If you could do it all again... would you do anything different?

Can you share what you have learned in that area? People are really divided on that topic, some say “learn as you go”, others say “if you don’t learn a lot of stuff preliminarily you are doomed”, some others say “you need to understand psychology and get in people’s face, outside of that you’ll be fine” etc. etc. I think I have an idea what every camp means but I am still kind of “WTF?” about this whole “learn sales” thing.

…Yeah, I wish I invested in learning cooking as well. :expressionless:

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It’s really fantastic to hear that Richard :023: with all your experience behind you, I’d love to learn why that is… perhaps you could write a blog (or forum) post about it? :slight_smile:

Your approach to software development certainly seems to make a lot of sense too :smiley:

How comes? In what way do you think it might have helped you?

It’s never too late to learn! :003:

When I had a consulting company about 10 years ago, we operated via outsourcing from marketing/design firms when they had something custom that was bigger than a CMS project. When the economy tanked in 2008, a lot of those firms pulled those projects in house and I ended up working with potential clients directly.

Sales is an entirely different mindset than software development. In the latter, you’re presented with problems and you work to solve them. In the former, people will try to extract as much information as possible from you without paying a dime. They’ll have you solve the problem for them and then shop around to find somebody who will tell them they will built it for less after wasting a lot of your time. Typically it’s called unpaid consulting…and I was doing a lot of it.

The sales class taught me a lot about how to recognize these behaviors, customer profiles, etc. I wasted so much time because I thought just being helpful would win me clients. I got more calls for “advice” from people who never paid me a dime than I’d care to admit. The classes helped me to better understand capping the unpaid time you’ll invest on a client, how to get them to commit to trying something and the sheer value of getting a little bit of money on the table before you bend over backwards trying to convince them.

The most common issue I ran into were clients who basically wanted you to spec out an entire system in detail, which is like asking an architect to provide you plans for a house for free before you decide to begin construction.

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Thanks a lot. This gives a valuable perspective.

I am kind of in luck because my burnout and megajoules of energy lost on stupid crap helped me filter my words and efforts in real life quite well; it might also be the age (38 now). These days I would ask the man/woman about what do they need and would give them no more than 2-3 practical advices – like “you will most likely be just fine with an in-house server for the first 2 years of your business”, “use these 3 languages for backend and stitch them together, it will give you best bang for buck” – and then I will politely excuse myself from further conversation with “I cannot tell you more until we truly work together” which is not a lie and is an objective fact anyway.

Now THESE I am genuinely interested in. Can you give a few examples, off the top of your head, on how do you get a client to commit? Most are very undecided and [act] shy. I don’t want to put a flawless suit and tie and fake the biggest confidence in the world to win over such people. I am interested in how does a combination of charisma and practical talk achieve this? Or is it something entirely else?

Yep, I found this to be the case as well. In order to avoid directly locking horns with such people, these days I make it very clear that I am gonna give a person 30 to 60 minutes of my time which is usually enough to get the message across that I am not scheduling a “here is your free expert consultancy” meeting and that it is about getting to know each other well enough to decide if we are gonna work together.

And I have no problem being pretty blunt on a rare occasion, like “please, I am not here to give you a tech lecture – I am here to see if we can start a professional relationship”. I know this can cut you from valuable future connections but… to quote my wife: “you don’t want to work with such people anyway so drop the feather and bring out the sword”.

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@AstonJ:

I’d be interested in hearing your findings :lol:

Life is a game. To beat it you must recognize the games within it and understand that there’s an infinite fractal of meta-games. To play wisely is to use the rules that you create. To create a rule, combine two or more truths.

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Also 38. At the time I was 28.

I have no issue with any of this stuff now. It’s honestly hard to roll up into any one specific thing and closer to a combination of clear communication and looking for negative patterns.

The two most valuable things I got out of the class actually came from a couple of simple “sayings”.

“Is that a lot or a little?”

Depending on the person you are talking to $1,000 can be everything they have and they will treat the project as if they own you. Others if you quote $50k won’t take you seriously because it’s not big enough. The real lesson is identifying quickly whether the person / company actually has a budget and can afford you at all. There is no point wasting time trying to sell something to a person who can never afford to buy.

What I started to do was listen and give a ballpark guess, just based on experience and based on how detailed certain parts could get. I could do that in a conversation and then give them a price for me to spec it out in detail to provide something more accurate that we could work from. A company who can afford you will do that in a heartbeat. A company who can’t will balk. The only exception are huge companies putting out full RFPs and those are a tread at your own risk scenario. Risk reward is up to you.

We also found that rush rates were huge for getting customers to tell us the truth. If somebody ran to us and said “this has to be done by Monday” we’d agree for double the price as a rush rate. Shockingly, when it cost twice as much it didn’t actually have to be done by then. That’s not so much a sales thing as a customer management thing.

The other big saying was “People buy pain relief.” It doesn’t just apply to sales but there is more truth in it than most people want to admit. You can get a great read on a situation or project by looking for the pain points.

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I found The Imposter’s Handbook informative. I never studied CS officially, so I can’t say how it compares.

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  1. Spent too much time as a big fish in a little pond.
  2. If I did college again, I’d actually study programming.
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I still do that to this day and I am supposed to be mature and better than that.

What was the event – random or caused by you – that broke this mindset and finally made you sell yourself better?

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I heard that a lot and witnessed it a few times. It’s very true. The real test for you as a salesman is to extremely quickly identify the expectations of the other side and play to them (assuming you want to work with them of course). I still haven’t made big deals in my life but I have talked to a number of business people – casual conversations about how is business lately and where are the issues that pain them the most seemed to be a good doorway to a more informative answers later on. Any recommendations on how to politely interrogate people about their payment expectations?

This is the thing that I absolutely know is true and I still struggle with it. There are people who can only offer you like $1500 a month however they would be fine if you only worked for them 10h a week (provided you actually deliver something). I cannot refuse such people just yet – very often I am not even sure I should be refusing them… I don’t know. I also don’t want to come across as an elitist a-hole who only takes very expensive work. There has to be a balance without going to the extremes but I cannot find it yet. I am open to advice here as well.

I used that successfully for both making more money in the shorter term, and to sober up customers. Works perfectly! Since I work predominantly remote, I also agree to days in an office for double or even triple my rate. This too helps people evaluate how much do they really want to see you in an office hunched over a laptop instead of you working in your optimal custom-made workplace where you are most productive. Very quickly they decide that “being around for quick questions” is not worth the extra price. I admit that I find observing the sobering effect of upping the price rather hilarious. Maybe I am just a bad person. :003:

This I have done all my life ever since pre-teen but I am still not convinced about its effectiveness to this day. Sometimes when you get in a company and start asking questions, you simply receive information that was true because of the last dev team (that just left a week ago); it does not tell you anything about the CEO who in one situation was genuinely the friendliest and most constructive and generous guy I have ever met and with which I worked quite productively and relatively lucratively for years after. I agree cases like these are outliers but I somehow cannot bring myself to quickly generalize people and companies based solely on pain points; I found plenty of cases when this approach is simply non-factual. What is your more detailed take on this? I would theorize that to overcome this psychological hurdle I should probably just put my financial interests at the top priority and call it a day?

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It wasn’t really a bucket of ice water realization. It was more the straw the broke the camel’s back.

The fix is still a work in process.

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