The salesman and the developer

http://swombat.com/2012/5/11/salesman-developer

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

125 56 14 years ago

marcusf3• 14 years ago

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again.

Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you're solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They're completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I've usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don't wreak unnecessary havoc on it.

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2...

wglb2• 14 years ago

How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf? And I am not sure that wolves stampede.

marcusf3• 14 years ago

Yeah, I admit the metaphor was weak. I wanted to head to lunch. I was thinking a flock of wolves requires a different gun than a single bear unless you want to be flooded in wolves.

mbell2• 14 years ago

> How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf?

Simple example: there are a number of guns that can be converted from semi-automatic to full-automatic with very simple changes, removing a spring, filing something down, etc. If you've got a pack of wolves coming at you the rate of fire could certainly change the balance in your favor.

pudakai2• 14 years ago

One hallmark of the truly great sales person is that they can sell the product they have rather than the one they wish you had.

tluyben22• 14 years ago

Where are those employed? I have never seen it; from small companies to MS (and especially Oracle), from services to product companies. They don't right-out lie because they've actually been drinking the kool-aid so they do not really know that actually the stuff they sell is hard (impossible) to produce. I'm talking software here; no clue :) about other branches of business.

msmamet• 14 years ago

Great post. I thought it was going to be a "builders rule, sales jocks drool" post - until I kept reading till the end. At the end of the day, it's important that founding teams recognize the obstacles of every person's job, and keep the common goal of team success above else. It's not about how many bears he lures into the cabin using himself as live bait, not about how heroically the builder slays each monstrous bear. When everyone is celebrating getting to the fur market (?) in one piece!

ryancarson• 14 years ago

Awesome post. So true.

kator• 14 years ago

Developer's need to stop thinking "If I build it they will come".

Even the "dream" companies like Dropbox mentioned here had someone on that team who knew how to sell even if they were working as a developer.

Selling doesn't always mean knocking on doors sometimes it means figuring out how to make the first couple of deals with investors or working with a smart person who can help you develop a viral referral model etc.

Thought experiment: Today think about all the physical items in your life and how they came to be in your life. Beside the people most of those items were sold to you by someone or you bought them because you saw marketing about them. Very few of them did you buy because you woke up one day and said "I have to fly to LAX and buy a Widget".. You had to know that Widget was there and realize you wanted it before you could take the first action.

ericHosick• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the joke that goes:

What is the difference between a salesperson and an engineer? An engineer knows when they are lying.

tferris• 14 years ago

Another silly generalization of developers and business people (here called sales men). Maybe the drawn stereotype matches many folks out there but this view is aged and not valid anymore.

Both the pure biz guy will die soon in the woods without any technical mindset and the dev will die soon when just waiting and hacking at the campfire. And together they won't be stronger. The picture the OP draws is from the past or taken from large corporations.

Successful entrepreneurs are both sales and technical. Non-technical people are considered illiterate nowadays and won't achieve anything as people who can not hunt. Best proof is Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. And that's what is so great about Hacker News—here you find the highest density of tech founders both business-driven and technical.

So, if anybody still wants to talk in stereotypes then distinguish between hunters and non-hunters and not between tech and non-tech.

swombat7• 14 years ago

Worth pointing out that I didn't mean to imply that these skills have to be in separate people.

A single person can be a developer, a salesperson, a manager, and a plethora of other things that are required to build a successful business. Most new entrepreneurs will not be competent in all those areas, but experienced ones will, I agree, have at least a baseline level of competence in all the key places (which includes sales and making things).

That said, it feels like you might be the one generalising... I know some successful and talented entrepreneurs of both kinds. Some are generalists who do everything. Some specialise in what they're good at and partner up with others who make up for their gaps. In my own business (which I consider successful), I myself am clearly more on the build/delivery side while my cofounder is clearly more on the sales side. I can do sales (not very well), and she can write grant applications, but if we were to swap roles the business would die. So, both types of people can build successful businesses.

dean• 14 years ago

"Best proof is Instagram founder Kevin Systrom."

Ouch. I hope we're not going to start saying that the extent of Instagram's success was planned and inevitable due to the great founders. Let's be honest, it's a great app, but they won the lottery. It's not every day a super-rich guy decides he needs your app, and is willing to stunningly overpay for it. (I'm sure Instagram would have jumped at $50 million if it was ever offered.)

I don't know Kevin Systrom. I'm sure he is as you say, a great 'sales and technical' entrepreneur. But Instagram's success in terms of their sales price is not reproducible. It's random. Like the lottery.

nadam• 14 years ago

developer and salesman: I miss the marketing guy from this story. (Or at least either the developer or the salesman should also wear the hat of a marketing guy.)

I think the rule of thumb is this: if you sell to the 'masses' you need great marketing, if you sell to only a few clients you need great sales.

I think of Steve Jobs more as a marketing guy than a salesman.

corin_• 14 years ago

I agree with your rule of thumb except I look at it from another angle. Jobs was a salesman because while he sold to the masses, he did it on a 1-to-x level, it was about speeches, etc. He basically did what any salesman does, he just did it to huge audiences.

Marketing is about pulling the strings to promote something, not being the guy who actually persuades people.

arethuza• 14 years ago

I personally don't view sales that way. For me sales is a narrowly defined role whose job is to close individual sales - so you can't really do it "to the masses".

Auguste• 14 years ago

This story sounds familiar. Are the names of the salesman and developer Bear Claws and Jeremiah Johnson? :)

http://youtu.be/FcsXC2xFis4?t=2m50s

damiongrimfield• 14 years ago

my father used to watch that movie at least once a month, usually with a bourbon in his hand, and alway a shit-eating grin on his face. i'm positive he wishes he could have been a mountain man when he 'grew up'.

FuzzyDunlop2• 14 years ago

There's something about the story that, in its telling, feels a little leaky.

The developer is getting the cabin in order, the salesperson is out bear-hunting, and we assume the bear is the potential client.

While the developer is still building, the salesperson is trying to find bears. He then lures the bears into a cabin which, from its description, was not built for the purpose of capturing bears.

So why was the salesperson hunting for bears when the more appropriate target might have been deer? Or other hunters needing a place to stay? Oh... he got bored before it was even finished, so doesn't know who the ideal client is.

By the same token, why was the developer unpacking everything nice and tidy when they were going bear hunting? Shouldn't he be at least partly aware of how the salesperson works, or what he's going to do? Did he know to prepare the cabin for a bear, or for themselves (or other hunters), or just make the assumption?

There's a clear problem with communication, that has led two people, aiming to do the same thing, down two very different paths. The trip was bound to fail right from the start.

swombat7• 14 years ago

Looking at it from a "Lean startup" perspective, you could say that the salesperson bringing that bear in enabled the business to figure out that actually, it should be targeting deers instead. I think we're both pushing the metaphor beyond its useful limits though :-)

FuzzyDunlop2• 14 years ago

Good reply. We could likely refactor the story based on all manner of different startup and corporate perspectives. One might involve the developer pointing his bear-rifle at the salesperson out of sheer frustration! (Personal experience perspective.)

seclorum• 14 years ago

Yeah, thats the point of the article: two people going bear-hunting, one better be prepared to lure and the other one better be prepared to kill and prep. Unless they're communicating about the best way to do it, its gonna be all bear-scratchy-furniture-developer-killing'y and not really much 'bear is dead, lets eat'.

babarock• 14 years ago

Completely off topic (or is it?) I find myself being quickly turned off by all these blogposts which 'casually' mention Steve Jobs on every single occasion the author comes across. Taken individually, each of these articles (like this one) would have a prefectly defendable reason to mention it. I'm annoyed with the trend.

I have mentioned this issue before in other comments threads on HN. Am I the only one annoyed by that? Yes Steve Jobs was a beloved public figure and an outstanding entrepreneur, but mentioning his name ("casually") won't add value to just any blog post. Unless I'm reading something written by an official biographer, or any other expert on the matter, I don't like reading Jobs name in a completely unrelated articles.

So this is my plea for bloggers: Stop doing that. Stop mentionning 'tech startup' celebrities in your posts; in my view it dillutes your point instead of adding anything to it. For the record, I'm reacting to the mention of Jobs' name because it's the trend of the moment, just like Zuckerberg's was a few years back. It's the celeb name dropping that bothers me, not the work of Steve Jobs.

Also, I apologize for the harsh tone. I really enjoyed reading everything else in the article and felt that it presented a serious miscommunication issue between builders and sales people in an otherwise very straight-to-the point yet witty and amusing fashion. Good post!

guynamedloren• 14 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Thanks for this.

IsaacL2• 14 years ago

Yes, couldn't agree more.

I agree with the people that say that future generations will see Steve Jobs as revolutionary a businessman as Henry Ford. But this hagiography has got to stop.

Let's put things in perspective. Steve Jobs made really good products that sold at a high-margin and made a lot of money. But hang on -- another way to see it is he focused on the features customers really did care about: nice UX, beautiful cases -- and ignored the features they said they cared about but didn't really: processing power, durability. That's it. He found a management style that worked for him, and it's worth looking at how he did it, but Apple and Steve Jobs had a bunch of flaws which are worth looking at as well.

What annoys me is that people can see the awesome parts, or they can see the flaws, but few people manage to see both. Even people like Isaacson (his biographer) who note both these sides don't really analyse it in a deep way. It would be interesting to read the history books of a 100 years time to see how Steve Jobs has been remembered after his impact has been put into proper perspective.

(Though another thing that annoys me is when the top of HN comment threads become dominated by an off-topic discussion. Sorry swombat!)

swombat7• 14 years ago

I only ended up mentioning Steve Jobs because the Apple II came to mind as a piece of technology that was so awesome and beyond its time that it really ought to sell itself. It just so happens that Steve Jobs was the sales side of that business at the time (at least according to the biography).

I tremendously respect what Jobs achieved, but I don't think I'm putting him on a pedestal. Are you guys suggesting I should deliberately avoid using any of Apple's products or achievements as an example for anything because I might end up having to mention Jobs? That seems extreme, but it's the natural conclusion of your reaction...

sparknlaunch122• 14 years ago

Harsh considering one mention and this was in relation to an old Apple product, within context of the article. People write about Jobs too much (agreed) but this is more about mainstream familiarity than laziness.

jpwagner2• 14 years ago

the phenomenon of mentioning Steve Jobs should probably be added as a corollary to Godwin's law

or maybe a broader law should have both Godwin's law and the Job's law as corollaries.

moron• 14 years ago

Wait, why is finding a bear in the woods the hard part? It's the woods, it has bears in it. The hard part would be actually killing it, and then all the skinning and dressing.

sparknlaunch122• 14 years ago

Enjoyed reading the story and appreciate the challenge to balance out sales and development. They are both important but need controls to ensure 1) money comes in and 2) you develop and focus on the right product.

The point that stood out was the final lines on the importance of sales. This almost promotes the mantra of building sales first, product second; and ensuring you are having money arriving in to pay the bills (and/or investors).

Having recently heard profitable entrepreneurs speak, the common story is how when they spoke with potential customers about their idea (even pre MVP) and customers paid them. Yes, paying customers suggest you are on to a smart product. Maybe some merit in this approach.

debacle3• 14 years ago

This is just a terribly bad analogy.

swombat7• 14 years ago

Care to expand on why?

debacle3• 14 years ago

It just breaks down on so many levels. So the client is a bear, and the developer is setting up camp, and the salesperson draws a bear into the cabin which destroys all of the developer's hard work.

So the real-world analogy would be that the developer is setting up an architecture (which performs similar to a camp - as a staging point for reaching goals), and the business guy brings in a client that then...what? Destroys the architecture? Invalidates it in some way?

It doesn't follow. A better analogy would be that the developer is digging a pit to catch a bear in, and the business guy finds a bear that's too big to fit into the hole. In that case, you have an instance where no one is at fault and there's simply an unshared assumption about the limits of how big the bear can and can't be.

But that doesn't make for as exciting of a blog post.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

There's nothing worse than a company where the sales department has too much power. Especially if they are able to hand off the project once the sale is made. It makes it impossible for the rest of the company to innovate on products.

aspir2• 14 years ago

I assume you're referring to BigCo, or even just a non-startup. If you're referring to a startup, I have to disagree with you -- revenue in the door when you're starting out, even if you have to alter your product, is invaluable. In fact, you'll likely have to alter the product from the original vision to get revenue in the door period :)

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

So what if you have to alter your product in 5 different, possibly incompatible, ways because 5 sales reps all sold something that you don't have? And you have to have it done by the agreed-upon delivery date (between sales and the client)? You wind up with a gigantic, unmaintainable hack.

pbharrin• 14 years ago

This statement is pure gold: "I now believe that having someone whose job it is to go and find clients willing to give you money from day one is so important, that I would not start any company without such a person."

WalterSear• 14 years ago

Were they worse off after the salesman did his job without knowing what they actually needed?

chriszf• 14 years ago

Two things.

You can build a product but until you manage to sell your product to someone, it's not a company.

'Salesmen' are not the only way to get people to buy your product.

I think it's important to start making a distinction between sales and marketing. At one place I worked, the marketing team resented being lumped in with sales and were actually in direct competition with them: organic signups nibbled away at a salesperson's commission.

People are becoming more comfortable with the idea of purchasing a product without ever having spoken to a human being in the entire sales cycle, and that's a marketing job. For some companies, it obviates the need for 'sales'.

Having made that distinction, I would not go to war, so to speak, without a great marketer by my side. A salesperson, on the other hand...

The problem with traditional sales is the pay structure. For mediocre salesmen, working on a commission means "any warm body will do as long as they don't churn before I get paid". This translates into having problematic customers who will thrash and cause you grief before inevitably cancelling your service or returning your product.

jpwagner2• 14 years ago

The thing that sucks about this story is that at the end, the customer is DEAD. Every great salesman I know cares deeply about the continued satisfaction of the customer. It's why they sell in the first place!

The salesman and the developer

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