels and when each one is appropriate https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...
For sales, I recommend How You Make the Sale. It's a general sales book no matter if you're selling software, services, or physical goods and it does a great job of walking you through the sales process and where it overlaps with the buying process. It also helps reframe a lot of the "scary" parts of sales like objections as "requests for more information". Highly recommend for technical people who are new to sales https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204....
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-....
Red Hat is hiring for Solution Architects in both Eastern and Pacific time zones. This is a remote job with some travel requirements for customer meetings.
Solution Architects at Red Hat are technical pre-sales engineers who help customers solve problems with our linux, automation and container offerings. Responsibilities include delivering presentations, demos, proof of concepts, and hands on workshops.
If you're personable, like talking tech with people, and don't want to be on call again, give presales a try!
Apply here: https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/93739/sled-solutions-archit...
A lot of sales books teach Jedi mind tricks and "tricks to close" and crap like that. This is much more practical. It walks you through a customer's buying process and shows how you can map that to your sales process. I find that making a better connection with my clients comes from putting their best interest first and being a good person. No need for psychology or tricks. Once you understand the buying process, and you understand the products/services you're selling, you're good to go.
You give demos, proof of concepts, and talk shop with your customers. Most of it can be done remotely, but for important customers, you travel in your territory. As long as you're close to an airport, you're good.
Base + Commission can be easily $250k plus equity.
You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.
The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.
Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.
Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones.
A free resource I really like is simply running `vimtutor`. It gives you a text file with exercises and you edit that text file directly.
It'd be interesting to collect reviews from established reviewers (rtings, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc) and create an average score too.
It's written by the founder of DuckDuckGo and he talks through all the different potential marketing channels and how to choose what's best for your company.
I thought it was pretty actionable and there wasn't much "fluff".
It's 24 pages, so it's a quick read, and it's from the perspective of an engineer who has to do sales for the first time. A lot of the ideas are taken from Frank McNair's book "How You Make the Sale" https://www.amazon.com/How-You-Make-Sale-Salesperson/dp/B01G...
The other option is to get a job as a Sales Engineer, Customer Engineer, Solution Architect, etc. These are all pre-sales engineering roles where you aren't responsible for closing sales, but are exposed to the process. I know you're already an engineering manager, but Solution Architect is a very entrepreneurial role. IMO, it's a tough skill and tough process to learn by reading, so getting a job with real life experience could be worthwhile.
I came from a technical background as well and this was the only book that really explained the process to me without a bunch of "closing tricks" or other gimmicky sales tactics.
I found these helpful because it was less "here's 10 closing tips and tricks!" and more about the sales process.
https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...
You can see the old homepage here http://josh.com/oldindex.htm
Some of his code (through acquisitions) lives on at the Nasdaq exchange. He's a fascinating person in the history of electronic markets.
I love podcasts so I'll give that a listen.
I'm looking forward to having both the technical skills and sales skills under my belt.
A recruiter friend reached out and I'm considering working sales for his staffing agency.
I'd love to hear from people that made the dev -> sales switch!
I'd be interested to hear what projects you couldn't find helpful information for.