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Sales fixes everything. Very hard to learn for engineers and designers often.
by tnolet 4y ago
Sales fixes everything. Very hard to learn for engineers and designers often.
- williamtwild 4y agoUnless the product you are selling is defective.
- arethuza 4y agoAssuming the product that has been sold actually exists!
- fxtentacle 4y agoThat can sometimes be fixed with "don't walk there" stickers and/or ignored.
- blowski 4y agoI wonder how many dev teams exist that think their product isn’t defective.
- tnolet 4y agoThere are always bugs. Turns out almost all customers are ok with bugs.
- jamil7 4y agoLook around, we're surrounded by defective products. Not just in software either. That doesn't seem to stop them being sold.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoYes, but I feel this is somewhat of a tautology: of course lots of revenue makes things easier. But the important part is to diagnose why you have low or declining sales. Sometimes it's because you don't have good sales people. But other times it's because the product you have isn't a good market fit, or it's really buggy, or your salespeople oversold and now your customers are unhappy with the actual functionality of your product.
- tnolet 4y agoThis is encapsulated by that simple statement. Do whatever you need to get sales.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoI disagree, and that's why I responded. I've seen too many "we'll do whatever we need to do to get sales" turn into salespeople making unrealistic promises on impossibly tight deadlines. So then the sale is made, but in a way that ends up destroying the long (and even medium) term health of the business. Product/engineering goes on a death march to get things done, by the end of it many of those folks are burnt out, customers are unhappy, and sales folks see the writing on the wall and are happy to bail with their fat commission. It's like saying "do whatever you need to raise your stock price." There are healthy and unhealthy ways to do that, and the advice is useless if you don't carefully distinguish between the two.
- lostcolony 4y agoSo I think both of you are 'right', but you're choosing to interpret, and argue, the statement from different perspectives. Sales are important. However, as you note, sales now should not come at the expense of sales later (or lead to returns later, or etc). And debugging low sales is non-trivial.
- 1penny42cents 4y agoNailed it. Focusing on sales to solve internal problems is like focusing on work to solve internal problems. It can work to an extent, but sometimes you need to solve the internal problem before you can get the results you need. So it's a feedback loop that leads to circular thinking. The problem is when we try to blame the external side of the feedback loop, to avoid seeing that our internal side is the problem.
- nullspace 4y agoI don't know... I might be having a reverse-survivor bias seeing, being in and contributing to failure, but I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything (EDIT: i.e. when things are bad. Of course, if things are good, sales is a key driver to growth) If you need "more sales" to fix it, the problem often lies somewhere else.
- tnolet 4y agoI meant “sales” as transactions, not “sales” as in the department or role.
- samatman 4y agoThe commenter with the advice clearly mean "sales" as the department or role. To a founder or CEO the word "revenue" is used where you're using "sales", it isn't wrong except in context but the intention was unambiguous to me.
- otterley 4y agoI believe the word revenue was simply elided in this case. i.e., parse as “sales revenue.” (I’m noticing elsewhere in this thread that others are interpreting “sales” as sales departments or salespeople. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, where the meaning of the plain word varies depending on where you live.)
- rileyphone 4y agoIMO "sales" in OP referred to revenue generating transactions.
- armc 4y agoOP here... I didn't realize how literally the words would be taken, so: Few problems (a/k/a most problems) can be solved with more sales (a/k/a sales as a P&L line item equating to revenue); but OF COURSE its what you do with the increased revenue/sales that matters. Buying a Bentley isn't going to solve the business problem.
- cupofpython 4y agoI want to emphasize an important distinction between Actual sales, and the sales department. Actual sales fix problems, the sales department may or may not be relevant to what causes that to happen.. although they will surely fight for the credit either way. AFAIK Engineers have an axe to grind with the sales department, not actual sales. Giving credit for a sale is a very subjective matter, and more often than not every sales person who so much as sent an email to the opp want credit - effectively taking advantage of the subjective nature as much as they can get away with. Even if in reality the customer had to pretty much talk around everyone on the sales team and speak with an engineer to gain confidence in the product. Then the engineer has to go play catch-up from the 1 hour meeting while the sales member gets % of the sale.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoCorollary #1 - Marketing /sales is hard. Relative to tech / code it's at least 10x more difficult. Code / tech v human behaviour?? Which is easier to predict and sort out. Corollary #2 - Nobody cares. You might love your baby (i.e., idea / product / startup) but nobody cares. At all. See Corollary #1 for more details.