alt Hacker NewsMuch of my team would probably qualify me as about as buyer-pull as sales people get — I told my VP my strategy for pipe generation in a QBR was exercising more product influence — and I disagree with many of the author’s points.
I challenge my customers and attempt to convince them they have the wrong approach to achieve X all the time.
Attaching to buyers pain is the only way you’ll ever get anything meaningful done.
Identifying and building the pain and knowing you have the solution is how you create urgency. If you’re doing it right that work is valuable for your customer and your company.
Most people need to see something before they’re willing to invest team time mapping solution to pain / use cases.
Some customers completely drop the ball on deployment. People get fired. People leave and the project gets abandoned. Shit happens. It’s rarely the vendor’s fault, unless it was a complete mismatch, and that’s everyone’s fault.
> Attaching to buyers pain is the only way you’ll ever get anything meaningful done.
Yes. Under the one precondition that you can actually provide a solution. Your customer might know that pain better than you do and they may sometimes know the solution space better than you do.
That is rare, but I have been on the reverse end of that multiple times. And while it isn't a catastrophe if the sales person is just that, they may need to convince someone with an actually hard problem that they (and their collegues) have the competency to solve it.
Some problems are just genuinely hard. Not in a "we would need to restructure some things"-hard, but rather "limited by the laws of physics"-hard.
If that is the case with a customer all you can offer is to try together.