Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

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At a startup I worked for several months as a university intern, I ended up (because of my location) working out of the office with the inside sales team instead of engineering. At first it felt like I was in the wrong place, but as I got into the swing of things and really figured out how sales reps were spending their time, I realized that there was a ton of manual labor just related to bookkeeping and tracking leads that was repeated for everyone they contacted.

I asked my direct boss's permission to be officially moved to the sales team, and spent most of that summer developing a custom CRM that facilitated the flow the sales staff used. When it was finished, the average number of leads contacted per associate increased 40% basically overnight, dramatically affecting the growth rate of the company (and the sales staff absolutely loved me).

Any software developer could have built what I did, and had the company realized what they were missing I'm sure they would have got one of their "real" developers to spend a couple of weeks and probably put something together better than what my intern-self was capable of. The value I added in that situation wasn't my engineering prowess, but rather my ability to see exactly what was needed and build the right tool for the job.

Any software developer could have built what I did, and had the company realized what they were missing I'm sure they would have got one of their "real" developers to spend a couple of weeks and probably put something together better than what my intern-self was capable of

Unless you have personal knowledge that that actually happened, I will bet you dinner that it did not. Yes, it is absolutely the case that it would have been in their best interest to do it. No, software companies cannot routinely self-motivate to actually do this.

Great news for anybody here, though: if you can unbork sales/marketing/etc for a software company that ability is quite lucrative indeed as a consultant.

This makes a great deal of sense. How would an average dev, with experience of fixing sales/marketing/etc, go about becoming this kind of consultantant?

Look through patio11's comment history and his essays on his website. He answers that and links to other answers extensively.

It's been a huge learning process for me around "the engineering side of this is relatively simple, and the non-engineering side of this is relatively simple, so they'd put two and two together themselves...right?"

But the reality is that the above is almost never what happens, even when the task required is limited to strictly marketing / sales / engineering, rather than requiring some combination of the above to be executed simultaneously and well.

If you can walk in, talk to each of the different groups involved, understand their separate needs, design a mutually acceptable solution, and then get the thing to actually be done - that is absurdly valuable, and you should bill accordingly.

The question is then: If lead contacts went up by 40%, and if sales worked on commission, did you get a cut of the sales increase that happened due to your work?

Nope. I did get a 50% pay raise though for the limited contracting work I did with them after the summer was over though, which turned out to be a lot of money for a student.

I was actually just hired as an intern at an SF company and I believe my job will be very similar. Sales engineering-oriented with my tasks being mainly development-focused to automate manual processes they've been dealing with. I haven't started yet, so I don't know the full details yet. Sounds like you were able to really make the most of it. I hope I can do even half of it like that.

This is a good one! Thanks for sharing!

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