[...] Engineers are notoriously too fast with the solution to the customer's problem. They don't show empathy. Making the problem seem too easy to fix is to make the customer feel stupid for not having fixed it earlier.
[...] Selling is all about listening. Listening is a euphemism for keeping your trap shut. When you walk into an account, what you're asking for, at the very least, is a meeting -- which better go well. Customers' satisfaction with a meeting will be directly correlated to how much they get to speak…
[...] Their product is basically 98 percent done. To a salesperson accustomed to selling vapor, 98 percent done is 100 percent salable. But engineers are perfectionists, and to them salable is a far cry from shippable. This is the X axis of the psychic space that divides engineers from salespeople:…
Steve Sellers uses this chance to tell everyone on his team that TEN, their dreaded powerhouse rival now backed by Kleiner Perkins, moved into on-line card games by buying a small company called Webdeck, which was just one ex-Oracle programmer working out of his garage. Just one guy! Not so long ag…
Max confided how he had been confronting his issues about commitment. He had thought that his freelance status was a way of keeping his priorities straight and protecting himself. He had outrageous fun and brain-candy work, what more could a young guy want? But now he was reseeing it as a lack of a…
