[...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]