Sales for Hackers

Re:Sales for Hackers by rcarrigan87 on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @08:31PM (#7383182)

Really great advice. All of the points made in this article can be distilled into one maxim - LISTEN. If you actually listen to your customer instead of trying to "sell" your product the conversation will naturally lead into discussions of budget, time frame, objections, etc.

The biggest mistake I've made with sales is getting nervous and talking too much. Ask open-ended questions and let the prospect do the rest.

Can't stress getting to the top quickly enough. It's so rare for a sale to close from the bottom-up in my personal experience.

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Re:Sales for Hackers by brettinlj on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @08:57PM (#7383286)

I have a counter to the emphasis of getting to the top. I used to work for a much larger company (definitely "enterprise") and as a product manager I was often the decider of a vendor to use. There were times where the vendors' sales teams wanted to make an end-run and get to someone on the upper management/executive level to influence the decision.

If anything, that became more of a negative because it meant that I had to spend more time managing those conversations rather than analyzing the fit for their product.

I would change "getting to the top quickly" to "identifying the decision maker and getting to them quickly".

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