Understanding Sales as an Engineer
It’s easy to see Silicon Valleys’ success solely from the perspective as an engineer: the willingness to build useful things singlehandedly explains the world around us. It’s easy to be prideful about the work we do, but today great software engineering alone will not build a successful business. Given the state of the world today, it’s important that software engineers understand the important role sales plays in driving the growth of a business. I believe understanding the role sales plays will help us fully understand what makes a successful business and how our roles are changing as the world evolves.
Internet Businesses are Different Today
Spending some time in the startup ecosystem you’ll hear mantras like “If you build it they will come” and “Make Something People Want.” Is this all it takes to build successful businesses? From my perspective, not anymore. The 2000s and 2010s were marked by successful internet consumer businesses: websites and apps that were used by normal people rather than businesses. In this era, success meant getting people to stumble upon your app and it being so useful that people tell their friends. No sales people involved.
For the most part, the growth of these types of businesses have ran their course: fifteen years ago most people didn’t have an app for everything: today we all have apps like Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Hinge somewhere on our phone. The next generation of internet businesses will be B2B and will grow in different ways. Unlike regular people, businesses don’t go looking to spend money on things they see on TikTok. When building something meant for other businesses, you will need to be able to convince the right people to buy what you’re building, and that will involve selling to them directly.
Everything Is Selling
Selling seems like a bad word to engineers, but it shouldn’t be. A more critical look will show us that sales proliferates through every aspect of our lives, and should generally accepted as a necessity of life. Sales is everywhere. One subtle way this manifests is in how software engineers dress. The typical outfit in San Francisco of an engineer is a company t-shirt and a Patagonia jacket. As comfortable as the outfit is, there’s also a signaling factor here: I’m dressed like this because I’m a software engineer in San Francisco and want to be taken seriously. In a world where software must be shown to people before being sold, the only way to be taken seriously is to have some sales muscle.
Selling Is Informing
Sales at its worst is the trope of a used car salesman: someone who would gladly overpromise and underdeliver a bad used car. In the best cases, sales basically boils down to informing. As a software engineer, you’ve likely build something that you deeply believe is good for the world and want to share it. In this case, being the salesman means informing a customer about how what you’ve built solves a problem that the customer has had.
Approaching selling as informing completely changed my perspective of how a sales motion should be done. When you’ve built something useful that people need, informing them about the solution you’ve built makes it become something that people want. Doing this is more important than ever today, since the surface area of software businesses are expanding into B2B businesses that require some level of informing before something is sold. Engineering and sales are the yin and yang of a successful software business today, and I believe its so important for engineers to understand the other side to fully comprehend our work.