DeanWormer

This was the strategy at the SomethingAwful forums. They seemed pretty well moderated, but definitely never hit the scale of Reddit or Twitter.

I manage a team of Solution Architects and I've hired many where this is their first "sales" job.

What kind of jobs are you applying to? If this is your first SA role, you should take a look at the technologies you use every day and apply to those vendors (and/or their competitors). You'll be able to speak credibly to their customers about your experiences and it'll make you a very effective SA.

In my experience, to hire a good SA, the sales skills come in a distant second to relevant technical skills. Rewrite your resume to highlight those skills and you'll have success.

I agree with this and have 2 book recommendations to help with marketing and sales.

For marketing, I recommend Traction by the founders of Duck Duck Go. It gives a practical guide to tons of different marketing channels and when each one is appropriate https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

For sales, I recommend How You Make the Sale. It's a general sales book no matter if you're selling software, services, or physical goods and it does a great job of walking you through the sales process and where it overlaps with the buying process. It also helps reframe a lot of the "scary" parts of sales like objections as "requests for more information". Highly recommend for technical people who are new to sales https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204....

Interesting topic especially when compared/contrasted with this Atlantic article on Asker vs Guesser culture.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-....

Red Hat | Solution Architect | Remote (US)

Red Hat is hiring for Solution Architects in both Eastern and Pacific time zones. This is a remote job with some travel requirements for customer meetings.

Solution Architects at Red Hat are technical pre-sales engineers who help customers solve problems with our linux, automation and container offerings. Responsibilities include delivering presentations, demos, proof of concepts, and hands on workshops.

If you're personable, like talking tech with people, and don't want to be on call again, give presales a try!

Apply here: https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/93739/sled-solutions-archit...

The only sales book I really liked was How You Make the Sale by Frank McNair https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204...

A lot of sales books teach Jedi mind tricks and "tricks to close" and crap like that. This is much more practical. It walks you through a customer's buying process and shows how you can map that to your sales process. I find that making a better connection with my clients comes from putting their best interest first and being a good person. No need for psychology or tricks. Once you understand the buying process, and you understand the products/services you're selling, you're good to go.

I agree with this and have experience with the Sales Engineering side of it. Any enterprise software company needs a field sales team with technical people to back up the sales reps. Sales Engineers or Solution Architects own the "technical close" of a deal. Once the customer says your technology solves their problems and they're not looking at any competitors, your job is done. Rarely do you have to do any salesy activity like negotiating contracts, "closing deals", cold calling etc.

You give demos, proof of concepts, and talk shop with your customers. Most of it can be done remotely, but for important customers, you travel in your territory. As long as you're close to an airport, you're good.

Base + Commission can be easily $250k plus equity.

Highly recommend this as well. And I encourage people to not get scared off by the "sales" aspect of the job. As the technical resource, you're almost never closing deals, cold calling, or any of the other salesy responsibilities. Your job is really just to help the potential customer solve a problem with your technology. You gather requirements about their problem, and have technical conversations to show how your product(s) can be a good fit.

You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.

The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.

Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.

This is a fun idea. I thought of a slightly different spin. Combine what Million Short does with search results (omits the top million results to help find things beyond the usual top results) with Reddit.

Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones.

https://millionshort.com/

I like how this uses repeated actions to help learn.

A free resource I really like is simply running `vimtutor`. It gives you a text file with exercises and you edit that text file directly.

I've had a similar idea for a "Metacritic for products" so I love this idea.

It'd be interesting to collect reviews from established reviewers (rtings, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc) and create an average score too.

I enjoyed Traction https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

It's written by the founder of DuckDuckGo and he talks through all the different potential marketing channels and how to choose what's best for your company.

I thought it was pretty actionable and there wasn't much "fluff".

I've posted this a few times, but my favorite book is just an ebook from Fog Creek (makers of FogBugz, Trello, Stack Overflow, and more) http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/20324/203241714.pdf

It's 24 pages, so it's a quick read, and it's from the perspective of an engineer who has to do sales for the first time. A lot of the ideas are taken from Frank McNair's book "How You Make the Sale" https://www.amazon.com/How-You-Make-Sale-Salesperson/dp/B01G...

The other option is to get a job as a Sales Engineer, Customer Engineer, Solution Architect, etc. These are all pre-sales engineering roles where you aren't responsible for closing sales, but are exposed to the process. I know you're already an engineering manager, but Solution Architect is a very entrepreneurial role. IMO, it's a tough skill and tough process to learn by reading, so getting a job with real life experience could be worthwhile.

My favorite is How You Make The Sale by Frank McNair https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204...

I came from a technical background as well and this was the only book that really explained the process to me without a bunch of "closing tricks" or other gimmicky sales tactics.

I'm a big fan of Fog Creek's "The Most Basic Things Your Company Needs to Know About Sales" (https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...) It's roughly 25 pages about high level sales strategies. The PDF mentions the book "How You Make the Sale" by Frank McNair (https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204... was a great 101 level book on sales. It's high level so it could be applied to everything from selling cars and real estate to software.

I found these helpful because it was less "here's 10 closing tips and tricks!" and more about the sales process.

I found this ~20 page guide Fog Creek put out a few years ago and it got me excited about switching from a technical role into sales. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a high level understanding of Enterprise sales.

https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...

For those that don't know, this is Josh Levine's blog. He started Island ECN and is prominently featured in Scott Patterson's Dark Pools https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp....

You can see the old homepage here http://josh.com/oldindex.htm

Some of his code (through acquisitions) lives on at the Nasdaq exchange. He's a fascinating person in the history of electronic markets.

And https://news.ycombinator.com/active

This is the one that's usually recommended here. It's a great book! https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

The equities markets have Limit Up/Limit Down bands (LULD bands) that prevent big swings in prices. Like the other commenter said, your strategy might work in cryptocurrency markets, but not in equities.

Yeah my BS meter has tripped. Most of his submissions are links to his own site and his comments here are "would anyone be interested in ____" and "let me tell you a secret" self promotional spam.

Thanks for the tips! I read and enjoyed SPIN Selling.

I love podcasts so I'll give that a listen.

Sales. I have a computer science degree and learned software development isn't for me so I'm switching to sales this year.

I'm looking forward to having both the technical skills and sales skills under my belt.

I discovered him from the old puzzle site thisisnotporn and loved "Dance Dance Dance" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World".

I have a software development background and am very interested in software sales, but it's been surprisingly hard to make the transition. I can't make it past a resume screen at most places. And coming from a development background, not a lot of my connections are in sales. I reached out to the ones that are and they said they'd keep me in mind.

A recruiter friend reached out and I'm considering working sales for his staffing agency.

I'd love to hear from people that made the dev -> sales switch!

Since you said you like videos, Khan Academy has a section on stocks: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

The Citadel letter mentioned in the article (http://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-16.pdf) is a very good read. I work in the industry and they hit all the main problems with IEX's approach.

He's probably referring to a Market Maker Pegged Order.

What about Lowe's Home Improvement YouTube channel? A friend and I were considering starting a similar site and selling the parts to complete the project, but we found Lowe's did a pretty good job of covering any routine project we thought of.

I'd be interested to hear what projects you couldn't find helpful information for.