by
Po Bronson
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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
[...] One of the best ways to get rid of a troublesome coworker is simply to give out his name to a few headhunters, who will quickly bombard the guy with so many offers that he will resign on his own within the month. In the ultimate perversion, companies hire headhunters to telephone their own employees (without identifying that's who they're really working for), in order to discover which ones are unhappy and vulnerable to being picked off. Do they fire these troublemakers? Odds are they'll be placated with a raise or a spontaneous performance bonus of two thousand stock options.
reminds me of the martin amis burglary bit
But there's still loyalty. I believe that Silicon Valley workers have a muscular faith in their industry, a deep optimism that they will be able to continue to find work for many more years. They have loyalty to the whole process. Their need to see the altruism in their efforts is supplied by implicit deduction rather than explicit hype: the industry is good; I work in the industry; therefore, I am good. This halo by association, or the Big Umbrella, reinforces industry loyalty. Your company may burn its cash, it may get beat to market, or it may even lay you off with only a week's severance [...] but you don't worry, because there are other companies willing to hire you. [...]