The salesman and the developer
swombat.com
swombat.com
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!
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!)
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...
Well... So the last man standing from the 8-bit days tells us (I mean Apple, not Jobs himself obv). But in truth, the C64 gave a lot more bang for the buck, esp. when you include the price of disk drives! And was just as hackable, etc. Similarly, the ST and Amiga were much more powerful and cheaper and more hackable than contemporary Macs. The Jackintosh was the first machine to deliver 1Mb of memory for under $1000. I just think we need to keep things in the proper perspective. Apple made and indeed makes some great products. But it's also true that they smothered technically superior but not as well commercially managed competitors. History is written by the winners.
The C64 was released in 1982 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 ), a whole 5 years after the Apple II in 1977 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series ), so I damn well hope that it gave more bang for the buck.
Anyway, my point is not to take anything away from Apple or Jobs, but it's a stretch to say that they were so far ahead of everyone else. If you need a hero for rhetorical purposes, try Jack Tramiel :-)
(IIRC the one time we spoke on Twitter I was also offering some vague criticism so I don't want you to think I'm some faceless internet critic. I'm actually a big fan of your blog).
or maybe a broader law should have both Godwin's law and the Job's law as corollaries.
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...
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.
It seems like we are getting into further trouble here. As this pack of wolves is stampeding (never heard of wolves stampeding, though) at you, removing the spring, filing something down might not be consistent with the very short period of time you have as this herd (?) of wolves is closing the gap on your, er, person.
This is where a huge amount of the rub between sales-marketing and dev comes in. But this "imagine all the possibilities" type of stuff is pure crack in the sales-customer relationship.
So I try to fill the void for the sales guys so they won't be making stuff up on their own. That is, I take a lot of care/explaining to them what are some of the near term possibilities of our app that we haven't built out yet, but make sense, that sort of thing, how much it would cost, risk factors, etc.
Fill up their fantastical story buffer in advance w/stuff that is acceptable to me. This seems to work well with little friction because sales guys tend to be a lot less intransigent than devs/designers about features - basically, they care less about the substance of the story rather than simply how well it sells.
In short, I try to make my fantasies their fantasies as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is the difference between a salesperson and an engineer? An engineer knows when they are lying.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
It also comes down to the amount of money these guys are paying as well. If you're selling to say, banks, insurers, or some other larger player, you should me bringing enough revenue to justify the added expenditure. If you're selling $200+/month software tools, there had better be more customers for it somewhere. But if you're selling anything less than $100/month, you nailed it. There's a problem.
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.
Marketing is about pulling the strings to promote something, not being the guy who actually persuades people.
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.
Dropping an swaddled and basketed infant sale on the programmer's doorstep is not what sales is about.