{"id":13402,"date":"2020-07-10T12:14:39","date_gmt":"2020-07-10T16:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/?p=13402"},"modified":"2020-07-10T16:37:59","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T20:37:59","slug":"tech-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/tech-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
By Larry Chiang<\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span><\/div>\n
Tech sales is where you take you Bay Area engineering degree and cram those four years of expertise into someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brain. That  person you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re mentoring is a sales prospect. <\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span><\/div>\n
The mentees will fight you. <\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span><\/div>\n
But this skill of tech sales can be actually fun and funny. For example…<\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153With <\/span>\u00e2\u0081\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u00aa@LarryChiang\u00e2\u20ac\u00ac\u00e2\u0081\u00a9<\/a><\/span> doing sales training for @Stanford_daily staff. And by training I mean calling tech bloggers & pitching print ads. Hooboy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Jason Shen (@JasonShen<\/a>)<\/b><\/div>\n
I wanted to show Stanford Daily ad salespeople that mentoring tech bloggers to buy print ads can be helpful to their conferences businesses. <\/div>\n
Look at how many Stanford Daily alums have springboarded because of sales and tech sales. <\/div>\n
\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\nJason Shen (@JasonShen<\/a>)<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
2\/1\/10, 11:07 PM<\/a><\/div>\n
With <\/a>\u00e2\u0081\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u00aa@LarryChiang\u00e2\u20ac\u00ac\u00e2\u0081\u00a9<\/a> doing sales training for @Stanford_daily staff. And by training I mean calling tech bloggers & pitching print ads. Hooboy.<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n
Look at great tech bloggers who host technical conferences on or near The Farm.<\/div>\n
Tech sales is hard for two reasons<\/div>\n
– the tech component <\/div>\n
– the sales aspects<\/div>\n
Founders need people who do tech sales. Professor Blank talks about avoiding \u00e2\u20ac\u0153startup death spiral\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which is a common, trite, popular and cliche pattern. The problematic pattern is that two or three cofounders all refuse to do technical sales. They outsource selling and tech sales to a vp of sales. They delegate doing tech sales to a business development hire. This biz dev person fights against the founders and eventually gets fired<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Confucius say: Upon the second VP of Sales getting fired, a founder gets fired too. <\/div>\n
Solution: Founders. Learn tech sales. <\/div>\n
Key insight: All a vc is is a tech salesperson. <\/div>\n
Key insight: More women entering tech sales would lead to wayyyyy more female VCs <\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Larry Chiang Tech sales is where you take you Bay Area engineering degree and cram those four years of expertise into someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brain. That  person you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re mentoring is a sales prospect.  The mentees will fight you.  But this skill of tech sales can be actually fun and funny. For example… \u00e2\u20ac\u0153With \u00e2\u0081\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u00aa@LarryChiang\u00e2\u20ac\u00ac\u00e2\u0081\u00a9 doing sales training for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stanford-engineering"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}