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The article is also the first of it's kind I've seen that gives salespeople comprehensible and actionable advice on how to improve. If they're salespeople wort

by mtrimpe 13y ago

The article is also the first of it's kind I've seen that gives salespeople comprehensible and actionable advice on how to improve. If they're salespeople worth their salt they'll be able to help leverage this newfound understanding to better sell their feature requests. I do agree that ideally this nuggets of wisdom would not have been hidden in such a ranty article though. P.S. Their equivalent post aimed at product managers is at http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissing-off-the-engineers/ http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissi...

notahacker 13y ago
If salespeople are worth their salt and working for a software company, this isn't "newfound understanding". On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code. If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.
corry 13y ago
Good points, and thanks for the other link. I'd disagree that it gives much (any?) actionable advice to real sales people since it's such a caricature-driven piece. It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM). I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion.. I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers. Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)

by mtrimpe 13y ago

notahacker 13y ago

If salespeople are worth their salt and working for a software company, this isn't "newfound understanding". On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code. If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.

corry 13y ago

Good points, and thanks for the other link. I'd disagree that it gives much (any?) actionable advice to real sales people since it's such a caricature-driven piece. It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM). I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion.. I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers. Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)