by
Po Bronson
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[...] They're all business development VPs for one Web site or another or marketing directors or PR flakes or CEOs -- and they all have graduate degrees and come from good schools and used to work in management consulting. They're not all blond and blue-eyed but that's the dominant strain. They all have firm handshakes and can look you in the eye and have big plans to go away on the weekend and aren't absent-minded and know to come out with a laugh when the conversational gambit is mean to provoke one. It's like the Valley crowed was given an en masse Cosmo makeover, given "that MBA look," gentrified just in time for the big Silicon Valley dramatizations and book deals. I looked at the scene, and I thought about how NBC bought into the company, and then it hit me: the party looked like a scene from Friends. As if every actor who hadn't made the cut had been given a job in the Internet division.
This is the cultural scene of late 1998. Programming used to be the bread and butter of high tech, but the in crowd now prefers chapati to bread and creme fraiche to butter. It's all about synergy deals and branding and national advertising.
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 attachment in every direction: no job, no kids, no marriage, no love. Did owning a portion of a house and volunteering for a San Mateo Big Brother program count as commitment? His freelance contracts explicitly stated, "Either party may terminate this relationship at any time." "I consider these things and wonder, have I found new and valid lifestyle alternatives, or am I simply a coward?"
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 ago this all-important revenue producer for TEN was a lot smaller than the Big Network. So no thinking, We can't do this. NO thinking, What are we doing playing with the big boys?
[...] 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: technical elegance versus pragmatic compromise.
[...] 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. (It is the tendency to interrupt that hinders engineers who try to sell. Even when they try to listen, engineers-turned-salesman give in to the irresistible desire to impress the client with their brainiac ability to anticipate needs through logical deduction rather than allow clients to spell out their needs for themselves.
Yaresuses a highly empathic conversational method that is much like echoing or mirroring. He merely repeats the essence of what he hears, resisting all temptation to ask leading questions. The dialogue that ensues sounds more like marital conflict counseling than a sales call. Yares often ends up moderating the bureaucratic grudges between technical engineers and their department managers.
rink story inspo?
[...] 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.
When Mans gives a demo, what he's waiting for is what salespeople call "the drift-off moment." The client's eyes get gooey, and they're staring into space. They're not bored -- they're imagining what they could do with Surveybuilder. All tech salespeople mention this -- they've succeeded not when they rivet the client's attention, but when they lose it.
Above that, it's "Department-level Discretionary," about three grand. At most Fortune 1,000 firms, all purchases above three grand have to go through a purchase requisition manager, who is someone who has taken classes and been trained to sit on a department's purchase order until the very last day of the quarter, when he knows the salesperson will call back and offer an additional 20 percent discount just to make his quota. Just as salespeople are paid commissions, these purchase requisition managers get quarterly bonuses based on how much they save their firms. [...]
minor thought about treating these people as the enemy? (pano)
[...] there are so many software firms that just selling them software can make a company one of the fastest-growing software firms. [...]
lol
Someone who talks to people all the time about what they want is a twenty-six-year-old woman I'll call Claudia Gomez. She is what is known in the headhunting trade as a "ruser," meaning one who performs ruses, one who uses surreptitious methods to trick receptionists into giving out names and job descriptions of employees at Silicon Valley companies. She sells these names to research firms, which in turn sell them to headhunters. So hot is the black market for names out here that Claudia gets $40 for a salesperson and $80 for an engineer, and for a female engineer she gets $120, since every company wants to improve its diversity.
crazy. wonder if there's still a market for this or if linkedin has automated her job away