How I Learned That Selling Is A Key To Success

My Secrets: How I Learned That Selling Is A Key To Success

The one skill that everyone needs is something that college doesn't teach: selling.

Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because selling is not just about exchanging things for money; selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. Each of these is a sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.

I didn't always believe this.

I started my career as a geek. I ended up as Chief Technology Officer of Seer Technologies, a software startup that we grew from zero to $120 million in annual revenue and took public in a short five years. And then I became CEO of my own very successful startup, Relativity Technologies (until I burned myself out and needed to shift gears). A number of skills helped me through this ascent. I learned a lot about motivating and managing people some of whom were smarter than I was; about understanding markets and communicating effectively; and also a few really boring things like accounting, finance, and law. But if I had not learned how to sell, then my company would never have made it past three guys in a room with a phone and some laptops.

I didn’t appreciate this in my youth. I thought that coding was the exact opposite of selling. I always associated “sales” with hustling and sleazy ways to convince customers to spend money on things they didn’t need—and having to work fast to get that check before the dupes backed away.

One day I was promoted to project manager. After thrashing through a few uncomfortable meetings, I understood that running a good project required a form of selling to my peers and managers. I also realized that perhaps sales was not so simple. In fact, convincing my staff that my ideas made sense was far more difficult than writing clean code. And persuading the company's managers to supply sufficient staff and funding to implement my ideas was harder still.

Being a successful project manager meant learning to listen closely to what others thought, to make them feel included, and to give them what they wanted and needed in order to succeed. It meant constant communication that was honest yet finely nuanced. It was hard work, but ultimately very rewarding. I could listen and focus on helping others in achieving their goals and at the same time advance myself quite easily. When I was able to focus on a global view of helping my company succeed, I found it much easier to avoid destructive departmental politics. I rose through the ranks to become a vice-president of technology at Credit Suisse First Boston—one of the world’s five largest investment banks.

Then I got the chance to become chief technology officer (CTO) of a startup that would market software that my team had built. Selling became an even more important skill. With limited funding from investors, we were all living on borrowed time, and the only thing that would give us more time was sales to put money into company coffers. We had a truly amazing product, much better than that of our competitors. But the stark reality was that unless we could really sell well, our competitors had a big advantage. They were a known quantity. They were not going out of business tomorrow. They took our prospective customers out for golf, beers, and lunch.

My guru and mentor was my boss, Gene Bedell. One of the first things Gene did when we launched our company was to put everyone through a sales-training boot camp. Gene had run billion-dollar businesses and reached the executive levels in investment banking. He had even convinced IBM to seed-finance our company, a software spinoff from Credit Suisse First Boston.

At first my technology team protested at being taught to learn about qualifying prospects and closing sales rather than the latest version-tracking software tools.

Within months, we were closing multimillion dollar sales with blue-chip customers across the globe. We did this with only two experienced sales reps and part-time sales support from our development staff. That’s because developers with sales training are incredibly valuable as a part of the sales process. They have two essential ingredients that make people persuasive—credibility and trustworthiness (for the most part). So, although prospective customers may not really believe a salesperson when, for example, he says a system is reliable, they’re likely to believe a developer they respect. This is a very powerful ingredient in the sales process, and one we used regularly. We competed with some of the largest software companies in the world—and won the sale almost every time. As CTO, I also took it upon myself to sell strategic partners. My biggest catch was a deal with IBM Japan worth $8.6 million.

With a culture that put customer support and sales above everything else, we grew into a profitable $120-million-a-year revenue machine. Our developers formed long-term bonds and friendships with our customers. They went to great pains to understand customer requirements and to build products that would sell. More often than not, new development projects would be funded directly by customers. Whenever there was a customer-service problem, our top engineers would voluntarily work around the clock and fly all over the globe to personally provide support.

So how do you learn sales? It’s easy. There are literally hundreds of books on selling. My personal favorite book (and I am a little biased here) is one by Gene Bedell himself, titled Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way. The methods vary, but in essence all of them teach you the basics of understanding customer needs and honing your message. There are also hundreds of “selling seminars” conducted all over the world. Be wary of any that teach you to sell things a customer doesn’t want. It is one thing to persuade people to buy something that they need, and another thing to con people.

This is really important, and you would figure that, at the least, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley would get it. Yet a quick conversation at any networking event in the Valley yields the simple observation that most technology workers don’t think that selling is part of their job description. The smartest technology entrepreneurs realize that everyone in the company is in sales; the sooner they embrace that reality, the easier it will be for that startup to grow and prosper. Coder; biz dev; PR; QA—nope. You’re all in sales. It’s all about selling for survival.