I hang out with a lot of techie folk and in general they are a great bunch of people. I particularly appreciate their rational and liberal outlook on the world and the optimism with which they face new challenges. I find that their opinions and views usually match mine. The exception is when it comes to the subject of sales.
Talk to any group of techies from a software company about sales and the results will vary from out-and-out insults to pure vitriol. They act as if sales sully the purity of their creation. There seems to be the belief that value is created solely by engineering
and that engineering is the most important element. I agree that it is the engineers who create the opportunity for value, however this is just potential value –without sales that value would never be realised.
I like to think about the relationship between software engineering and sales in terms of energy. You can lug water up to the top of a hill to put it through a turbine in order to make electricity. However, when the water is at the top of the hill it is potential energy. The usable energy doesn’t actually become realized until the water starts flowing back down the hill in the form of kinetic energy. Only then is it useful. In much the same way, software engineers create the potential for value and it is sales that
converts this to real usable value.
One interesting way to think about this is to strip away the technology and picture the situation in terms of primitive man. Imagine that you live in a cave. Everyday you walk the 5 minutes to the stream and cup water in your hands to drink. One day you invent pottery and you make a bowl that you use to bring water from the stream back to your cave. You realize that you have derived real value from your bowl –so you make another.
The second bowl provides more value, not a lot more, but more – so you make a third. This third bowl
provides you with almost no value at all, as your two hands are full carrying the first two bowls to and from the stream. Meanwhile, down the valley, another caveman has milled too much grain. This grain is of no value to him, as it is simply going to rot. The act of selling the bowl for the grain releases the potential value in both the bowl and the milled grain.
From this viewpoint, you come to realize the phenomenal value of sales. Basically everything that we value (from a materialistic point of view) has this value realized through sales. Invention and technical expertise is intrinsically tied up with the success of sales in finding trading partners.
So the next time you find yourself cursing some sales person for overselling a feature, remember how symbiotic the relationship is. The sales person is probably cursing you for not having already coded the feature for them to sell.
I will remain anonymous for this reply. But as a technology person I have been letting the tech and functions hold me back for over a year. Why pick up a phone to make that sales call when x feature is not yet finished. But of course there is always an x feature if you let there be. So from this week I am picking up the phone and selling that feature so I know if it is actually *really* needed before I spend time on it.
This is a really important point and I think that this is a function that naturally belongs to marketing. In my mind understand the market and it wants and needs is something a product marketing manager should be doing. However, in smaller companies that don’t have this function it still has to be done by somebody and it is better that it be an engineer than no one