
Tech people can't sell - astrec
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2009/02/tech-people-cant-sell.html
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cyberpunkdreams
I saw some friends pee away £40K of their own money for just reasons outlined
here. It's too true.

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patio11
Tech people can sell fine, once they realize that sales is an engineering
problem. (Or it can be, if you set out to make it that way. I suppose you
could also do it by believing in magic and hoping magic works for you.)

See also: marketing, PR, and customer support.

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johnyzee
> If you've got something to sell or are already selling something, [the
> nextNY presentation] is a must-attend!

A corollary to the article's point is that sales and marketing precludes
building product, so that sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

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nolanbrown23
In a startup in the process of building a product, a business guy is the
biggest drag a company has. You might as well swim across a lake with anchors
tied to your legs. They provide almost no value to the company and instead
stand around advocating pulling cash from development (outsource!) and putting
it towards something the company doesn't need yet like marketing. (This
statement is based on personal experience in various startups from both
internal and external viewpoints)

A tech guy can build and run a company, it doesn't take a genius to do it. He
may fumble a little bit more and have a bigger learning curve for things like
accounting and business law, but even business guys have the same issues. The
only time a business guy can make a solid contribution is only when there are
both customers and money, not before.

Bottom line, if he's not writing code, he's not helping enough. It's not a 2
way street in terms of symbiotic needs between business and tech people.
Business people need tech people or they have no business, tech people only
need business people once they already have a business.

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lacker
I liked the article except for this complaint -

 _I see businesspeople ask for tech all the time to build a great idea but
where are the tech people clamoring for a businessperson to market and sell a
great product?_

Many tech people can do a reasonable job at business for a while until you
find just the right business person. Whereas much of the "clamor for tech
people" is from business guys who need tech people just to get started, so
they are desperate for anybody.

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ABrandt
As a business guy, I completely agree that we are helpless to develop a web
application at the start. We develop a thorough business plan to put our great
ideas to paper, evaluate the structural requirements for said business, and
set off to file the proper government documents. As soon as we receive our
EINs from the IRS, however, that horrible pang of incompetency sinks in--we
just dont $_GET it.

The point is that in developing a business, we both have our own strengths and
weaknesses. Great things happen when people accept that fact.

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rgrieselhuber
The overall point to this article contains some truth but I came away with the
impression that "tech" people and "biz" people are somehow genetically
different. Either one, in reality, can learn to do the other one but it takes
time, practice and lots of mistakes.

As a tech person learning how to sell in the last year, I've made many
mistakes and learned a lot. Aside from on-the-job experience, one book that I
recommend is The New Solution Selling. This is probably more applicable in the
enterprise sales world (where I do most of my work), but it's a fantastic
place for tech people to start.

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adamsmith
Interesting. Could you describe how this process has gone in more detail?

How broadly do you think about "selling?" What kind of on-the-job training did
you do? How good can one get in twelve months?

Thanks!

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rgrieselhuber
Good question. :-)

My answer turned out to be a bit long, so I just created a post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485701>

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noonespecial
I've found that as a tech person, I'm too well acquainted with the
shortcomings of products I've developed. I always feel like I'm pulling the
wool on the customer by not jumping up and telling them all of the weak points
of what I've built.

I find that I need a biz guy to stretch the truth, sell features that I
haven't developed yet, and relentlessly hammer the good points in a way that
I'm just not prepared to do.

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johnyzee
Completely agree. Other replies in this thread reveals how non-intuitive this
insight is (why not just learn to sell?).

The thing is that selling and engineering are two different mindsets - one
requires you to be a borderline delusional optimist, while the other requires
you to be a nitpicking pessimist, always looking for flaws and shortcomings to
fix. You'd have to be schizophrenic to be great at both at the same time.

