Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous

I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an interest in marketing, but never really studied marketing. Now, I'm one of three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and understand marketing (and sales).

OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had.

Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff... Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of The Ultimate Sales Machine fame).

Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more good startup marketing related links on HN!

Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions, that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have actionable steps and are not just high level talk.

a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; -Only print, no audio

d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Heh, I own 4 of those 5 books (not the Gene Bedell one). All are on my "to read" list but other than Spin Selling (which I've browsed through a bit), I haven't read them yet.

I've heard a lot of good things about Made To Stick though, so I think it's time to bump that up the list a little.

Thanks for sharing!

One sales book I read, and found quite interesting:

The Greatest Salesman in the World

by Og Mandino.

Just a word of advice, I've read most of those books and haven't found them super valuable. It really depends what you're selling, but the approach that's worked for me is to figure out my top 5 marketing goals and then find blog posts or interviews that help answer those questions. Almost all marketing books are a little too high-level to be useful in my opinion.

Just a word of advice, I've read most of those books and haven't found them super valuable. It really depends what you're selling,

Yeah, we're working on a somewhat traditional product oriented company... more Microsoft or IBM, than AirBnB or Dropbox. In that world, I think the positioning stuff matters, but I will freely admit that it may be less relevant in a different domain.

Nontheless, I would think most companies would want to achieve what Chet Holmes calls "Top of Mind Awareness," where your company is first in mind for a customer when they think about a need for $FOO. For example, ask most people to "name a router manufacturer" and the majority will almost certainly come back with "Cisco" (a few oddballs might say "Juniper" or something weird, but Cisco clearly has "TOMA").

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